Thread: BTN's Future

WTF is this s***t! I have been away 2 days and now when i come back this? I hate tracker dramas and make the site looks bad and most of the time hurt it (people don't want to donate any more) BTN was one of the site that have no problems of reaching the donations to 100% every month but looks like this will change in the future... When the site become successful and making profit sure people want to take over it's that stupid people greed. It was one of the sites that you can say staff is cool and this won't happened but look at it now.... :(

Further to the post on the main page, I would like to elaborate on this matter to avoid any more speculation or mis-information.

Firstly, this is not a takeover. Marflaming and Hex were sysops prior to this, and are still sysops now. What has happened is that due to gross incompetence with regard to managing BTN's finances, the site was in real danger of going down due to its inability to pay its bills. BTN has also incurred some debt with suppliers (servers etc).

The dire nature of this situation became clear earlier in the week when the tracker went down due to insufficient funds to pay for the server & the hosting supplier shut the tracker-server down. Unfortunately this wasn't the first time its happened with various servers in the past however it was the first time BTN itself as a whole was at risk of going offline. With BTN being generally well funded each month through generous donations from its members, the fact that BTN was unable to meet its financial obligations demonstrates not only negligence but gross incompetence.

AzzA was confronted with the matter and after initially stating he would step down and announced in a staff chan he was leaving, ignored any further attempts to talk to him about it. He instead chose to start harming BTN by making the site unavailable.

We corrected the initial attempt, however he then started changing service account passwords and tried to take the domain; ONLY at this point, with the site still unavailable, we removed AzzA's access from the majority of BTN infrastructure and demoted him on the BTN website to avoid him causing more harm. Some time after this he was re-promoted on the BTN site but again refused to engage with us to discuss the situation. He was later demoted on the site by Marflaming, and the notice placed on the main page about the situation (this thread). At this point AzzA still had some control and used it to take the main site server offline. We moved this part of BTN to backup servers where it is now operating.

With regard to donations, I would like to clarify a few key points. Firstly it was AzzA that posted the request for additional donations in order pay the tracker bill, this was done without consulting the staff. The donation request message was later removed by Staff once it was noticed. The timing of this first request was PRIOR to AzzA being confronted regarding the financial situation.

Immediately after AzzA was confronted regarding the financial situation, AzzA again re-posted the request for additional donations in order to pay the tracker bill, this was again done with no consultation with Staff. It is important to note that this was PRIOR to AzzA being demoted or any of his access being removed. This second request for additional donations in order to pay the tracker bill was removed by Staff once discovered. During this time AzzA refused to engage with the Staff to discuss the situation and the events above unfolded.

Many of you may also note that Donations are currently temporarily disabled. This is to ensure that BTN funds are not inappropriately accessed by AzzA until such time that we can make alternative arrangements. The remaining donation-funds have been moved to a trusted account temporarily.

The posting of this information was delayed until such time as the critical servers and systems that comprise BTN's core functions could be moved to infrastructure that AzzA could not harm. While regrettable this delay was necessary to ensure the BTN's core systems remained operational. There may be some performance issues or loss of minor functionality until we are able to procure ongoing resources to host BTN moving forward.

To quote from my earlier post: BTN is not an individual's thing to manipulate how they like, its a service for the members - its owned by the community and run/managed by the Staff. These decisions have not been taken lightly, they are not impulsive or driven by personal gain. The fact that AzzA was unwilling to discuss the site's financial situation coupled with openly asking for additional donations to address the cashflow problem he had created; and actively trying to harm the site show that he was both negligent and unfit to continue as Sysop.

Kenyz and I have been asked to return to help sort out the mess. Some of you may remember Kenyz as one of the founders of BTN; he left because he could no longer stand how AzzA was running the site - making rash decisions independently of the other Sysops/staff. The main reason I left was due to the ongoing poor financial management and bad decisions. We are here to help Marflaming, Hex and the staff recover from this situation and ensure the ongoing success of BTN.

//Bitey

From the forum.

BTN Members,

Further to the information in this forum post, it can now be proven that AzzA has stolen funds from BTN, including all recent donations. We are in the process of individually contacting the affected Donors seeking to have your donations returned to you.

Furthermore AzzA has now cancelled all BTN's accounts with its suppliers, immediately terminating all BTN's servers. Based on AzzA's prior attempts to harm BTN we'd anticipated this and has already moved the critical services, however BTN's size means we will be juggling our now limited resources until we can arrange alternatives.

While this means there will be some performance issues and minor loss of functionality over the coming days, BTN will remain online and with the Staff body united, we will work through these challenges, we will overcome them and we will be better for it.

We are now putting in processes and controls to make sure these financial issues do not happen again, including more rigor around how and when donations are used; and that donations will be used in a way to give BTN the best value for its members. No one individual will be able to make financial decisions and all expenditure will be accounted for including consideration of ongoing obligations. In other words, we wont overspend or make financial commitments we cant keep.

We'll continue to keep you informed, we are committed to open and honest communication and are happy to answer any questions or concerns you may have, we might take a while to get back to you but don't be afraid to ask.

//Bitey

And latest.. I can't feel sorry for him if he's doing all this. He was wrong to start with, now he's deliberately sabotaging the site. It's a good thing action was taken to move most of the site, else btn would be gone today.

Well at the end of the day what? People got greedy. Let it be Azza or the other BTN staff; the thing is..conspiracy started Sh1t started spinning outta control and bam that's what happened. (Well kinda the story of our daily life isn't it?). All I can say after reading through a damn fricking lotta pages on various sites is that hope to see BTN survive this storm. The donations ain't gonna be pretty for them to come by now as they used to be. Well one thing's for certain their repo just went straight downhill so things are not gonna go good. It's like a TV show going on; on the top TV tracker lol!

Seems like a conspiracy documentary. They could make one on it and distribute it on BTN or maybe just make a TV series outta it lol! (just a j/k stop taking stuff so srsly ffs!)