I know at times like these it can be quite easy to become enveloped in passion, but we have to remember to remain civil in our discourse, like we set out to do at the beginning, even when things inevitably become heated. We come to the community with these types of things to open up an honest dialogue about what the best interest of everyone is so we need to try our best not to make snap judgments about the character of members who may not necessarily agree with us on what the best path forward is and hope to believe that we all still care about this community’s future.
I’ve seen some really awesome members at the opposite end of the majority opinion that have really true hearts that I’ve seen unwarrantedly been given unfair treatment or commentary. The last thing we should want is to create a further divide in this community when I think someone said it best that we should all be coming together in this time of strife and uncertainty. I know we all have our difference in opinion specifically on whether or not we want to be able to post these links, but the one thing I hope we all agree on is we will not be both siding Nazis and/or their salutes.
I’m going to be completely transparent with you guys. I did not completely read this entire thread nor did I really grasp the magnitude of the way people felt about this topic. I mainly came into it with a “are we really doing this right now” kind of attitude where my position was removing the ability to embed Twitter/X links would be a net negative on the overall forum experience for people that generally do post them for wrestling, sports and other manner of news, commentary, and drama that generally can only be found on the singular platform that is X because most of these companies for one reason or another don’t duplicate them on the other social media platforms even when every company on demand is on Facebook, they rarely ever post to Facebook the way that they do on X, which is unfortunate.
What I think also irritated me enough to blind me from really reading into the situation at hand was I don’t think people really know the extent of what was done to get the X domain links to embed when they were down before. It was not just my time, it was also money I had to spend and lots of support. Because almost everything on the backend had to be upgraded in order to implement the upgrade to the embedding add-on, which included a new server I had to be on and if I’m being completely honest with you, I still haven’t completely figured out the settings on this new thing to get us back to the speeds and the efficiency that I think we were at before we moved. So I wasn’t able to come into this conversation with the open mind I needed to.
I can’t really apologize for thinking about the forum first, though. Because I’m one of the only people that doesn’t have the luxury of not having to think about that when it comes to things that we do on the forum. This includes me commenting to Grim about his secondary chat idea that he wanted to do on Monday night. I meant no harm or offense in asking him follow up questions about that. I was thoroughly satisfied with Grim’s and Chris’s answers and wouldn’t have impeded any further. It was just as someone that does have to think about the well-being of the forum, I have been watching live numbers kind of dwindle over 2024 and it was kinda nice to see an uptick in the beginning of 2025. It’s honestly given me a renewed sense of hope I haven’t seen in a minute so I can and will apologize if that seemed insensitive when I asked about that, but it is something I do wish that we can continue to nurture while also nurturing these other things that you guys are passionate about. I was also not aware that one of the motivations behind the stream that Grim was suggesting was politically or morally motivated until afterwards when I was confronted about it. I would never give anyone grief about feeling however they wanna feel about certain things. I think we can and we should all take a step back and allow each other to feel how we need to feel about these things.
I do hope that you come to see it as a blessing that sometimes I have to be shown why something is important and will eventually acquiesce to that when the community voices a significant enough concern for said change versus how it could be where some people aren’t willing to waiver on those types of issues, regardless of how much a community might want them. I’m sure you would prefer someone who just automatically saw things from your perspective, but it shouldn’t be considered a negative if someone can eventually come around to someone else’s perspective. It shows a flexibility, and I hope I’ve shown a flexibility. Because once upon a time, I was probably a no exemptions free speech person like you might consider Elon Musk to be, while this topic is relevant, but I have not only come around to zero tolerance on transphobia in our rules, but I have agreed with my staff, and I am fully on board with my staff, that when people show that kind of transphobia, they don’t get the third and fourth chances I would for most other things and we will immediately show bigotry and people who display it the door and we have done so repeatedly now for awhile without much pressure to do so.
I can’t promise to honor every impromptu poll or suggestion made on the forum. Sometimes I just have to make a decision. What I CAN promise to do and what I WILL apologize for is I can at least give you guys the chance to make an argument for your case that I will do my best to listen to before making a call. The community has made their voice heard on this one and I understand now that this is part of a larger movement across the Internet. Places that include Reddit of all things who are also disavowing X links. Wrestling Smarks will now from this point forward add their name to that list. We will take a stand against whatever it is that Elon Musk was trying to do on the fateful day when he decided to do that salute. Which, for the record definitely looked almost identical to the heart palm salute forward that very prominent neo-Nazi groups today continue to do, and I have a hard time believing anyone didn’t realize after the second time what he was doing. I don’t even think he himself beliefs everything that they do, but I think he’s so engulfed in the far right memes that he doesn’t understand the harm of doing that so we will have to show him that we do not associate with that idiocy in any way, shape or form.
I do want to be clear that I don’t want this to be something we’re going be hard line about. If someone embeds an X link, just please remind them that we don’t do that around here and let them know that they can take a screenshot. I also want to be clear that screenshots will remain valid here until the day comes companies post 95% of their content on another. We have to be able to post what’s going on in the wrestling world in some way and we will do that with screenshots at the very least until there’s another viable solution.
This final part might be unpopular to some of you, but I also do not plan to allow this to become a slippery slope situation where we start banning Facebook and Instagram and all that other stuff. If one of them is stupid enough to do a Nazi salute, maybe we’ll have to come back to this, but for now hopefully none of them are that fucking stupid.
The people have spoken on this issue and I don’t foresee that poll outcome changing so this new rule and the implementation of it is now official.
