TOPIC: Paramontana's Demotion & CM ban

Paramontana's Demotion & CM ban

Dear ZARP, some of you may recently remember an incident in which Paramontana abused his powers to ban both Tyler Durden and TheXnator from our TeamSpeak server after Tyler played a certain word which Para personally finds offensive. He banned TheXnator threatening to keep him banned permanently unless he gave up the name of who played it.

After confronting Paramontana a day ago about this he decided to post his resignation on the forums without informing anyone in the Community Team as to this decision in order to try and avoid this story coming to light. We owe it to our community to publish the full story and what action we will be taking as a result.

Although this was a major policy break banning a Community Team member without following policy, this is not the reason for the ban, what we found out next was shocking in every way and we believe it is the right thing to do to bring this to the attention of the community.

In an attempt to force an apology out of Tyler Durden, Para messaged Tyler on Steam threatening to blackmail Tyler saying he would expose the “real truth” about how Tyler got his Community Manager position. He repeatedly threatened Tyler and told him to keep quiet and blackmailed him in order to make sure he did not expose this at the time.

It was at this moment Tyler came forward to report that Para had used alternate accounts on the forums, specifically using accounts to avoid our anti vote abuse measures, in order to rig the vote in favour of Tyler stating that he did not ever want to work with Brandify and would resign if he won the position.

After re-checking the polling data we found that unfortunately this story was true and up to 18 alternate accounts were used on the Community Votes 2017 poll by Paramonata in order to fraudulently boost the vote count of his preferred candidate.

Paramontana has violated the trust of the entire community and attempted to disrupt the very heart of this communities values. He has attempted to keep his vote tampering a secret for almost an entire year threatening to blackmail Tyler Durden on numerous occasions if he were to report this to the rest of the team.

The Evidence
After the incident with Xnator’s TeamSpeak bot, here is the evidence of what led to this situation coming to light with Para threatening to blackmail Tyler.

Both Tyler and Para also claim RedPowder helped to create a number of these fraudulent votes but we have not been able to contact Red about this since he has already resigned and left the community we cannot investigate this involvement any further.



Here is the evidence from 4 of the accounts in which Para used VPN’s to cast fraudulent votes onto his preferred candidate.

Here are 8 votes suspiciously cast within a few minutes of one another for example, IP addresses have not been blanked out because they are from VPN servers.

Paramontana purposefully used accounts he had been approved to make by the Community Team for VIP alts in order to cast votes on the poll bypassing our registration date check which made sure only accounts registered before the announcement of the vote could participate.

Example of some of the fraudulent votes with full evidence trail


All 4 of these accounts are linked to one of Para’s alts with his SteamID as follows. One of the accounts also used an email address with his real name which we cannot post here.

As you can see the last logon date for each of his accounts was shortly before the votes cast on the poll on January 19th. The SteamID linked is shown for each account as well as a screenshot for each of his alts Steam profiles in case he tries to remove himself as the only friend.

seniorlampost




steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198281984452

freedom




steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198294001863

howlingwolf




steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198230150844

stinkie




steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198224944096


What action are we taking
At the heart of the ZARP Community is our democratic processes and we have accepted thousands of staff members onto our team in the past 4 years of this great community under our democratic systems that we strongly believe are the right way to run a community.

We are not here to take away the great work Paramontana has done and we thank him for his contribution to ZARP throughout his time here. However that said, a violation of trust and community values on this scale covered up for almost an entire year is not something that is worthy of a warning and therefore Paramonata has been demoted and banned with immediate effect.

We want to thank our newest Community Team members, Max and CaptinF1Rework for their support during this investigation, and we apologize if we haven’t been around much this

Would the results have been different?
Because of the sheer volume of votes cast during the Community Votes 2017 it was not possible to check every single vote for its legitimacy the first time around and even though potentially results could have changed from this fraud, we could not make a 100% judgement without doing a full review of every vote.

After such time has passed it is simply not possible to do the review at this point and instead we have to focus on the fraud committed by Para and make sure it can never happen again.

Will there be a new Community Manager?
The Community Team will be reviewing the possibility of running a new Community Votes 2018 poll in January in the form of a public vote once we are able to review our anti vote abuse measures to make sure fraudulent voting at any level is never again a possibility.

Over 700 legitimate votes were cast in our Community Votes 2017 poll and we want to thank all the users who took part legitimately voting for their strongest candidates and we are so sorry that ZARP has fallen victim to the vote fraud committed by Paramontana.

Questions
The ZARP Community has fallen victim to a serious undermining of our democratic processes by Paramontana and we feel the right action has been taken. Staying true to this we are opening this thread for public discussion and we will do our best to answer any questions.

We ask the community to come together during this difficult time.

Thank you for reading.
ZARP Community Team

HAHAHAHAH

AND YOU WORRIED ABOUT BRANDIFY PAYING PEOPLE TO VOTE LMFAOOO

what the fuck lol

is this legit? o.o

lmao it's moga all over again

God damn

This has made Para even more legendary, hopefully Raeker gets CM Manager now, or Rhys.

Lmao, what a shithead

damn

Disappointing coming from an Ex-CM

This is legit.
PROOF: zarpgaming.com/index.php/forum/profile/16269-paramontana

Damn dude this shit is messed up, did'nt know para would do this.....

wow

dankek wrote: damn..

can someone make a tl;dr

Hell no...

LucyLevi17 wrote:
Yes. Yes it is.

This is horrible to have seen. Thought that Para was a good person, and definitely did not expect something like this to have happened. Absolutely disgusted by this, for a community manager to have done something like this and gone against all of the key values of ZARP...
If a new vote happens, hopefully the right person / people will get the role, and hopefully nothing like this ends up happening again. Definitely a surprising and disgusting outcome for someone who was so respected in the community.

Hopefully Tyler doesn't get any shit as a result of this, as he has done an excellent job over the course of the year, and Tyler is not the kind of person who would ever want something like this to happen. Horrific to see that Tyler was also blackmailed over this, good to see that the real story is actually coming out now, and Para didn't do anything against Tyler. Big ups Tyler, always been a great CM <3

Tyler couldn't have prevented what happened but we owe him lots of decency, Paramontana has given us a lot of dedication and the fact that he has done this may have lost a lot of our trust but most of his work was genuine and true and we do owe him that too.

Disgusting...