Hi everyone !
As some may have noticed this evening hasn't been very quiet. We'll provide more information here about the situation. Last weekend we unfortunately had to kick a very well known and respected member in the community from our team, due to a break of our internal Information Security Policy (ISP). This policy has two important applications. The most well known is against leaks, but it also specifies how and where information we have can and cannot be used by staff members.
After the initial kick, members from a some groups in the community started a protest against our actions, including avatars, streams and spam. These have been dealt with accordingly as was seen best at the time. Unfortunately, information regarding how it was handled was leaked and put out of context. We have tried to work with and listen to the complaints as much as possible, trying to show respect and full attention. However, it did not take long before we were no longer met with respect, and the situation escalated out of control, including members of the community groups starting to troll on our and other communities related to TruckersMP.
It's important to note that we do not want to be in a situation like this. Having to replace an upper staff member at short notice is never beneficial, but in this case it was necessary, and it was a situation we were in.
During this situation, there have been various accusations, such as claims that we are trying to destroy the Polish community. We are not trying to make this happen. We went into the situation set on assigning a new Polish community manager, who could continue the work with the Polish community. However, due to several Polish team members choosing to leave, and others choosing to violate the ISP in protest, we now have to evaluate whether we can still support the Polish community like we have been doing since the start of the mod, or if we will have to lower the level of support to the same as the other language-specific communities.
We regret that we have to make this evaluation, and potentially this decision, but if we are unable to provide proper support then we are forced to do so.
TruckersMP has a major responsibility - Not just for the mod itself, but because of the data people have entrusted us with, from email addresses, to appeals, to in game chat logs, and more. This responsibility means we have to be strict about our Information Security Policy, and that we can control where that data is. While we don't believe any user data has been leaked during this, we cannot risk a leak like that in the future.
We as a team want to thank each and every one of you who showed respect and worked with us to try find the best possible solution, even if the solution now might end up being an unfortunate one for some of the language communities. Now we will evaluate our response to the situation that occurred after the kick, and how we can deal with it better in the future.