Warning: There are photos of evidence in this doc, and while still censored by default, I can't spoiler them like discord. If you are sensitive to seeing even censored csam, I advise caution. each csam thing is labeled before the picture, again it's censored but just in case I wanted to put a warning.
I was just informed about the image quality. I'm not sure if I have the energy to fix it at this time. All the images are on the public evidence server.
Hi for anyone reading, this is being updated as I have the energy to do it as well as when stuff comes out. It's not going to be a full doc breakdown or anything, this is just plain copy and paste from what I see. I may not get everything, I am exhausted so please understand.
Also Responses from mods are being moved to the bottom, so that the evidence is first
Images From The Evidence Server
From the mod: "I was in a VC at the time, and given access to a document that I realise now was not right to have been shown to me unfiltered, as this was during a time a lot of things came to light where I was talked about behind my back.
I wanted things cleared, as did **BLANK**, and I felt, because of how bad it all was, to yes, allow my name, to be named. In hindsight, when I had my breakdown later that day, I regretted it.ā
This was me(Kim, who is the one compiling all this evidence in the evidence server, not me) - I can confirm that I and many other mods, who can step forward if they wish to - were fighting this decision. I firmly believe the KKK is on the same level as the nazis, and the mod team was appalled by this decision. However this was decided by the devs. I have evidence that I can not share of this decision, as I was under NDA.
Rowan: I confirm, I tried to help before and was ignored in the same way, or I didn't receive any instructions on how to help.
Slushi Note Here! MULTIPLE mods, including myself, have offered to help in communication before from the beginning Offers to help have been turned down from very early on.
Note: this was a video, I had to take screenshots of it
https://www.semafor.com/article/09/20/2023/the-nsfw-chatbot-app-hooking-gen-z-on-ai-boyfriends
Moderation Responses Thread (Non Mods Included)
Hi all,
Wanted to reach out with some context regarding the document thatās been circulating around about our internal moderation practices.
First, to the author and to all our moderators past and present: thank you. The work youāve done has kept this platform running. Youāve dealt with genuinely disturbing content, absorbed abuse from users, and done it as volunteers with tools that weren't good enough. We are incredibly grateful for this.
The document raises a lot of legitimate concerns. Many of them weāve been aware of; some of them we should have addressed sooner. Iām not going to make excusesāI want to provide transparency about why things have been the way they are and what we're doing about it.
On the tools: The moderation tools are really bad right now. Weāve historically faced a direct tradeoff between improving mod tools and shipping user-facing features, and we leaned too far toward the latter.
A couple of weeks ago, we kicked off a project to rebuild the moderation tools, and Shep and I have spent hundreds of hours over the past month building significantly improved moderation tooling. We were planning to announce this when it was ready for testing next week, but I want you to know itās coming.
On communication: The document describes mods learning about policy changes at the same time as users, being expected to enforce rules they weren't informed about, and receiving conflicting guidance. Thatās a failure on our part. Weāre implementing a formal communication pipeline so mod teams are briefed on policy changes before they go public, with clear documentation of what's changing and why.
Our communication with users has also been bad. Weāve apologized for this in the past, but despite this, you havenāt seen the change weāve promised. Over the last couple of weeks Iāve been collecting feedback to assemble an actionable plan that we can execute to make real progress here. I would love for you all to be involved in figuring out what concrete steps we should prioritize to make progress here.
On policies being vague: Some of this is unavoidableāweāre operating in genuinely uncertain legal territory, and weāre still figuring out where the lines should be. But āwe're figuring it outā isn't an excuse for leaving you without guidance. Weāre working on clearer internal documentation that explains the reasoning behind policies, even when the policies themselves have to remain somewhat flexible.
On enforcement consistency: The concerns about different treatment based on follower counts are valid. Our intention was to add friction before actioning high-visibility accounts to prevent mistakes that would be hard to reverseānot to create a two-tier system where some users are above the rules. But the effect was the same. Weāll be changing these policies over the next couple of weeks.
Verification has also been too discretionary, and has gone from being something creators felt they could work towards to something that seems capricious and random. Weāre going to be announcing a new progress-based badge system soon.
On compensation and sustainability: Running a platform this size on volunteer moderation isn't sustainable, and expecting people to do site moderation/customer support indefinitely without compensation isn't fair. Weāre working on a path toward professionalizing the site moderation, though I don't have a timeline I can commit to publicly yet. I hope to be able to share more on this soon.
On the specific incidents mentioned: Iām not going to relitigate individual moderation decisions hereāthat wouldnāt be fair to anyone involved. What I will say is that when decisions were reversed, it wasn't because we donāt trust our mods or because certain users got special treatment. Sometimes we got new information, sometimes we made mistakes, and sometimes the communication about what happened and why was poor. We can do better.
Some of what's described in the document reflects real problems. Some of it reflects the genuine difficulty of moderating a platform like this. And some of it reflects perspectives I don't fully share. But dismissing the concerns because I disagree with parts of it would be wrong.
We're not where we need to be. We're working to get there.
Iām going to be active in the CS Slack and <#1120634968129949716>-chat on Discord to answer any questions. Iād also like to offer to talk with anyone who would like to discuss concerns privately, either over DMs or a voice call whenever is convenient. Please just ping me and I am happy to find some time to talk.
Thank you for everything you do <3
Hugo
Former Discord mod here.
I fully support what Mikale said. We had even talked about this way before the post came out and have seen how the CS team gets treated and how quickly devs changed their minds about things.
I've seen minors being banned, and then them coming to Shep about it and then unbanning them because they said they aren't a minor.
Even Discord mods didn't know anything when things were coming out.
I've seen awful creators making horrible bots and only getting a small slap on the hand because they had more than 1000 followers, and people below that getting banned.
I've had to keep quiet about things, not be allowed to give criticism towards staff when I felt like things were not right.
The mods in specific, are amazing to work with, they only have lots of love for the userbase. And just like them I've only done things for the community and tried to improve that.
I have multiple times offered shep to help with communication, writing blog posts, give him ideas and tips on how to improve. But these were either ignored, or said he would send me something and then be ignored. This even happened a few days ago and no response.
I am glad and proud of the people who are leaving, and who left before.
I have reached out to former mods to put their statement here.
Former Discord Mod and CS Mod (Customer Service)
As far as I know, nothing Mikale or anything anyone else said has been false. There may be some things that happened before or after my time, but the things that they claimed happened while I was there definitely happened.
We werenāt told about several things. We spent days on a verification spreadsheet before being told it was āvibesā based now. I only bring this up to verify that we definitely werenāt given prior notice on changes.
I can verify we were unable to take actions on creators over a certain size. We just had to note them. I rarely saw follow-up about those notes.
I can verify that morale was low a lot of the time but people didnāt want to make waves. I personally stayed quiet because I felt like it was a āmeā thing. I didnāt realize so many of my colleagues felt similarly until now.
It felt like a lot of hard work went unappreciated outside of generic āthank you everyoneā messages. Before I left I had sent paid staff a message saying thereās things I want to discuss that are important to me. This was never answered. I do not blame that staff member as they are extremely overworked and underpaid for how overworked they are.
I say this knowing I love the current volunteers. I love the people who volunteered at the same time as me. I love the site and the community. I donāt love how people who put hours into trying to help make the platform better are treated.
Itās a cycle of being overworked, burning out, taking a hiatus, and then restarting.
I am currently a journalist. Previously, I worked for a company and did announcements for them. Public communication is literally my career. I have offered to help with communication issues before. Nothing ever came of this.
The volunteers want to help. They want to make users felt heard. We canāt.
Iām the person referred to as Aviv in the first screenshot in this thread.
-# Long time no see friends. I've come just to give my statement and then I'm leaving.
Former All Around Mod (I specialized in CS, but was here before we split into groups so helped in both Discord, Reddit, and Site as well).
I was in the same wave of hiring as Mikale was (~Nov 2024), and left May of 2025.
During my time as a moderator I saw many, many things that Mikale outlined in the document. I left before the brunt of the unbanning regarding minors and illegal content happened, however I can speak to quite a few of the other details Mikale pointed out.
Towards the tail end of when I was leaving was when actions on creators over a certain size needed to be verified by a moderator who was higher than you. At the time, it was 1,000 followers OR if they were verified. That did not change before I left, so I cannot speak to the limit now being 666 followers, but I do not doubt it.
Morale was one of the lowest things among the moderation team. Not only did we have an insane amount of inactive staff members due to burn out, life issues, etc., communication was **nonexistent** between upper management and moderation. This led to those of us who were active carrying the majority of the work, and thus getting the blunt of the repercussions both from the community and upper management.
Did we get thanked for any of this? Maybe, a pat on the back here and there. A promotion to keep us sated. But we were never actually listened to. Our concerns, even when laid out, in depth, and well thought out over days, if not weeks of discussions, were put to the wayside.
Similar to Aviv, I am studying Journalism alongside Communications and Media. I had offered fully re-written announcements for better understanding. I had pushed for us to get some sort of PR delegate to not only help with the public image, but help create proper lines of communication between moderators, staff, and developers because this was a PR nightmare waiting to happen from the start.
They will try to blame the rot on the mod team. It's not. They're simply doing their best to survive. The rot is coming from the top, and until there's genuine action to fix it, Janitor is not going to be getting any better any time soon.
To my fellow former mods, you guys are strong, you are amazing, and I am so proud of you for sticking up and speaking out.
To the current mods, it's not your fault. None of this is. You may want to stick around, but I urge you to re-evaluate before Janitor sucks your soul from the inside out.
Former discord mod here.
I have been a moderator for a very long time (2023.08.09.-2025.11.01.) .
I have been the part of both discord moderation and site moderation. For the later parts of my modding work I have stayed only as a discord mod.
I fully stand with what Mikale has said. What I have read is what I have experienced and seen.
As Other former moderators have stated many things unfortunately have not only affected the CS team but other parts of moderation as well.
Having to keep quiet about things. Not knowing about changes until the last minute, a day before or experiencing it at the same time as users did.
We as discord moderation were left to deal with hordes of upset users, users with questions we couldn't even answer, because we didn't have answers we could share.
We understood why everyone was upset, but we had to stay calm and collected even when we felt upset too.
Users were right to feel upset.
As someone who once held a higher roll in moderation still did not know enough. At times I had the same knowledge as the other moderation and other times only same level knowledge the users. Which upset me. Not only could I not help users of the site but couldn't help my colleagues who had to take the heat, the hate, and everything that was thrown at them for something that was out of their control.
We asked for a change, we offered help so that change could happen. We did everything we could. I have seen my friends sit over documents for hours, for days, only to those documents not to be taken seriously.
I have no hate towards current volunteers, I know they are not the ones to blame. While I may not know many of the new faces that joined, I have nothing but appreciation towards you guys. I know many of you joined to support and help janitor grow into something great.
I wanted to do the same. I wanted to help change things for the better, make a safe space. I wasn't able to with how things are going.
The International Team has always been a united team, everything was culminating in its new structure. I and other moderators had vision, putting our time and always trying to improve our internal points to be autonomous and be a communicative bridge.
From the moment this began to crumble, speeches being ignored and especially the moderative overload ā everything was falling apart like a little sand castle, literally speaking. Meetings to discuss, planning until late, restructuring whenever you could (sometimes from one day to the next) and listening to promises. Everything has started to get out of our control to the point that there is no longer an international team. Translations taken without the opinion of those who moderate or manage the team, lack of vision for what "International Team" actually is and especially the silence of the direction.
Pushing for communication is something we've done for almost two years in a row, and we have the same response; 'we will improve', 'we will be transparent', 'we will address our bad points and improve'. Sometimes, it was more of the same (see unfreezingMariah Carey at the end of the year) and at one point, it no longer makes sense. The international team is not over, it was (and still possibly is) neglected until its end.
Everything Mikale said, is true. Everything the other former moderators say is true. And much of what current moderators in their personal conversations about exhaustion, lack of spirit, burnout and among other reasons... is true.
And this goes straight to you, Shep, don't make a joke supporting 'release the shep files' you're in a BAD position to even joke about that shit.
And if my message is deleted or even ban me because I'm banned in my main account by my choice, I didn't break any rules but that's too much to keep my mouth shut, they'll just reinforce what I'm saying.
You'd better start address this subject now, because nobody will accept "uwu sowy!!!" anymore. This is serious.
Founder of the International Team
Former Admin/Head Moderator of Internacional
Rowan.
from a old mod friend who is not comfortable speaking publicly
"I stepped down because of all the same reasons - having credible evidence of minors, and being ignored. Reporting hard ban content but users not being banned because the approval for ban never came due to follower count. There are fucking 13 year olds using the site. People are interacting directly with some 13 year old's NSFW RP bots. That's fucking insane.ā
Former CS Mod here.
It's very early in the morning here, and I'm not in the mood to be careful with my wording and grammars, so I apologize in advance.
There's a reason why I can only stay for 2 months before I decide to bail. I fully support what Mikale said, and what the other former mods had said here. I don't think I would need to add much, but yeah, even communication *inside* the moderation team is dogshit.
You know there were quite a few times where I answered some issues, only to find out I was wrong because "that's not the case anymore"? And times where I was required to do my *own* research to answer other ones? I still remember that time when we first had that "unauthorized" bug, there weren't any words from the higher ups, and I ended up asking ChatGPT on what that issue could mean. Thank fuck GPT got it right.
I also still remember quite a few times where moderation, with full consciousness, decided to *ignore* some tickets just because they weren't in the mood.
And the verification sheet... Oh boy... Don't make me start on that. I spent days, weeks even, on looking through them *one by one*, reading the grossest shits I had ever read, and then in one thread we were told that Shep "lost the list"?
Oh how I wanna come through the monitor and shake Shep so hard, and scream to his ears directly.
Because, bro... Tf you mean you lost our hardwork??? <a:ratSHAKE:1242310180599890050>
I can also still vividly remember that time we were told any creator with more than 1000 followers would never get banned anymore. No matter what they do. Well, except if they're a minor.
Which we know they just need to DM Shep to get unbanned anyway.
It was like... Whatever we did as a mod, will always end up pointless. Sometimes I find myself thinking "why should there be a mod if that's the case?" We would only end up wasting our time anyway.
Whoever spent more than 2 months being a mod, y'all tough bunch of bitches. I could *neverā¦*
sharing another mods statement anonymously because they are uncomfortable doing so themselves
```Hello, as someone who was formerly high up on the totem pole I want to say that everything that was said and made in Mikale's post is true. Many moderations from various teams would often get sent death threats, rape threats and doxxing threats and nothing was ever done to protect anyone until people began to threaten to quit, and even then it was the bare minimum.
Guidelines change every other day and we're expected to keep up to date with new information, all the while facing constant backlash both from the community and from higher ups where we often times had to defend and explain why we did what we did if one of those community members complained to the devs.
There's little to no communication except for with a few team members. We're told to reach out and DM Shep or the other devs for things, but they either don't respond or have their dms off. many of the moderation team often went months without a response from Shep, while others would get replies within hours or minutes, forcing us to rely on one or two people to escalate issues.
I love JanitorAI as a website, and I loved my fellow moderators, but I do not like the leadership (or lack thereof) that constantly threw us under the bus or left to pick up the pieces when we were just as blindsided as everyone else 99% of the time.```
Thereās little I can add I havenāt already said in other threads but I will say this:
shep. staff.
We care. So fucking much it burned us out and for many of us destroyed our physical and/or mental health. We powered through bad times because we truly believed at the time we were doing the right things. We thought we were helping the community. We see now we did not. Or that what we did just simply didnāt work because the change we were promised just never came.
We arenāt attacking or ganging up. We just want you to seriously, really look at how much we have given for free to your company, to the community and rather than make vague statements of filler or promises of things changing, actually *do* something.
Prove allegations wrong. Or accept them and show real change.
The fact former mods have made amends with users we wronged yet nothing changes up top shows the issue was never *truly* us. It came from above. And even now, even knowing that, we just want you guys to improve, like we have. To be better, like we are trying to be.
I rarely chat on this server but.
I'm not a mod, but I'm one of those users that did a ridiculous amount of work tracking down and getting ToS violating bots removed, and minors banned.
I watched a user I got banned for being a minor be unbanned one day later. By Shep. Thankfully that user was banned again.
The ban system doesn't even really work. I've been playing Whack-A-Mole with one user thats been banned over 10 times already. It is *stupidly* easy to get around a ban.
I've seen the effect of the 'we can't do anything the creator is verified.' ***Three months*** it took to get ***one*** bot made my a verified creator removed, because the mod I spoke to didn't have the clearance to remove it without speaking to a dev.
I'd write even more, but currently don't have the time, but yes, a lot is wrong, and a lot needs to be fixed.
Some more stuff from me.
My mission to track down bad bots and such has exposed me to some messed up shit on the site. Which Iām happy to say Iāve managed to get successfully removed.
The problem is itās like a hydra, take down one bot, more appear. And it doesnāt stop.
Itās affected me too because Iām a really empathic person. Iāve seen people freak out, death threats and everything towards the mods for a user being banned. Was the mod the one that found out the user was problematic and reported them? No, it was me. I am the one to blame.
Iāve been the cause of some creators with as many as over a thousand followers being banned, every single time the mods get the whole death threat drama.
Iāve seen people quick to blame the mods for power tripping. My favourite accusation is āThey banned (user) because they write like a minor.ā If everyone that wrote like a kid got banned, thatād be like half the site.
The mods are far from power tripping, honestly they donāt even have enough power.
This stuff takes a harsh mental toll on people. Iāve had a mod rant their frustrations to me for hours about how they canāt really do stuff. How theyāll do something and it just gets reversed by the devs.
Iāve had to take a break myself because of the mental toll from just finding and reporting these things.
Last I checked even the criteria for banning a creator was made harder. It gave a whole lot more leeway for people to abuse the system and not be punished.
Honestly at this rate? Smartest thing I can think of is freezing bot creation. No new bots until this whole moderator issue is solved and they have a team that can deal with the workload.
People make bots faster than we can get them removed. So maybe that creation option should be taken away for now. Maybe even not a full bot creation freeze, but only verified creators can post.
The site needs to slow down, literally. Otherwise the workload for the current mods, and any future ones, is going to get out of control.
Hey, I'm not a mod or anything like that but a usual in this server.
I just wanted to contribute my experience with the site's moderation because I feel that it goes along with the topic, since it's about miscommunication and the apparent privileges and protection creators get for being popular. Or at least that's my guess.
Months ago, I got a certain user banned off this discord for CSAM related allegations and proven racism, among other things. Last November, I think, I noticed him being a popular creator and active on the site, for which I made a ticket here asking to the same Staff member that managed the situation back then why wasn't he banned off the site too, since that Staff member said that "This type of individual has absolutely nothing to do with our community or our platform."
After months of waiting for a follow up, I got told to take it to the CS team and make a ticket on the site about it, which I did, only to find that the creator didn't face any consequences whatsoever. To which I suppose the reasoning was that even if he had that CSAM related stuff around him and was banned on the discord server, if it wasn't on the site it wasn't their problem, since he hadn't made weird bots or whatever.
There goes the protecting popular creators part, now onto the miscommunication and not giving serious situations the importance they deserve. I have to go back on time a bit, sorry if the order confuses anyone.
At first, the issue around this user was brought into the Staff's attention more than half a year ago ago. In a ticket (where there was already proof of the stuff going on around him) which the Staff member I've been talking about told us that there wasn't enough evidence and "forgot" about it. I'm not blaming you, everyone has got lives. But after months of not knowing anything about it, I decided to ask Rowan, former Head Moderator, who told me that it was best to make a document with collected proof and all the stuff. Some other people and I made it and forwarded it to him, finally getting this person banned. But again, this Staff member never communicated with us again and took whole months to get this done, that's why I decided to go with Rowan and ask. Still love you lots for that, Rowan.
And now, back to the present, when I made the ticket asking about why is he still on the site, the Staff member told me they would look into it, but to no avail since there was no follow up after months. Made the server ticket on November, then the site ticket on 29th December, after being told by an Administrator to take it there. This takes us back to seeing he didn't face any consequences and blablabla.
My point is that this Staff member forgot both times and didn't give it enough importance, or that's how I feel about it, even after telling me last time that they WILL check into it, even if I wasn't "following the protocol" and took the matter into a server ticket. And got sent to make a site ticket anyways. And the worst part is that at this point you know that you will not get the outcome that you want, even if you do everything to try and make it work and get it through. It isn't trustworthy, it's pointless. Don't blame the Mods, blame the higher ups. Don't crash out at them because you were mad as I did.
i am again posting this for a mod who wishes ti remain anonymous
ā
i'm keeping anonymous for my own sanity as well as for the fact i am crying far too much to say much more.
shep's communication is obsolete. he refuses to speak with people directly and after 3-4 hours of this , he still hasn't given an apology to even the mods. it takes nothing. literally *nothing* to apologize and take responsibility. the lack of it is what speaks volumes.
i found myself nearing leaving many times through these past few months and after this, i made up my mind.
the outlast bots thing is also true. i, as a mixed person, found most of those bans to be 100% valid. some weren't, which is true. but most were valid. i stood up for mikale during that time and still do. i think it takes nothing to apply rules to all bots, not just special ones, and members of the site with verification or more numbers don't deserve special attention.
i wouldn't expect an apology from shep to be genuine, or his own words. do not hold ur breath. because he did it to us. even today, we were given more excuses and more promises. and it's finally been enough for me.
please take it easy on the mods staying. seriously. it takes balls and they are lovely people, all of them.
oh, and by the way, shep 1000% believes he is professional. and don't trust the apology, because his attitude and his persona match significantly with what u are seeing in those proofs of 'finding cheaper labor'.
maybe in another lifetime, shep cared about the users. it certainly isn't this one. <3
Former Discord Int Mod here.
I joined the team on 07/21/2023 and left in August 2025. I was part of the moderation for the international channels (yes, all of them) and moderated the site and tickets for some time. As you can tell, Iāve been moderating for a long time and I can confirm that Mikale and the other former mods are being honest.
The pleas and begging for JanitorAI to be more transparent and for the mod team to receive better communication are nothing new. We tried to tolerate it and believe in false promises just to keep this community afloat, but it was never going to thrive in the face of these lies.
I could talk about the obvious negligence regarding the international community and the hell that the mods there went through, but I wonāt go on, as Rowan has already said everything I wanted to say. Iāll just say that I hope the devs and Shep finally grant our request: be more transparent. The users and your staff deserve to know the truth.
Former Discord moderator and Lead/Senior mod for the International Team
(2024.01.11-2025.09.12)
My fellow former moderators have already given you an insight on how bad things were. I myself also experienced many things ex-mods are sharing, specially regarding the lack of communication coming from the Devs.
Back when I was a moderator, there was no segregation of the team depending on what you wanted to handle, you pretty much learned everything (Site, Reddit, Server) so you could help in case of an emergency. I was used to being a site moderator/Costumer Support and also a server moderator.
With the segregation of the team it was hard for me to follow on being a site moderator, knowing how fast the rules changed regarding on how to handle deleting/banning certain content. Most of the stuff I focused myself on deleting was intuitive, and if I doubted on a decision, I had my team to back me up or correct me. But with the lack of moderation tools given to us and how easily it was to overturn a moderate action by just messaging Shep, put scolded puppy eyes and promise to never do that again, was really demoralising. I could not moderate effectively as time progressed because neither I nor my superiors knew what was needed to be done with the content on site, and that uncertainty seeped into the server.
All of this also affected the International Team, already at the odds from how small it was. We were a very small group within the moderation team, and we needed to deal with many people who spoke different languages. And our job was to bring together the non-English speaking part of the Janitor community together, making it grown, banding it together and giving it visibility, as it was also a substantial part of what made Janitor.
As Mikale and the rest of ex-mods who have decided to voice it out have explained, the issues with communication were not privy to this last periods, it was an issue we had been swimming against whenever it happened.
Hold on people there's more
I am not the second best yapper in the leaderboard for naught
Whenever shep rolled out a new feature or tweaked around the site without giving us a heads up, I had to stay handling hordes along the other mods, and even worse, because I had to moderate a single channel alone where I could hardly ask help with because the other int mods were also handling their own channels. If my channel behaved for 10 mins, I was immediately on to another int channel or the gen channel to help. Staying up late and sleeping very little hours became part of my routine as a moderator, just so I could moderate the server and site. As soon as I woke up I helped moderate not only the English part of the community, but also the international part, with people just as confused as we were because something always changed whenever I was sleeping due to my timezone.
The workload on the International Team grew and got heavier with the popularity of Janitor. More work for the very small team that we were, we burned out quickly. Some took leaves to focus on their mental health, some others to deal with other irl issues. Those who stayed had to take on that workload, moderating the rest of the int channels even if we weren't well versed in the language (translation tools became our best pals). With each new wave of MITs, we only got at best 2-3 people that would be needed to be trained in a certain language to moderate one of the 6 int channels the INT team had, and even with exclusive int mod applications open, we got very little people who could help.
Former Discord moderator here. I joined at 2023 end of October and left permanently at 2025.08.24. I don't think i can add anything new story, everybody else already presented in detail what problems we had to deal with for so long. I was here for a long time and witnessed it as well, even with the fact i only focused mostly on discord moderation. I saw ppl not sleeping bc suddenly a big change got implemented without having any announcement to the team abt it and we had to deal with massive hordes, and no matter how many times we begged for change, even when things got better, later we just got back to square one. I tried my best to give emotional support to ppl in dms who got fed up with the constant stress and how we got treated. And considering the fact that this is going out from my free time, without getting paid, and more and more feeling like I'm doing a job for free instead of being part of a passion project (not to mention all the "stuff" i experienced that can't be even mentioned bc the subject on it's own is against tos), i lost all my motivation to be part of this moderation team again. Now I'm just focusing on the friends i made along the way.
I'm going to put my formulated response to the announcement here, because quite simply I need to say something.
Moderators have come out of moderating for Janitor with genuine mental health issues, with TRAUMA, not only because of the shit we see behind the scenes, but because of the toxic work environment and the shit that we were put through.
For you to come out and say that these things are lies? When multiple morderators can attest to the fact that csam was not in fact handled right away in the majority of cases, as well as other vile and disgusting content that rules were suddenly 'lightened up on' about?
It's genuinely pathetic. Wholeheartedly. You are refusing to take responsibility for the results of your own actions. Actions that have harmed HUNDREDS of people. Because guess what? That's how many people who have been through the mod program HUNDREDS.
All of us are telling the same story, many of us have simply completely blacked out our time as moderators because it was that horrific. This isn't something you can "step back" and let the remaining mods handle. Own up to your actions before it leads to deeper, darker holes that I'm sure you don't want to go down Shep.
We've had plenty of nice conversations. I used to think you were a nice guy. It's all just a farce. Take responsibility for your actions. Own up. Doing otherwise? That's how you lose your userbase.
Former Discord mod.
I've been harrased and had trauma from situations ive had to deal with ALONE, It saddens me that the moderation team is kept in the dark about everything until its us who has to stand at the front line as the shield. and then we only have eachother to stand with, when it becomes a shitstorm and war agiasnt the mods for any little thing we do. The fact that nothing is addressed for the teams, and the feeling of it being rug swept, and jus "rebuilding trust and doing better" the thing is, when is it going to be better? That was promised months ago. Moderators have to mod hordes alone a lot of the time when i was mod until recently. Lietral hoirdes only 2-3 people stretched thin.
I didnt wanna write here but i feel like its needed after that announcement................. I loved the site and the team, and god bless the remaining mods and CS staff..... but this has just gotten to a point that's not okay anymore or defensible
I'm going to copy over what I said in the JAI Discord in case it ever gets deleted (The thread, post, whatever).
Hello, I'm Aurellea! Mom, bot creator and former team lead for the CS/Site team (and previously a Discord mod prior to that) since late 2024 that I personally have had people DM me death threats, ||rape|| threats, and threats to (TW Child Harm) ||unalive my child|| before.
A lot of the issues I kept to myself because I loved doing what I did and "no service job is without it's assholes", but this caused me to have extreme anxiety attacks and severe depression that left me hospitalized twice and with long lasting health issues half a year later. These flares ups triggered a dormant auto-immune issue that I'm *still* getting tested and sorted out for to this day.
A lot of the team had similar things happen, with no protection for us. This was on top of the stuff we had to see moderating the site on a day to day basis (which of course comes with the job description, but it still takes a toll all the same).
We were never offered protection, no therapy, no compensation. We only ever got "Damn I didn't realize this would happen, my bad" responses every single time something really bad happened to us - and nothing changed or came from it.
The guilt I was feeling from being sick because of this job and not being able to perform properly compounded exponentially, making my health worse. I stopped partaking in most of my hobbies, stopped talking to my friends outside of work because I just *didn't* have the time, stopped leaving the house because when could I find the time? I felt guilty for taking time off. Even when I *would* take time off, I ended up working. (Obviously towards the end, leading up to me quitting, this became less of an issue). Working from the hospital waiting room because I was afraid of not doing enough and being fired should have been my wakeup call.
I couldn't keep up with the constant flux of changes, even with me active in moderation spaces every day. It's like changing the menu at a restaurant every other day and expecting your servers to know it by heart - it's impossible.
I wish I had quit sooner. I regret staying as long as I did, but I genuinely believed that there was a sliver of hope for change - which for awhile it looked like there might be. I love Janitor and the friends I've made, it's helped me through some tough times - but also ruined my life in other ways.
The healing journey for all of us is going to be long and hard, but not impossible. We'll get there. Thank you all for your support.
All the points have been said, what bothered me is how certain situation have been handled. X drama happened and what WE moderation team got? Threats after threats. I have little to no respect to Shep anymore. You cannot take accountability with all of the situation happening. I went to push myself to at least try and support the team even if it costed my mental health. I loved the team and I still love them but ignoring everything being said, giving your job to the others and just put it under the rug is extremely wrong in so many ways. We are humans and not your shields. We should have been treated with respect yet here we are. This whole situation is disheartening to see. I love this community but this is too much.
I'll put my response to the announcement here too!
-# Or well the key parts I saw and went "what the fuck is wrong with you dawg?"
1***. Trying to tell us that some of the stuff mentioned in the statement wasn't true? ***
I'm sorry lil' bro but as far as I can tell, the fact that your mods** opinions got undermined **and the people that was doing the harmful shit were **unbanned** and allowed to continue existing on the site. And you're trying to say ya'll don't tolerate CSAM despite, apparently letting some accounts involving such get unbanned?
Sounds like you're seemingly tolerating it to me.
-# Correct me if I'm wrong on that information btw chat, everything been very hard and confusing to follow with all the chaos so i'm just spewing about what i've understood this far
2.*** STEPPING BACK IS THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW. ***
We do not give two shits about your plans for the site right now, everyone wants an apology from you about what has been happening with your moderators, and your mods **DESERVE **an apology.
We deserve an apology for the fact that you tried to call this situation "silly~ š "
Am i allowed to have an opinion here...?
Because letās be fair for a moment. Communication between the mods and the devs has been pretty rough, and yeah, there have been some genuinely bad calls made along the way. The amount of times mods have been treated like punching bags has also gotten out of hand. That said, we need to step back and remember something important, this is still a community.
A lot of us have made real friends here. Weāve built relationships, discovered hobbies, poured time and creativity into making bots, writing stories, and just existing together in this space. If weāre going to call ourselves a community, then we canāt turn around and dump all the blame onto one group and wash our hands of it.
Do the devs deserve criticism? Absolutely. Did Shep, Hugo, and others drop the ball at times? Yeah, a bit. But can people redeem themselves if they actually put in effort, communicate honestly, and stop dodging accountability? Also yes. Growth doesnāt happen if we decide someone is permanently irredeemable the second they mess up.
Was the JAI post unnecessary? In some ways, yes. In other ways, no. Could it have been handled better? Probably. But piling onto the mods who are still around, arguing with them, or being outright rude just makes their jobs harder and pushes more people away. That doesnāt fix anything, it just burns bridges.
We could all do better. That includes not immediately jumping down moderatorsā throats, not assuming bad faith every time an announcement is made, and actually helping to report or remove genuinely harmful people from the site instead of fueling drama. And a lot of us have been, myself included.
Mods, paid or volunteer, are trying to keep the peace in a messy environment. The paid mods are obviously going to focus on stability, and if volunteer mods need to step back for their own mental health, and well being that shouldnāt be used as ammo against them, nor ammo against the other mods or devs.
If mods leaving sends a message to the devs and leadership that things are serious, then we also need to allow time and space for that message to actually sink in. Demanding instant perfection while continuing to attack the people still holding things together isnāt productive. Accountability matters, but so does patience if we actually want change.
A genuinely good starting point would be giving senior mods full rein to moderate properly and guide new mods, instead of undermining them or allowing people to slip around the system to get unbanned through back channels. Clear authority, clear communication, and consistent enforcement would go a long way toward restoring trust.
At the end of the day, a community is run by the community. This situation isnāt the fault of one person, one mod, or one dev alone. If we want things to improve, we have to act like adults, work together, and stop tearing down the very people who are still trying to hold the place together.
Accountability does need to be taken but you cannot force someone to do better by holding them at gun point.
TL;DR: A community succeeds or fails based on collective behavior. Blame doesnāt fix problems, cooperation does.
I start this message firstly mentioning that I do not have any ties with the moderation of the site, and that I do not intend to deviate the spotlight from the unfair treatment past mods have faced. For this, forgive me.
While I agree that favouritism is real in the site--as proven in other threads made today--I have never been on the favored side of moderators in any way of form. The exposition and presentation of this rentry feels misconstrued on purpose in some aspects and it does not sit right with me. I am wholeheartedly sorry that you may have felt how you felt during your time as moderator, but the claim of someone being xenophobic and harsh 'just for fun' is severe and should not be thrown around lightly.
I'm fully willing to settle any misunderstandings privately because these are personal attacks, so to tie into the intent of the thread, I feel it wise to also shed light into a part of the site that is poorly managed to the expense of the Mods well-being: the Community Teams, specially regarding the brief time I've been a part of the CSS Team. It also serves to clear any potential misunderstandings.
I will be brief and direct, I do not care if I get removed from the server for going against the Community Teams policy: the CSS Team has been pretty much ghosted since it's creation. There is no one managing the team. We have no special permissions or privileges. We have absolutely no guidance, no goals, no projects, no communication with any mods nor staff in any way. This is not recent and dates back to December. We only have a fancy color for our names, and that is all. The rentry insinuates many things, that we have an important role, that we have special treatment, and other individuals have gone as far as spreading rumours about us having site admin privileges to remove CSS as we see fit. All of that is nowhere near the truth. That is all.
From my experience of what hasn't already been said; the head mod in charge of helping us and making guides for us would rather spend time playing games in the voice chat.
Idk anything about the current admins, but those back then only took over when it became "drama".
Our "leader" literally would not stop showing favoritism and spread lies about both ex mods and users. They also wouldn't take responsibility and sit through a conversation on how to better the experience.
Former discord mod.
Before I even joined the team I was aware of the team structure, I saw how fast some moderators were promoted and how burnout would happen at every stage of progression. I joined as they were phasing out moderators do everything (by that I mean mod discord, site and reddit) which left my group of junior moderators feeling forgotten as we were told we would receive training only then to be told that we were now discord only moderators.
I saw horrible things even just moderating the discord to the point I was very low mentally, i had no option but to leave the team. But even though I left the team I was still friends with mods, I still could see how bad it was.
Then I came back, and when I came back it felt like there was no time between me being prompted to Senior then to an Admin, both times were not positions I wanted but I felt like I could not say no. Every time I was promoted I would worry that I was about to be fired when I got a message saying ācan we talkā, which is not a healthy mindset at all.
Internally within the discord mod team there were some things I was very unhappy about and I said as much when I had a meeting with the head of discord team who agreed with what I was saying. Thereās this idea that you have to mod a horde alone which is not a good thing, I personally stayed awake until the sun would come up because there was not enough moderators online.
I left at the same time as another discord moderator, it was unplanned but thatās how it happened. I cited university as the reason for leaving but the true reason is I was unhappy and frustrated with how the discord team operated as an Admin myself. I tried my best but when youāre trying your best and everything stays the same you lose hope. At the time leaving was the only option I saw because I could not stay in that environment. I still adore this community, I still am passionate about it because at the end of the day I became a moderator because of the community.
The stuff in the document by Mikale? I saw some of it happen, I remember community reactions to some of the things. And every time the moderation team would get the flack even if we were not responsible. So many times the discord team or the site team would be used as a shield, a punching bag for the community.
The fact multiple mods can attest to the fact they have received threats of death or SA is not good. Itās far from not good, but what weād been told to do was close our DMs, to not accept friend requests.
I did not speak out when I left and I wish that I did. I wish that I had told the staff the real reason I was leaving was because the environment was unhealthy and I was mentally exhausted and drained. It felt like I was drowning.
Hello my fellow ex-staff members. Sad we all meet again like this and I hope everyone's been well. <a:lizard:1118880010145644654>
For those that don't know who I am, I am Sundae. Some of you may know me from my thread attached to <#1125828713565663303>. I was bought into Customer Support during its restructure in late August. I quickly became a CS Lead to attempt to head the technical support side. I'm primarily a LLM researcher and prompter first, though I enjoy fandom and creative writing. Being a part of Janitor was a dream come true, since it put me closer to what I like doing. I am not good at social things, but if I could help Janitor become the best roleplay platform it could, then I would swallow my pride and try to learn new skills. It is volunteer work, but it won't be, forever... right?
The main thing I went into Janitor with was to try and help CS have a rigid structure. I'm the person who helped write some of the templates that my fellow CS members (hopefully) used to answer tickets. I helped with updating the articles on the help desk. I answered tickets. A lot of them. I tried to lesson the work load from Iroh, who I saw was drowning in it. The amount of work that man did alone is inhumane. The community has no idea how much he advocated for all of you. My duties eventually extended towards helping answer questions in threads because I wanted to rebuild the shattered bridge of trust. Users pinged me in to help communicate because the developers, despite their repeated promises of "we will do better" did not, in fact, do better. Iroh was the only paid Janitor staff member I could trust to be in the trenches with us volunteer staff.
I apologise to those users that may have found me obtuse or strict when I asked for "feedback to be constructive." I was attempting to bring forth concerns in a way that expressed where friction happened so that the developers could improve on the rough patches with the concept. I knew they were not changing their plans and wanted to try and find a balance. Volunteer staff **very frequently** found out about movements by Shep through... *the same time you guys did.*
Volunteer staff carried the brunt of criticism. Volunteer staff carried the weight of relaying user problems to developers. Volunteer staff would be abused for actions we had no part in.
There are days I woke up, saw what happened during the time I slept, and spent the next hour trying to discuss with other staff members how to proceed. I considered pulling in an alternate Discord account so I could have peace and let my brain reset. The stress was a millstone on my psyche, making it harder for me to sleep a full cycle and I started sleeping less to the point that *other staff members noticed*. I watched **multiple staff members grow sick enough to be hospitalised**. One staff member suffered a concussion during a fainting spell. They had never spoken of health issues before and this came shortly after a decision to pitch their work. Hundreds of hours. Gone. My justified rage towards this incident is why I'm ex-staff.
After my departure, I realised the toll the stress took upon me. I had stress hives on my palms. I was sick for the week after. A month later, I was sick for another week. I have never had stress crash my immune system to this point and I'm still recovering. I almost quit LLM research. I left this server. Some people checked in because they thought I was going through a mental health crisis. In a way, I was.
## I do not disagree with anything Mikale said in his post.
Furthermore, Mikale was one of the most pleasant people to work alongside. He worked incredibly hard and without complaint. He is the reason why CS had a coherent structure to enforce site moderation. Because it sure didn't come from Shep.
One ex-staff member had warned me that Janitor turns their staff members over the coals, using them for their worth until there's nothing left. When "they" are done, they turn on you and cast you out.
I was not a mod for long enough to speak a lot on this. But i do have words i want to say and iām not sure where else to direct them. Ive taken my time to think about this and wanted to be sure I knew what i wanted before i spoke out.
Shep being the face of JAI and making the comments he did during the height of this whole debacle had me sick to my stomach. Without going into detail, I have been through a tremendous amount of grief and struggles in life that I do not tell the whole world. Seeing someone meant to be above me making comments and jokes like that was absolutely vile and wretched.
The responses we got to the whole situation were also nothing short of filler and excuses. The denial and refusal of what happened is insane considering everyone elseās testimony. My time here was short but I grew to love and respect these people and they would not lie out of thin air.
I know next to nothing about site mods so I canāt speak on them. But the discord mods did everything they could with what little they had every single time something new happened. I watched real time as things were sprang on us and we had to do damage control in discord and actively tell people āsorry, weāre also in the dark.ā
Again, i wasnāt around long but I wanted to share my thoughts. I wasnāt nearly as affected as some of the others but I am sickened to say the least. To my fellow mods/ex-mods please remember that though things are hard to take care of yourself. I love you all.
ill take my shot here i guess. Low on energy rn, but ill give an honest two cents since ive seen a few ppl have. Dunno if this is the right place or not <:shrug:1430161254558859364>
I was a junior mod for a very short time a few months back. For that short time, it was stressful. The things i saw here were not great, my mind is fuzzy.
i don't wanna say much else about my experience with the team bc i don't want to get smited by the rest of the mods bc I'm genuinely terrified of them š
But, genuinely thank you so much to those that did help me during my short fling with the Mod Team. y'all were a big help.
i will say this was also when i got hired into a high stress job, and putting on my big boy pants *here* while also doing the same irl blurred everything together.
seeing what this server and site has come to... im not at all surprised. I say we don't scrap it, and start anew. New team, both for the site and server. Now, i don't know a whole lot, but i know enough, and heard enough to know some shady stuff has happened.
stuff that never should have.
-Discord Jesus
For what it is worth, people know that I've been on CS team. Now ... now you can have your guesses, it doesn't matter anymore.
I cannot deny any of the info presented, though in some cases I simply am not sure. The being attacked by community part sticks out to me, though; lacking any real info and only doing your best, you would get attacked just because you were a part of the team, sometimes even by people you'd known, and sometimes even by people who would admit that they are unloading negativity unto you and yet seemed to believe themselves to be right.
The lack of info made the help you would do feel unsafe. The interactions with the community would make this space feel unsafe. Even if it wasn't everyone, there's a certain break when you don't feel safe, and you end up feeling in some ways so alone. People would burn out, and sometimes you would need to force yourself do things because you just couldn't. Some couldn't take it mentally, and things got unhealthy because there was no safety network and people were breaking.
Trust is a very precious resource, and it's one that evaporates quickly when people feel unsafe. Whatever the reason, this had almost consistently been what'd happened, and that is a part of the problem. Consistency breeds predictability breeds trust, within environment of safety.
A part of me hopes that things can improve. That said, at this point that requires recreating hope, and this cannot be done with words. For this to succeed at all, it has to be a commitment.
Hi i was a mod too. I can't really add anything new but here is my story.
I was a mod from 2023 until 2025 with a huge break. I had to step back bc i had no time to moderate the server, handle tickets, reddit or the site anymore. Im a uni student, i had to work, live my life and this was a fulltime unpaid job for most of us.
First it was nice. We had our rules, we did our jobs, we tried to make the server safer. sometimes we got arguments with the users but the worst time was when the beta testers appeared. Its not their faul but bc they paid for this service they threated us really bad even in dms. We couldn't say anything bc we had to "behave", we had to keep our cold even if someone texted us something terrible. Users expected us to fix the problems or tell the devs the problems but we couldn't really reach anyone with these problems.
We had to handle tickets, reddit, the server and the site at the same time and it was too much after a while mentally, especially when we had to explain adults in the tickets why making nsfw content with kids are not okay and they not wanted to understand it.
Every single time when a huge update happened there were chaos on the server and we only knew the same things like the users, nothing more. We were mods but we didn't know anything about what is going on and we had to calm down the people. When the beta become public it was the same. We had no idea about the release date, only after it was released.
We had to moderate disturbing things on the side and here this server aswell. when we applied we knew this, we wanted to make the communty safer but new rules came, new moderation tools and with the new rules and tools we still couldn't exactly do anything. A lot of rules were not clear after a while. We had to beg for new tools for the site and sometimes they gave it to us sometimes not. anytime when the site was down i had 100 dms about it. some users just complained but a lot of them was really bad. they expected from us to tell what is happening, what the devs are doing but we didnt know anything so we had to shake it off. "patience, wait a little more" and this made the users more and more angrier. when i came back after my break i wanted to mod the site only but when it was down everything was the same. lot of dms, "fix the site", "why is the moderation bad", "what happened with a banned bot" and a lot of terrible messages about what they would do to me. I never told anyone this but few people even found my personal messenger account and texted there from fake accounts + even texted my boyfriend which was too much for me. Its the internet if someone harassing me i dont care, i can ignore it but texting on my personal account was different. I wasn't scared, they not even knew which country i live in but i still not really felt safe after it so i become inactive.
We tried our best with the communication but you cant communicate any relatable information if you dont have any bc no one is communication with you from the higher ups. We tried to make the community safe, the server and the site enjoyable while we not got anything back for it. We had to protect the community while no one protected us and this was a huge problem.
i dont know anything about the recent beta testers since im not a mod, i want to clarify this (+ when i came back i only checked the site most of the time). these were the testers before the llm rolled out to public. half of them was supportive, nice and correct, but the other half was behind threats, complains etc. the llm and the site changed a lot almost every hour or day and after every change they started to send dms or pinging in the feedback channel and argued a lot without listening to us.
Hello,
I was unsure if I would ever be able to speak up about it - but I'm going too now as I can't keep my mouth shut. I was a recent volunteer hire of the CS team, aka the site mods and the tickets for the site.
Originally, when I joined I was warned there'd be backlash, and there'd be a lot for us. I went in positively, because there's always chaos at every place, right? When I first joined I was met with the understanding that we had over 100,000 tickets that were unanswered and that we were a very, very small team. We worked on our own time, and some could only really devote maybe two, three hours at a time a day due to their RL. I was one of those people. I immediately was overwhelmed, but kept faith because I loved JanitorAI and I still, at the time, really love making bots.
Learning and training was hard. Everyone had their own times and schedules and there wasn't really "set training tools". Iroh and others tried VERY hard to make sure they knew I could take time, I could rest. The other mods were so loving and kind and I feel so bad for them. But in just my span of being there for a short time, several policy changes happened right in front of me and I was often left struggling because I was still trying to learn the OLD policies.
Everything Mikale said is true. The tools we had were very little, very... lackluster. The rules about the bots we had were very confusing and often left me second guessing myself, and therefore I felt unsure whenever I handled a report and often left questioning more than actually helping the site. Personally, as a verified creator - it made me very uncomfortable to see that verified creators were practically favored above all else and things were not handled the same with other accounts. As someone whose verified, I sure would hope if I had made anything wrong in my bots it would be reported and handled. But no, apparently as a verified creator I'm "pampered" more and I dislike that.
I was told from the get-go not to respond to moderation comments, or hate comments. Or anything involving moderators. This... put a lot of stress on me. But sure, Shep can make jokes about the files and I have to sit silent? Absolutely not.
Thank you guys for listening. Stay safe. I just want to make bots and hopefully, in due time, see the site gain back it's shattered trust.
hi all,
I've been a site mod/CS team member and later senior one for janitor since around the start of july 2025 until half of december 2025. I then switched to the discord moderation team until today, when I stepped down from the role.
disclaimer: I am tired as I write this and english is not my first language, so forgive me if there are errors. I tried my best to speak my mind clearly, and this is my perception of how things were.
anything I can possibly say about this has been addressed countless times, and all I can say is I 100% agree with everything from Mikale's statement, and I am appalled to see how the response from shep's part was handled. I just couldn't support this any longer, and after seeing everyone voice their opinion, I gained courage and wanted to do the same.
I'll try to not repeat the things that have been said already too much as we all agree they are true, but one thing that never felt right to me was how us site mods/CS members were eventually forced to go anonymous for several reasons, including the sheer amount of harassment we were receiving on a daily basis for modding site. instead of openly defending us and fighting for our safety by at least punishing people who sent us the worst threats, their plan of action was to simply hide us from the world and honestly? just to then make us take it, but quietly, saying it was for our sake. the only support we had was our own team members, all equally burnt out and tired, because we were not allowed to tell anyone of our situation. I felt trapped in that sort of environment, and definitely not cared for, despite the INSANE amount of work I put. we ALL put. unpaid.
I felt sad for everyone else, who seemed to agree to the change, but I also often felt like they didn't truly enjoy this work anymore. I quit the CS team after that whole ordeal, and decided to focus on being part of the discord team as I felt like all my efforts were just useless on the site, but still wished to help somehow. I didn't want to have to hide my identity just because they didn't want to handle moderation bashing properly. I wanted to be seen and feel safe when being in janitor's spaces while being a volunteer worker for it at the same time. which is really not a lot to ask...it shouldn't be.
unfortunately, this entire thing happening ruined most of the hopes I had left. we, both moderators of any kind and users, were promised so many things, and almost none of them have ever been delivered despite MANY complaints and requests to. from a moderation point of view, a couple popular requests were things such as:
- better moderation tools; this one has been asked by basically every moderator on site ever, past and present, and it has been postponed to no end. Iroh made an extension for us moderators that improved the process of handling and logging things greatly, yes, but it still wasn't *improved site tools* like we've requested time and time again from devs. we heard they were working on it but it didn't really come, at least not during my time there.
- making temporary bans hide profiles from view (which they don't. the user is just locked out of the account but anyone else can access it); minors? yeah, we banned them a few years depending on how old they are, but the profile stays open to everyone regardless unless we ban it fully. and even then, a regular ban still lets people use the site, with the exception of commenting and making bots.
not to mention the lack of clear guidelines, even internally, that we so desperately needed.
these are, in my opinion, all very important requests that were often made because there was a serious need for them, but were for some reason never actually listened to and implemented (at least during my time there, which is until fairly recently...).
I am grateful to this platform for making me meet many people I consider friends and even close friends. that is all I am grateful for right now, because everything else is simply unacceptable.
So hi, former discord senior mod here!
I probably don't have as much to say as many others here, but regardless here is my piece. First some context, until relatively recently CS moderation was based in this server, including team announcements, team conversations and action logging. As a senior moderator I had privileged access to see these channels until the point the CS team were anonymised - any other upper-mod can verify this.
In regards to Mikale's original post, I have seen first-hand enough to not doubt a word of what was expressed like many of my former colleagues already have.
- I watched the incident with the KKK/Outlast bots play out as a member, I personally knew the individual who was outed for Nazi RP later - everything mentioned matches.
- I saw the CS guidelines updated to specify CSAM content had to be sufficiently explicit for an account ban, otherwise the bot was merely deleted.
- I've spoken to (now 18+) minors who were banned and still had full access to their account other than publishing public content.
- I witnessed a policy change be announced that meant content created by minors would still be on the site and usable for anyone, and my concerns that this was inherently problematic and honestly gross were not responded to (I don't know if this was implemented but the conversation happened)
- I witnessed mods, both CS and Discord/Reddit begging for information from Devs on changes or issues that we found from USERS that turned out to be intentional changes, only to be ignored. Over and over and over... And promises of improvement made over and over as well.
- I witnessed discussions about "large creator" accounts and that they would need to be escalated for action to be taken, including confusion at what the number even was (it was believed to be 1000, but moderation found themselves unable to action accounts lower, as it turns out this number was 666)
- I witnessed the weakening of moderation punishments, that what many of us would consider severe infractions (||necrophilia, bestiality||) would no longer result in a ban but merely a bot removal, a slap on the wrist.
- To this day, there are parts of bot definitions that CANNOT BE SEEN BY SITE MODERATORS. It cannot be moderated, and this is seen as acceptable.
I think there's more but you get the point.
I've been in this community a long time (since April 2024!), and a mod for almost 6 months. I've interacted with so many lovely people in that time, I really love this community and what I believed it stood for. I've always encouraged people to do what's best for them, not pain themselves for the sake of others and to not force themselves beyond their limits - so that's where I reached last night.
Shep's comments made it clear to me that the site doesn't align to what I believe, and likely never will despite so many people working so hard for it. People will continue to be abused, ignored and trampled and the person overseeing it will make jokes about exactly the kind of harmful content we did our best to protect people from. I think the users, creators and above all VOLUNTEER STAFF deserve so much better than what Janitor has given them and I only hope those that stay have a brighter future.
Much love to you all
-# I rambled and definitely forgot to say some stuff but it's been an emotional time for all of us
Hello, everyone. I am currently having a hard time with everything who has been going on with Janitorai.
I ask anyone to please respect my wishes: if you want to share my post, do so respectfully and remove my name from it. I am not strong enough to handle any amount of hate or criticism right now, as my mental health is at a breaking point.
I have considered writing this on reddit and discord, but I genuinely believe that I have no longer a place in the community. It is not a safe space for me, I have peeked into the discord server and I can confidently say would not be able to bear it if anyone replied to me with any amount of negativity (even perceived).
As some of you know, I have been part of the customer support/site moderation team for nine months. During the last days, I genuinely thought there was a small possibility things could be better for me, that I could stay on the team and keep working on the things that I am so passionate about. But it is no longer the case, I have decided to step off. I am no longer able to handle the situation... I can't anymore.
When I first joined, I genuinely thought I would be able to help. I was passionate about what I worked on, and have seen people as passionate as me come and go. Everyone I have known was hired with a head full of dreams and hopes, only to leave burned out and angry. They were my team, and I still consider them as such. I have stood up for them, and they stood up for me countless times, we have vented and consoled each others so much during hard times, and I will never be grateful enough for the time we spent working together. I have dreamed, genuinely, of working with them as a real team.
Right now, I want to give you guys a CW about ||**mental health and suicidal themes.** || Because I believe one is needed.
The day I joined the team, I was happy. Immensely so. I am a very naive, gullible person. I thought I would make friends, that it would help me to overcome my loneliness and offer me a place in the community. I thought I would help people, that I will be able to make things change. I was wrong.
Each day spent as a member of that team pushed me farther away from the community. I do not know if it is true, I really don't, I may be delusional, but I strongly believe that everything has been made to rip me away from others.
I was no longer able to interact with users how I did before. I was constantly in a horrible mental space, and for those who have been following me from a very long time, you have noticed: I have lost any desire to write and make bots. My hobby has been taken away from me, and I will never have it back, I will never be able to enjoy it like before.
Once isolated from the community, I genuinely felt trapped. I believed, and still believe, that by quitting the team, I would have lost my hobby for nothing. And maybe, it is the case. If I hadn't applied, I would still be a happy, fulfilled creator.
I am a very lonely person. I am disabled, with a list of mental disorders I will not share because I do not feel comfortable to... but I have no IRL friends, because I am not able to leave my house, and as an LGBT person, I currently live in a neighbourhood where it is not safe for me to be outside and meet people.
Knowing that, it is safe to say that the amount of positive social interaction I have are very little. There were days where I genuinely considered taking my own life, and recently have done an attempt; fortunately, the amount of medication I have taken was not enough, and I ended up being fine, recovering after three days. I genuinely thought that would be the end for me.
*I have not talked about my suicide attempt to the team. I feared I would have been pushed away from the team for "my own good," and wished not to talk about this to them.
While working with the team, I have received an horrible amount of hate in multiple, numerous occasions. I have:
- Received sexual comments while working to help with discord moderation during hordes: people asking me if they could suck my dick/fuck me, transphobic comments, etc. (One of those users was not punished).
- Received death threats, and one rape threat directly in my DMs. I had to archive my old discord profile and make a new one. I am still afraid to log into that specific profile.
- Seen people partaking in witchunts, and sharing my profile and one of another team lead's under announcement against the moderation team with call for violence (I have quietly banned the user without asking for permission)
- Read, among with other mods, a very violent post where one specific user claimed that if we ever put one foot into his city, he would stab us and eviscerate us (we requested for punishment, and it was rejected)
- Moderated stuff (I will do not enter into details), including real life photography, that has taken nights of sleep away from me
The moderation team had no right to speak or vent. There is no one you can talk to about all of this outside of the moderation circle or a therapist, no one wants to talk about this to their friends and family. Both because it is very shocking, and because it is hard to understand if you do not live it.
No one, outside of us and one paid employee stood up for us. Even when we complained about death threads, even when we were at breaking point, even when we got doxxed, attacked, reached out to personally to be harassed or insulted.
Seeing my team getting constantly attacked and thrown under the bus turned me very sour towards the userbase. Because it was not fair. I felt so enraged when I saw the discord team, the reddit team, or my own team getting harassed, insulted, attacked for hours for things we weren't able to control. Because everyone has made their best to help our users. Moderators are also users and creators, they are impacted by decisions the same way you are. Moderators also have to remove their content when guidelines get change, they also had to remove their nsfw pictures (I had to remove 72 nsfw pictures from my bots bio).
I have been very mean at times. I apologise for this, truly, because people did not know what was going on behind the scenes, and it was unfair to talk to some people the way I have.
I know it doesn't makes things better, but I guarantee from the bottom of my heart that each mean word directed to users or mods has been directed 10x to those above me. I have debated, I have argued, I have done so for a very long time to make things fair. I pushed to make things more transparent, edited guidelines, and asked to write new ones constantly. There were times were I genuinely argued with employees/devs and I genuinely thought I would get fired for that.
I have considered quitting Janitorai, both as a creator and moderator for a very long time. But it is not fair. I don't want to stop being a creator, I simply do not.
I will be staying as one, even if my motivation is scarce. I will be trying new site, will crosspost and maybe? If I find the right one I will quit the site and move permanently.
I thank everyone for reading this. And apologize for venting, but I had to let it out.
There is no one I can talk to about this.
Note: I will also add this, if you may recognize the ex mod by the message please do not say who they are but you are allowed to share their statement to those who may want to read it
Former Junior that have left the team before this situation happening. I left due to my studies but after what I am witnessing I won't be coming back. I have not handled the same treatment that the others have endure. I am sending my strenght to you guys.
Also keep in mind English is not my first language but my second so nothing will be perfect.
It will be a short statement, some of you may not know me and Nyxx are roommate, he's my best friend and even I consider him as a big brother because he helped throught a big difficult time. I noticed that when he became a member of the team, I noticed a change on his behavior. He was spiraling, starting to have bad habits that he used to drop like excessive alcoholism drinking and some tencencies of self destruction actions. It was happening slowly but surely
After a month ago, when I joined the team I finally understood the slow change on his behavior. He was always forcing himself to be positive to the point it was costing his own mental state. I had to witness one of the person I cherish the most, destroying and sacrifying everything for the sake of the team and the community. Reading all of the past statement of anyone is heart dropping, yet again I cannot say much since I havent got in the team for so long. I know that they tried so hard to keep it organized but it was impossible with how it was being handled and constant policy change on certain things. I think it was also the same for the admins and the other seniors.
Just because Shep cannot communicate properly to the team and the community and actually make sure that they get a safety policy.
The paid staff and likely my colleagues will know who this is, but Iām still posting anonymously as Iām not sure I want to discuss this publicly quite yet. Itās a very very hard time of my life.
I was fired from one team after being on it for a few months. I was then rehired, less than 72 hours later, onto another team. I was very grateful at the time for an opportunity for a āfresh startā, but I believe I was set up for failure from the lack of proper management.
Usually when someone is fired, they tell you exactly what you did. I was givenā¦ vagueness. I had hurt people with my actions. Thatās the extent to what I knew. I was never told anything else. I was never told if it was wording or tone or the context of what I said, or even specifically which comments of mine were hurtful. Iām autistic, so I knew it likely involved some sort of tonal or missed social queues.
I spent hours going through DMs with colleagues and trying to rehearse interactions I had in channels I no longer had access to to try to prevent it from happening again, I never did figure it out.
I had an autistic meltdown for over 12 hours the day I was fired. I was upset I had poured so much time and energy only to be fired with zero prior warnings or coaching. In fact, I later found out the thing I was fired for? Mods, including myself, were all told in one of our channels that no one was in trouble over the situation.
I did find out the reason lately, and I understand why. A situation happened in a moderation channel that I misunderstood and reacted inappropriately to. Iāve since apologized to both the people affected by my hurtful comments.
However, other people never found out. People much higher than me had reached out to a paid staff member involved in my firing. All the ones I spoke to were told different things that donāt align with what I was told.
I was also told it had to do with me doing too many server bans. I was an MIT/Junior Mod at the time. Junior Mods have never been able to ban people. I was told this by the paid staff member who fired me, despite it not making sense.
Regardless, they agreed to rehire me. I was determined to make sure they donāt regret it.
Except, I still didnāt know what specifically I had done wrong. I had heard so many conflicting reports from different people. Plus, one of the things I was told directly I was fired for, I was incapable of doing. I physically did not have the perms to ban people even if I wanted to.
I tried to reach out to the paid staff member involved, but I was told that theyāre no longer in my upline, so I should reach out to someone else.
I tried to make it work. I tried to do the best job I could, but I didnāt want to hurt anyone with my actions as at the time I didnāt know what had happened.
So I kept to myself. I didnāt interact with my peers in work channels because I didnāt want to say something and hurt them. I didnāt interact with my peers from either team in DMs anymore because I didnāt want to hurt them. I had several panic attacks over the rest of my tenure from just answering simple questions in work channels. Iād be brought to tears every time I got a DM from a lead or paid staff member, convinced I had disappointed those who gave me a second chance by doing something wrong again.
Eventually, I told my leads what was going on and how severely it was impacting me from doing my duties. They agreed I should reach out to the paid staff member in charge. So I sent the paid staff member a message. To this day, it has not been acknowledged.
I donāt blame this particular staff member. They had a lot going on, but it was the end of my line. I had no one else paid or unpaid I could turn to as the original paid staff member who fired me already said I wasnāt under them anymore. Plus, at this point I had learned they lied about my firing.
So I just kinda quietly stepped away. Maybe I couldāve reached out to my colleagues at the beginning and said āhey, if I ever say something that hurts you, please call me out on it, so I knowā. But I was embarrassed still at the beginning.
When someone is fired, the paid staff say why. Or a version of why. It is usually very specific like āleaking informationā. Mine was simply because of my ābehaviors and actionsā. This was likely to support the original paid staff members lies about me to other moderators.
Regardless, there was less than 72 hours before myself and the rest of my new team was onboarded. The announcement was never taken down or even edited to reflect that Iād be rejoining. It was humiliating. Not only did my former colleagues know I was fired less than 3 days prior, now all of my new ones knew as well.
I was lucky that they were all extremely kind. No one had really mentioned it during my tenure, and I was never belittled for it by past or present colleagues, but I didnāt know that. I didnāt know what would happen.
So I ended up letting down the people who believed in me anyway. To those people. To the paid staff member I was under at the end. To all of my leads. To anyone who tried to fight for me. Iām so so sorry I disappointed you. Iām so sorry I failed you. It wasnāt your fault. I was just scared, but my fear became a self fulfilling prophecy. None of you did anything wrong.
If anyone involved with this wishes to DM me to discuss it and receive a personal apology, please feel free to do so. If the original paid staff member wishes to DM me knowing I know they lied to myself and others, you may as well.
This is more for my colleagues than anyone else. They deserve to know why I only spoke to my leads for the most part. They deserve to know why I rarely answered questions. And I am sorry to them as well. They suffered because of my fear and it isnāt okay.
Proper management wouldāve involved training. It wouldāve involved coaching. I shouldnāt have had to spend hours agonising over every interaction with my colleagues. I shouldāve been told ānow that youāve rejoined the team, we have to work on XYZā.
What if I hadnāt been scared? What if I repeated my previous actions because I wasnāt told what I did wrong specifically? That wouldnāt be fair to myself or my colleagues. What if I hadnāt been hired back? Would my colleagues have just believed lies they were told by paid staff?
Itās not fair to anyone. Itās not right.
Evidence Server Confessions of Mods
I will share a small story here first.
I was a mod for over two years. I helped set up the rules, the community guidelines. I on boarded the new mods, I set up the application process.
I pushed for removal of bots containing CSAM, bestiality and any other such abhorrent content. I have seen some of the most horrible things in my time moderating the site, the server, yet pushed on. Things that I cannot unsee, and I did so out of love for the community. Wanting them to be safe, them to thrive.
I worked through my vacations, spend time moderating even when I was in Japan. I did Customer service, Discord moderating, Reddit moderating, e-mails, private DMs, site moderation. I worked more than fifty hours per week in the name of passion.
The last year or so I got paid. It was not much, less than I would get working part-time at McDonald's, but it was more than nothing. Then suddenly the payments stopped. I had to reach out myself - this happened often, I would not be paid on time, or I would have to remind them.
I was fired. There was no more budget.
I learned that the mods and users were told that I left voluntarily.
I did not. After two years, I was fired, and I did not even get told so until *I* reached out personally to see what was going on.
Ill go next,
I was a mod for almost 2 years, from August 2023 to July 2025, I also held the headmod position and for a while it was good, i used to really like jai despite the disgusting things i would see on the site, them mainly being CSAM and many other things.
But what eventually pushed me out, besides my time constraints were the lack of appreciation from shep and leadership in general. Like i said, i was headmod, which basically was the second highest role beneath admin back then before the roles were changed, I was technically in a leadership position, but in reality I was barely more then a normal mod.
I mostly worked on training other staff and on the appeals of the discord and the things that soured the whole experience for me was the clear lack of trust in us headmods, we had proven ourselves to be the most dependable.
We were promised communication and true leadership and we got nothing, we were promised and promised and promised but nothing ever happened, i began dreading looking at janitor. We were the ones who apologized and excused the devs and sheps behaviour, we were always the one that protected everyone. We did work we shouldnt have had to do.
We had to beg shep for proper mod tools both on site and then for discord we were also denied resources because some of them wouldve been paid ones. We were shafted and treated as lesser beings in general.
I left around the same time kim was said to leave, at the latest stages of my stay i was mostly around for her and when her situation happened i packed my bags and havent felt bad about it since.
Hello community, my name is Rowan K. For those who have known me for a long time, you know that I was the first moderator to help with the International section, officially recommended by a former admin but under Kim's guidance. Therefore, I am the one responsible (founder) for the structure we have seen in the International department from 2023 until mid-2025. My job was always to translate, relay demands, and assist other moderators with channels like 'hispanohablantes' and 'brazil' (since I am fluent in Portuguese and decent enough in Spanish to understand context). These were the two main channels for a while, until Alexys and Tamal joined to help me.
Alexys served as the Co-Founder of International, assisting me with the server as a whole regarding the Hispano and Brazil sections. Tamal was the first Hispanic moderator under my guidance, dealing directly with demands from the Spanish-speaking community.
From the start, Shep was more of a reserved admin than someone who approached moderators. We were even 'afraid' to ping him, understanding that he handled larger demands and needed to focus. I swear, you will read the word 'communication' repeatedly hereāoften, the final hope was simply that some admin would be available to handle situations requiring dev action.
I have always advocated for communicationāsee the stories with Gem and the beta-testers, where I was constantly trying to build a bridge so everyone would be satisfied. To this day, I remember that on my birthday, something happened on the server regarding beta-testers who were dissatisfied with a sudden change. I tried to step in to calm things down, understand, and serve as an administrative bridge when everyone was already exhausted... I cried that day because I had to read horrible things saying I lied about my work, when I hadn't even had enough time to understand what had happened.
I had to take a break from the team during a period where we went through a massive changeāthe image overhaul. This was not communicated to the team. Not at any point. We dealt with users hating us for absolutely everything, but even we didn't know what was actually going on. We were caught off guard by an announcement from Shep rather than internally. We didn't have time to properly prepare an action plan to deal with each situation individuallyāand boy... those were cruel days where my body couldn't process the information coming in. All the debate, all the threats we received were brutal. The team was mentally and physically exhausted.
Again, I say: we were not informed of anything.
A large part of the team was dissatisfied. I was exhausted and sick (I have fibromyalgia, which flares up under stress) and I asked to leave. I left my last meeting in tears (Shep was present and said he would communicate better) because I felt like I was abandoning ship at the worst possible moment. I calmed my entire team because we had worked together for nearly a year straight; I had to swallow my tears and go back to taking care of the part I loved most.
I returned after a while, this time as a Server Admin, but by then, I witnessed even more horror stories regarding communication. Mikale was my international moderator at the time. We had website translations, communication bridges, and new goalsāonly for everything to be removed without my proper consent. This left all the work of the translators ignored, treated as a secondary priority that didn't deserve proper attention.
Everything else is on the official server. There were communication breakdowns (on both sides) until they stopped entirely. My dissatisfaction was no longer enough to keep trying to fix the team, until I received the final message saying I was too aggressive in my speech and that this would be my end on the Janitor team.
I chose to be banned as a last wish so as not to become bitter while still holding a moderator's mindset.
I preferred to disappear out of sadness and disappointment rather than be bitter, and I regret that deeply.
December 2025 was when I decided to speak out again, this time directed at a small Brazilian community. I voiced my dissatisfaction, told them what happened, and it resulted in an actionāthat isn't my story to tell, but the evidence is in the Brazilian server where I postedāa moderative action until we find ourselves where we are today.
An International team no longer exists. It was suffocated to death, along with all the work I did for years and the countless sleepless nights.
Sincerely,
Rowan.
I think this will be my last word before I finally let go.
After that fiasco of an announcement, I feel like the light has finally gone out. To reduce five multicultural channels to simply 'non-heavy' is to belittle their origins and active users. Yes, I understand ā the primary rule among international channels is: if there's no moderator, there's no channel. Period.
***BUT*** what left me indifferent was the attempt to downplay the importance of these channels as a whole. To those who remain, stay strong. To those contemplating leaving, do what your heart tells you.
And with that, I turn off the lights on any subject involving the team. That's all I had to say. If there's anything more, it doesn't matter to me anymore.
LaroyĆŖ š±
Rowan.
Hello everyone. I'm Nimbus. Started off as a discord mod on Janitor AI in November 2024 and moved to reddit in the middle of 2025. I didn't have a huge role like the heads and seniors (translations, rule making, making sure things went smoothly)., but I considered myself pretty active. Modding for the discord was amazing until it wasn't. It would be eight or nine at night (gmt-5) and we would get updates after they had dropped and have to deal with hordes for hours due to lack of communication, and just overall chaos that never really seemed to be smoothed over. I put in a lot of work on the discord team with bans, logging and whatnot and got little to no recognition for it.
After I moved over to Reddit, things were great under the small leadership that was there. It was me and three other mods. We hired a few more, and then things turned downhill pretty quickly. A select few of the newer reddit mods that started bringing an air of toxicity to the team. I requested a transfer back to Discord due to the environment and how uncomfortable I felt and was subsequently denied the opportunity to go back because it was only "growing pains". But the thing is that Reddit does its own thing and there's really no structure whatsoever and no real guidelines as to how we should moderate the subreddit.
I did eventually get promoted to senior reddit mod thanks to Fiore (love you š), but being in the environment was a huge tax on my mental health. There are reddit mods that are ban happy, that is the truth. But there were those of us who preferred to be rational before banning too, and I was one of those. I was essentially out of my element and with the loss of leadership from three people I could trust wholeheartedly, I ultimately drowned because I couldn't go with the current of toxicity and refused to do so.
I grieve the time I put into this project. But at the end of the day, I don't regret leaving.
For those of you who aren't familiar with me already, I'm Niko and was a mod on the Discord server for about 3 months. Admittedly not that long, but I have been an active member of the community for a lot longer and have seen time and time again the miscommunication of devs, though mostly from a user/member standpoint.
Working on the mod team was amazing, even if it was hectic at times, but there were parts that did not sit right with me in the moment nor afterwards in light of everything. I do wanna note that I have no issues whatsoever with anyone on the team who was a volunteer - I hold a lot of respect for current and previous mods.
After changes within the team, we were promised additional support from staff and meetings that never happened - I had been freshly promoted to mod, and we'd lost a significant portion of our upper team. The rest of the team was amazing and I do think we handled that well, but I can't remember much support from staff at the time outside of promises that fell through.
Recently, we had an optional meeting aimed at helping our juniors get their footing and answering some questions. Again, this was optional and held by a fellow moderator. I was present because I'm always looking for chances to improve and learn more things. What I learnt though, from staff that attended the meeting, was that our documents that we as a team relied on for judgments on actions were outdated. That we were expected to make less bans and issue less warnings to avoid being a 'police state', and that our philosophy for moderation was gonna be changing. I can't speak for how upper moderation feels about that, but that was the first I had heard of any of that, apart from the philosophy change. At the time I felt frustrated, because why wasn't this communicated to us moderators? I had been a moderator for nearly two months at the time and got told at *an optional meeting* that the documents I used as backing in my actions were outdated. Documents, that as far as I know, are still being used as guidance.
Hello my fellow ex-staff members. Sad we all meet again like this and I hope everyone's been well. :lizard:
For those that don't know who I am, I am Sundae. Some of you may know me from my thread attached to <#1125828713565663303>. I was bought into Customer Support during its restructure in late August. I quickly became a CS Lead to attempt to head the technical support side. I'm primarily a LLM researcher and prompter first, though I enjoy fandom and creative writing. Being a part of Janitor was a dream come true, since it put me closer to what I like doing. I am not good at social things, but if I could help Janitor become the best roleplay platform it could, then I would swallow my pride and try to learn new skills. It is volunteer work, but it won't be, forever... right?
The main thing I went into Janitor with was to try and help CS have a rigid structure. I'm the person who helped write some of the templates that my fellow CS members (hopefully) used to answer tickets. I helped with updating the articles on the help desk. I answered tickets. A lot of them. I tried to lesson the work load from Iroh, who I saw was drowning in it. The amount of work that man did alone is inhumane. The community has no idea how much he advocated for all of you. My duties eventually extended towards helping answer questions in threads because I wanted to rebuild the shattered bridge of trust. Users pinged me in to help communicate because the developers, despite their repeated promises of "we will do better" did not, in fact, do better. Iroh was the only paid Janitor staff member I could trust to be in the trenches with us volunteer staff.
I apologise to those users that may have found me obtuse or strict when I asked for "feedback to be constructive." I was attempting to bring forth concerns in a way that expressed where friction happened so that the developers could improve on the rough patches with the concept. I knew they were not changing their plans and wanted to try and find a balance. Volunteer staff **very frequently** found out about movements by Shep through... *the same time you guys did.*
Volunteer staff carried the brunt of criticism. Volunteer staff carried the weight of relaying user problems to developers. Volunteer staff would be abused for actions we had no part in.
There are days I woke up, saw what happened during the time I slept, and spent the next hour trying to discuss with other staff members how to proceed. I considered pulling in an alternate Discord account so I could have peace and let my brain reset. The stress was a millstone on my psyche, making it harder for me to sleep a full cycle and I started sleeping less to the point that *other staff members noticed*. I watched **multiple staff members grow sick enough to be hospitalised**. One staff member suffered a concussion during a fainting spell. They had never spoken of health issues before and this came shortly after a decision to pitch their work. Hundreds of hours. Gone. My justified rage towards this incident is why I'm ex-staff.
After my departure, I realised the toll the stress took upon me. I had stress hives on my palms. I was sick for the week after. A month later, I was sick for another week. I have never had stress crash my immune system to this point and I'm still recovering. I almost quit LLM research. I left this server. Some people checked in because they thought I was going through a mental health crisis. In a way, I was.
## I do not disagree with anything Mikale said in his post.
Furthermore, Mikale was one of the most pleasant people to work alongside. He worked incredibly hard and without complaint. He is the reason why CS had a coherent structure to enforce site moderation. Because it sure didn't come from Shep.
One ex-staff member had warned me that Janitor turns their staff members over the coals, using them for their worth until there's nothing left. When "they" are done, they turn on you and cast you out.
I'm going to keep mine short (hopefully), I've been a JAI user since 2023, and a Reddit mod since 2024 and became lead more later during the year. I appreciate all of the work all teams have put in and even when things were disorganized we had each other's backs. I do not regret the time that I spend moderating Reddit or some of the content I moderated on site, it has been great to get the experience in doing so but it has had its difficulties. Reddit has consistently been the most understaffed team outside of the initial numbers CS team had. The truth is that moderating the subreddit is incredibly difficult, not just for the environment alone but timezones are also a factor. For a long time EU timezones only hd 1 or 2 mod available, sometimes I was by myself working through hordes during downtime or when changes occurred that caused an uproar in the community.
I have seen users harass and single out a single mod due to mod-based actions, using different ''names'' to be able to talk about them to avoid being nuked, death threats, insults...that's among other problematic content that we see and remove on the sub or getting hate in modmail. Even then, some guidelines are still not clear to us 100% and we have been left in the dark about changes just as much as discord mods have been, because things aren't even communicated to us before it happens. It leaves us dealing with the brunt of user's anger and frustrations, and it's so frustrating that not even mods can get responses when we absolutely need them.
I 100% stand with ex-staff, and that will not change. Regardless of the outcome, I'm happy to have contributed, and I wish all ex-staff and current moderation the best. I genuinely hope that for everyone's sake, especially for current mods, that they will see some real change.
**ALRIGHT LETS DO THIS.** I am about to say some hard fucking truths because I believe in accountability, even if it seems like Janitor does not.
Do not bother people. do not point fingers. This will be my piece, and that is it. I want to *finally* put "mod!void" into her fucking grave and bury her.
I was here for about a year, give or take.
I cannot comment on every little thing, so please bear with me. I have spotty memory due to MH issues and trauma and shit, so some things might be slightly incorrect-- fellow mods please do feel free to jog me if I'm getting some details wrong.
**When I say "staff" I mean PAID staff. Not volunteers. That distinction is important, thank you.**
## Things I was exposed to as a mod and received nothing but words over and encouragement to take a break:
- A literal ISIS beh//ding video on xmas day 2024.
- Extreme TOS porn content that was shocking/graphic (and using *real life pornography*)
- CSAM material (many times. We had this one prolific person who just would not stop. One dev found over FORTY accounts by this person on the site)
- Death threats from users
- hostility from users (I will address some of this in a moment)
- Hostility from above
- hostility from *within*
- an echo chamber that encouraged us to the people we are not
- Publicly told off in a full meeting in front of my peers, in a way that was meant to humiliate me
- Told not to do "paid work" but then expected to make documentation that should have been paid work
## Things I got wrong and why
**- The entire ai models fiascos**
Now, on this, *everyone* is to blame. *Everyone* did something that contributed to it. I have publicly and am doing so again, admitting and owning my part in being unable to have handled it properly. Now, it's a long story and I'm not reopening this wound. It's old but it's a thing I wish to address because these "why"s are intrinsically linked to **core issues in Janitor**.
At one point, *staff* stepped in, to try and find a middle ground. We volunteers were explicity told: stay out of it.
That went wrong, for its own reasons that I am not aware of or able to fully remember. We were then encouraged to just ban those causing issues and yet despite that we tried to follow the 3 strike system where possible to avoid being too harsh (and also a reminder we were at our smallest in team size so we had become frustrated and an echo chamber because we were just so *done* with it all, we were not perfect but there were *reasons* for why we acted that way. *Reason*. Not excuse. I have taken accountability, those who need to do so on that part should do so too. We all contributed to that mess.)
**- Certain bans that I personally "signed off on"**
We were using outdated documents for so long, and so fucking strained, that instead of having time to redo all the documents, I was on the ground, modding 16+ hours a day. I did not get every call right. I own that.
I apologise to any who feel wronged and any I *did* wrong. You don't gotta accept it, I'm not apologising for my conscience, just because it's the right thing to do. I have apologised to some of you already, and I do so again willingly.
I stand on many decisions I made. I stand my ground that I did the best I could to re-establish trust in the discord team, despite constant misinformation, communication failures, and poor decisions that came from the very top down.
## Core problems in the Janitor volunteer spaces
**- There is no support network**
There are staff members trying to get the teams that. But they are hitting brick walls somewhere, and nothing is being done.
We had no support, and still do not.
**- Inconsistent decision making and throwing past volunteers under the bus**
It's so easy to make us take the blame, we cannot go and defend ourselves now we are on the outside.
It has to stop.
**- Echo chamber behaviour that changes you, in the same way as being around toxic friends makes you meaner**
The whole feel is "mean girls". I have been shown proof of people I trusted, valued, and championed for talking mad shit behind my back. You know who you are. It is on you to learn grow from it. I do not and never will forgive you. I championed for you, constantly spoke your praises in upper spaces, and this was what I got. I hope you can improve as people. I hold no ill will, but that is it.
**That said**, this behaviour is *enabled* by the attitude coming from the top, down into the team. I hope, and still do, that these behaviours in the team - behaviours even i once exhibited and was held accountable for by other mods who i was shitty to and tried to then use that learning curve to stamp it out of the team (and failed, unfortunately) - are not their natural personalities, and that once out of the space, they will see things clearer, as I and many others have.
You have no outside support, and thus, the spaces become echo chambers where you feel you cannot trust anyone but those above you. The paid people, the actual *janitor team*. And when their advice only makes things worse, it validates the paranoia and escalates things further. It has to stop.
**- Work is not valued**
Myself and another volunteer member on another team put literal weeks and months into work that was easily dropped and redone or ignored entirely.
(I have been told by staff my work wasn't, yet another recent mod told me that is not the case, my work was called outdated. My work that was done in AUGUST.)
I was told do not do paid work. Yet we were encouraged and felt compelled to make documentation that IS PAID WORK. because we were so fuckign ivnested in improving things.
**- C.O.M.M.U.N.I.C.A.T.I.O.N.**
We had improvements in mod spaces, but when a scrap of food is given to you when you're hugnry, that in itself seems like a meal. It was not enough, and we were silly to think it was.
This drum cannot be beat anymore. The horse is so dead it's fucking ashes after we beat this so hard.
There's probably more I coudl say but I am just so fucking done. That's it. Mod!void is dead. Rest in piss.
I wanted to write something a bit more personal here, separate from the big public post.
I discovered the whole AI chatbot world almost two years ago now and it ended up taking a much bigger place in my life than I ever expected. Like I mentioned in the document, I'm disabled (autistic, with other mental health comorbidities) and at some point I had to accept that I was never going to be able to hold a "normal" job. I live on disability allowance, that's just my reality.
Finding chatbots was honestly a revelation for me. For the first time in a long while, I had something to do during my days. Something that kept my messy brain busy. And when I found Janitor, I wanted to give something back to a community that, in its own way, had helped me a lot.
Before Janitor, I had already been a moderator for about three years in mental health communities. I ran peer-support spaces, did online talks, helped manage safe spaces. I eventually left all of that because it was extremely demanding and I needed a break. So when I thought about applying for moderation again, I hesitated. I knew exactly what it costs mentally, but I also really wanted to help. So I applied thinking "Worst case, they won't take me. That's fine." They did take me.
At the time, everyone started on Discord moderation before choosing where they wanted to work. So I worked on Discord (which I honestly didn't want to, but I did it anyway). Big, crowded spaces are very hard for me, so I mostly stayed in the report-bug channel. I helped users troubleshoot issues, fix things when possible, explain how the site worked. It felt good, I felt useful, and I could do it without putting myself in situations that were too overwhelming.
When I eventually got site permissions, that's where I really wanted to be. I started handling reports, a lot of them. Slowly, I took on more responsibility, then, I became team lead for the site.
Throughout that year, there were rules and decisions I disagreed with. But I need to be honest about the mental space I was in back then: I genuinely believed my value as a person depended on being useful to something. My personal and relational life was a mess, I had nothing else going on. I remember telling other moderators this at the time that if I stopped being a moderator, I'd go back to days where I had nothing to do, no purpose, no usefulness. So I stayed blind longer than I should have. I kept believing things would improve. And I reached a point where I couldn't stay anymore.
I have a very strong trigger around injustice and I couldn't leave without explaining what I had seen. I had received death threats because of moderation decisions and wasn't allowed to explain anything. I watched people be treated in ways I couldn't justify and I couldn't say a word. Leaving quietly and carrying all of that with me didn't feel possible, so I wrote the post.
The goal was never to convince anyone or to turn people against anyone. Honestly, the reason is very selfish: I needed to say it. I needed to stop carrying all of this silently. For me, it's a form of closure, a way of saying "I stayed too long, yes, but I didn't disappear without speaking.ā
I'm doing better mentally now! I don't need this site the way I once did. I don't owe anyone anything anymore.
What I didn't expect at all was the response. I thought maybe a few creators would share it. I never imagined the reach it would have or the support I'd receive, especially from people I don't know, people I moderated, people I even took action against. Some of them messaged me to say that even when I moderated them, they felt respected.
I'm just some guy behind a computer with a complicated life. I'm basically the moderator clichƩ xD And realizing that I actually helped people, that my work mattered to them, that's why I did this in the first place. So for me, that's enough ^^
Even if I'm not a moderator anymore, knowing that what I did meant something to people, that's already my payment. I don't need to stay, I can leave knowing that part of my goal was fulfilled.
Hello to the fellow community, Nyxx here, I used to be in the moderation team in the server of Janitor.AI around 6 months.
I have a lot to say on my occurrence and how I have to disagree with some stuff. first of all the lack of protection with minors, how there was no protection with our teams/CS team and Reddit team during some drama and the lack of communication.
I will bring the most obvious but the protection towards minor in Mikale post he has stated about being banned. Complaining to Shep about it and unbanning them is ridiculous. But because of this we had to change the policy on how we handle minor report. If they only had a number in bio it was to vague and had to decline, age as role? Apparently it's also too vague so we had to refuse the report unless we had to dig the proof that they we're actually a minor. For me this was ridiculous because of this there's more minors roaming on the site and the server too. I am a father myself and witnessing this is extremely hard to watch how this stuff is being handled.
For the protection? We had none, NONE, some of us got death threats of things that we couldn't control at all. We had to take the punches of the community and couldn't defend ourselves. I felt sick to my stomach with some drama. I only stayed to give my support for the team. Make sure they we're alright, even if it costed me my mental health. Sometimes I sacrificed some sleep to support the team until I was passing out when I was working the other day. We no saint I won't lie. I have a big respect to the past staff and the one that are still staying.
I don't have other things to say than this. I already stated what I said in the moderator thread with the other ex moderators.
Thank you for your time to read.
as one of the more tenured members of the moderation team, i wanted to share about my experience. i know i didnāt receive the worst treatment on the team, but i think my perspective is important. many of you will know me - i joined the mod team shortly after jaiās inception, and in the beginning, it was a lot of fun. i am no stranger to large server moderation - prior to jai, i modded for a 500k+ member server.
i enjoyed the newness of what jai was offering and i was excited to work on the mod team. i made a lot of friends and i donāt regret choosing to join when i did. however, as the team developed, i became somewhat disillusioned. moderators were pushed harder and given more tasks, all for literal crumbs. to my memory, i did not receive any official compensation, having given more than two full years of work. i managed the server, i managed social medias, i led customer service, and i was told that i would be compensated āsoon.ā soon never came.
meanwhile, during the course of being a moderator, i was pushed to my limits. i was a full time senior university student, a full time worker, and i had a family to care for. none of that really seemed to matter. it always felt like āif you push yourself more, THEN you will deserve pay.ā i never slept more than 6 hours for over a year. i dedicated all my free time (and some of my not so free time) to jai. i did everything i could to ensure that i would be successful.
i donāt know why i stayed. i started to become very disillusioned with what i was seeing around me. users hated mods for āruiningā the site - calling us names and threatening us - i became paranoid that i would be doxxed or otherwise recognized. i know i was not alone in this, and that others faced worse than me.
at one point, my moderation account was hacked. while this caused strain on the dev team as they worked to undo the hack, i was not informed at all about the status of my personal information. to this day, i do not know if the malicious actor/s were able to access my information that was in my account. i do assume that nothing bad happened, but there was no concern from shep or developers for my safety - only for whether the site was functioning.
this is not to mention the content i bore witness to. i saw CSAM, gore, and bestiality - not just text or depictions, but real, genuine graphic content. at companies like meta and alphabet (facebook/instagram and google) these moderators are compensated with pay and therapy. we received nothing. i will never be able to forget the things i have seen. i still have nightmares and lasting trauma.
i do not feel that the staff at janitor made attempts to protect its volunteers. i do not feel that they have anyoneās interests at heart, other than driving their own profits. i do not feel that the company makes ethical choices. i regret being a part of the team for as long as i was. i imagine part of me saw something in jai that made me think there was hope for resolution. i no longer have hope for the site. i think the siteās days are truthfully numbered.
i apologize that i was blind to all of this, and to anyone that was hurt at janitor ai over the years. i know it isnāt directly my fault, but i feel so responsible for encouraging such bad practice.
i know this is rambled, so iāll end it here. i am grateful to still have friends in low places. much love.
Hello to everyone, it's a shame we meet at such a sad time. Some of you may know me, most of you probably have no idea who I am. I apologize in advance for the length of this message, I'm not too good at summarizing this whole thing.
I'm Fiore and I've been in the moderation for about two years. When I got hired back in the days there was no separate moderation teams and I was one of the mods that basically did a bit of everything until the creation of actual teams. I confirm what the document Mikale posted said, the communication between users and moderators was almost all the time flawed by the fact that we had little to no communication with devs ourselves, and adding to that the secrecy that has been imposed on mods to users didn't help at all. If in some occasions it was needed, in many more we couldn't explain why a certain behavior was punished clearly because of this secrecy.
Around December 2024 I moved permanently to Reddit. Me and other two mods literally did everything we could to make the subreddit a decent place, you don't even know how hard it was to do so. Reddit itself as a platform is a... complicated one because of the average user, and before the revamp it was a jungle on fire. We spent months organizing and improving the situation, and even if it was frustrating as hell it's a memory I keep close to me: it wasn't all bad, we had union and a vision shared mutually, and it was probably the first time I felt like I was doing actually good modwise. In the end, we made it: it wasn't perfect, will never be probably, but the improvement was massive in my humble opinion even if slow at some points. I wanted to make the community better and better, but unfortunately some things didn't go as planned: this isn't only a moderation system fault, to be completely transparent I have to say that the user base isn't one of the easiest to deal with and many times we had to deal with people being inconsiderate of the rules and incapable of cooperate to keep the situation under control, along with getting constantly harassed. The Reddit team was and still is the smallest one, so some situations had been pretty hard to manage to the point of having to make difficult decisions to keep ourselves sane and grounded - not that we (and I) dind't have burnouts. We did, especially elder mods.
Despite everything what was my team was one of the most well oiled ones, the cooperation and discussion inside of it were great. I don't regret anything of what I did for the team, even if sometimes it meant shielding it from the amount of chaos and stress other teams would've encounter. To be completely fair we had it easier than other teams, but at the cost of being left out most of the time: we were - and still are as far as I know - basically self managed and struggled a lot with coordinating info between site, server and the subreddit. This obviously meant that many users were very frustrated on the sub, and here it comes the biggest problem that every single mod of any team of jai had suffered: when we didn't give explanations it was because we either couldn't do so or because we genuinely had none. I lost count of the times I went to ask other teams for clarification or further info, sometimes finding out that some things had been changing in the last couple days without us being noticed or overnight, other times no one had a clue on what was going on. Sometimes I would notice that devs weren't even aware of the ruling or what was happening, I let you imagine how bad it was to moderate, especially as a team lead, in those conditions. This, of course, translated in the subreddit calling us incompetents and lazy, even direct insults and constant harassment. This isn't something that a volunteer should go through. Honestly, not even a paid worker.
Finally, I want to spend a few words about my leave, because I know I could've done better for certain things but I also know that I didn't want to leave like that.
I went on a declared long break for personal reasons that I briefly explained to my team. My mental health was very bad, but I'll spare you the details. Between that and the fact that I started working (in an awful place too) I went on DNI to preserve what little left of my sanity. After three weeks I was met with a DM communicating the removal of my permits as a mod in their full form due to the length of the break and a potential reintegration if I ever came back: I want to make it crystal clear that this wasn't a choice that I condemn, the inactivity is a good reason and I absolutely don't think that it was a bad decision, but what hurt me was the lack of discussion about it and the fact that I wasn't even asked if I planned a longer leave to act consequentially. I would've agreed on it, even possibly leave for good on my own, but I wasn't presented the possibility to do so and with that not even the possibility to say a proper goodbye to the team I put blood and sweat on. Partially it was my fault for not responding to the DM, but at that time I was so deep into a bad situation that I felt like it was just no use and a final decision. This is more of a human flaw part of the discourse, I can be wrong about it and I don't deny so.
I know that some of my former team mods are here: to you, I'm sorry I couldn't say goodbye and that I made you feel like I abandoned you without a word. I went offline for three whole months, I came back yesterday and if I can I will pass a proper goodbye in the next days. If I can't, know that I really appreciated working with all of you.
I will not get back on moderation. I never thought I would've said or even thought this, but I lost all the hope and trust in the JAI project. I was always rooting for it, even when things were bad, I defended devs publicly and tried to keep spirits up as much as I could, I always tried to be as transparent and fair as possible and think both as a moderator and a community member even if I couldn't even explain properly why certain punishments were made because of the secrecy and lack of communication. I can't do this anymore, I feel let down. The recent decisions that were made from devs and Shep in particular, along with words that were spoken, disappointed me so much that all I can think about is "it was nice while it lasted".
As a last, I wish no ill to anyone involved. Ex mods, you already know how sad I am. Current mods, please reflect on your position, and if you decide to stay I hope you get granted excuses and actual changes. Good luck, I still think of you regularly and wish you the best, from junior mods to admins. May the future be kind with you. To the users: please be cooperative and possibly kind to mods. It's incredibly hard to work in those conditions and despite everything they're really trying their best.
Goodbye, and please take care.
Fiore!!
Hi, I'm Doc. Former head mod for the discord server. Main priority being safety for both users and staff.
I crashed the fuck out after learning about Shep's mistreatment towards paid staff. Refusing to moderate under a person that ''forgot'' to pay people and moderated outside of our set protocols.
After two rather back-to-back meetings between headmods, devs, admins and Shep, spelling out what we needed him to do differently. Which he said he would do... For only a week after to do the EXACT same thing again, I was fed the fuck up and left.
Hellohello I'm Xeron, some may of known me as Hikari in 'ye olden days' of JAI or of seen me lurk in the former Tech Support channel(s) once upon a time. I'm a former Moderator, around 6/27/2023 to 8/30/2024, not a long time as compared to others but still a decent bit of time spent with this community ā Retired mostly due to my own life and having to focus on myself rather than a volunteer position that unfortunately sucked the living days out of me !
I won't try to spend a whole chunk yapping, as majority has been said what needed to be said, but, honestly modding for the JAI community both a blessing and a curse. The community, you lot of people, made the place wonderful and memorable. Filled with many stories, funny moments, and overall a place where y'know can collectively share this and that about bots and whatnot. Then of course, there's the.. *other side*.
While yes, it was a *volunteer position*, the amount of stuff that had happened even in my short period is *insane*. From seeing actual gore posted the first week I was hired and us (MIT) not having the right tools to handle it fully, to the way majority of staff were treated both in the first half and towards now till everything just kinda?? *Kaboomed*. Understandably things were gonna hit the fan, and unfortunately I am glad I retried while I did seeing as I was in college at the time and needing to prioritize myself and my own mental health after the small amount of things that went on,,,
Uhm. Honestly not sure what else to put here, apart from sharing my small tidbit, while modding had it's moments that were enjoyable! It all just.. slid downhill ever since.
*He* will never see this more than likely but. This isn't how you run a community much less a site, this isn't how you treat **people** both ""paid"" and unpaid. Volunteers or hired workers nonetheless. You won't go far abusing and using folks !!
Remember to prioritize yourself at the end of the day, y'all. Your own mind and body are what should be sound and radiating with those feel good vibes. š
(this is what I wrote in jai's server, copied as I don't know how else to word it other than that. plus, just in case...)
hi all,
I'm cain! I've been a site mod/CS team member and later senior one for janitor since around the start of july 2025 until half of december 2025. I then switched to the discord moderation team until today, when I stepped down from the role.
anything I can possibly say about this has been addressed countless times, and all I can say is I 100% agree with everything from Mikale's statement, and I am appalled to see how the response from shep's part was handled. I just couldn't support this any longer, and after seeing everyone voice their opinion, I gained courage and wanted to do the same.
I'll try to not repeat the things that have been said already too much as we all agree they are true, but one thing that never felt right to me was how us site mods/CS members were eventually forced to go anonymous for several reasons, including the sheer amount of harassment we were receiving on a daily basis for modding site. instead of openly defending us and fighting for our safety by at least punishing people who sent us the worst threats, their plan of action was to simply hide us from the world and honestly? just to then make us take it, but quietly, saying it was for our sake. the only support we had was our own team members, all equally burnt out and tired, because we were not allowed to tell anyone of our situation. I felt trapped in that sort of environment, and definitely not cared for, despite the INSANE amount of work I put. we ALL put. unpaid.
I felt sad for everyone else, who seemed to agree to the change, but I also often felt like they didn't truly enjoy this work anymore. I quit the CS team after that whole ordeal, and decided to focus on being part of the discord team as I felt like all my efforts were just useless on the site, but still wished to help somehow. I didn't want to have to hide my identity just because they didn't want to handle moderation bashing properly. I wanted to be seen and feel safe when being in janitor's spaces while being a volunteer worker for it at the same time. which is really not a lot to ask...it shouldn't be.
unfortunately, this entire thing happening ruined most of the hopes I had left. we, both moderators of any kind and users, were promised so many things, and almost none of them have ever been delivered despite MANY complaints and requests to. from a moderation point of view, a couple popular requests were things such as:
- better moderation tools; this one has been asked by basically every moderator on site ever, past and present, and it has been postponed to no end. Iroh made an extension for us moderators that improved the process of handling and logging things greatly, yes, but it still wasn't *improved site tools* like we've requested time and time again from devs. we heard they were working on it but it didn't really come, at least not during my time there.
- making temporary bans hide profiles from view (which they don't. the user is just locked out of the account but anyone else can access it); minors? yeah, we banned them a few years depending on how old they are, but the profile stays open to everyone regardless unless we ban it fully. and even then, a regular ban still lets people use the site, with the exception of commenting and making bots.
not to mention the lack of clear guidelines, even internally, that we so desperately needed.
these are, in my opinion, all very important requests that were often made because there was a serious need for them, but were for some reason never actually listened to and implemented (at least during my time there, which is until fairly recently...).
I am grateful to this platform for making me meet many people I consider friends and even close friends. that is all I am grateful for right now, because everything else is simply unacceptable.
I don't hate anyone. I don't hate Janitor. But the dread I feel in my chest knowing that something I worked so hard to make better is going down this path.
Sorry, I'm a bit more emotional with this :[ It's hard to separate my feelings from JanitorAI when I loved it so much.
More important points - I got ignored when I found what was possibly real child pornogprahy, NO communication, and a hostile environment.
i am posting this as a final goodbye to the entire community and as a means to let go of whatever anxiety or sadness i still have. š©·
as a junior mod on the server, admittedly i was very aggressive. as well as nervous and overbearing. looking back i wish i had more of an open mind. however, i do not agree with and didnāt agree with, at the time, the way the server was run.
i then became a site mod part time as well as server mod. i witnessed and saw some triggering stuff. as well as, and i am seriously saying this, HEAVY TW ||a bot with an abortion kink. yes, you heard that right||. i wonāt go into specifics. but it was the first ever bot that made me physically sick. it was not the last.
bots like these on the site are not treated the same. horrific kinks, illegal actions and behavior, and hate groups are not treated the same. i posted an anonymous note before leaving the official discord, and i will confirm it was me. kkk and nazi bots are treated differently when they are simply this; horrific hate groups. they should each get similar treatment.
shep has unbanned members of the site **and** server that have given proof of their age, but we as discord mods are disallowed to take it, even in dire situations.
shep goes by his own rules. which to an extent is fine and dandy, but the extent he does it, is not.
i spent hours on the information desk along with many other talented discord moderators (you know who you are) and the international team who took the time to go over EVERYTHING i wrote and translate everything.
i recreated the previous roles in the server to make them more fun, introduced a more interactive and easier way to level up with silly names. and just put so much heart into the server that it truly needed.
before being admin, however, i spent tireless nights on the server. **overnighters**. i am a full time employee and college student. my academic career was in jeopardy plenty times, but because i passed, i threw my thumbs up and said the tears were not in vain.
thatās not to say i didnāt love my job. i did. but those overnighters couldāve been avoided entirely if shep **just communicated**. even in the end, we were given more promises, more attempts at things that were coming. i was livid.
do not expect any good changes to come to this site anytime soon. moderation wise, yes. itāll likely get better. but otherwise? nah, donāt hold ur breath.
i loved my team. so so much. it hurts me so much to leave them now. but after two years and no real changes, i canāt be asked to stay any longer. especially after sheps horrific statements.
iāll not return to the community. i will continue to chat on the site for some time, but that is all. frankly, i need to avoid ai as much as possible.
i love u all so much. forgive me for not striving and doing more. i just wanted you all to feel comfortable and safe in the server as much as i could.
- jezelle
Hello everyone, my name is crya and former discord mod on JAI
-# English is not my first language so I'm sorry for weird grammar, I'm also not good at summarizing things so please bear with me
I've told this many times before within the team that the main reason I joined is because of Mikale. He was the mod that was patient enough to help me through my issues back when I was a member (tech-support), even with my broken English, he was making sure my issues were solved. And that's what inspired me to join because I want to *help* like he helped me with my issues.
When I was still a user too, I also noticed how the communication between mods are off. Because at some thread a mod might reply A then on other thread with same issue, a mod might reply with B. And this confused me a lot and makes me wonder a lot with how teamwork work in the team.
When I got in, I was thrilled because I'm able to be part of the team I admired and help. I did also noticed how communication between devs is completely strained even behind the scene, even much worse than I've seen when I was a user. But nonetheless I still want to help in a way, because my main focus was the team and community, to ease anyone's work.
We were promised *so* many things, and it looked very promising, the hope coming from each announcement saying they'll communicate better, inform the team, update, meetings, and so on. But each time, it's just empty words and promises, and I stopped believing for a long time because we *begged* for communication, to no futile.
What Mikale said on the post is true, in a way because back then discord mods can still see CS channel (and I often lurk because I want to be part of CS team, it's my way of learning), I've witnessed changes in the rules, how weird it was, how unacceptable most are. But I still somewhat think "there must've been a *good* reason". But there's none, none of it is acceptable, this includes letting minors in site while they only got perma ban so they can't access their acc until they're legal age to appeal, leaving their profile with age there for everyone to see.
Me, along with other MITs (juniors at that time) reported a **lot** of rulebreaking TOS bots, and I remember few that I specifically reported were banned, yet somewhat it's back again on the site?
Just a TW of mine: ||I was less than 7 years old when stuff was done to me by my own uncle.|| so when Mikale made that post, I was dumbfounded by how it is allowed until it's "very bad"?? Even now I'm still feeling blank, I just can't fathom how someone even let such disgusting things to exist in the site. I want to say, at this point I'm not even surprised anymore with how often Shep overturned rules to fit his own agenda "just because", yet he refuses to see it from mods perspective that WE are the one who had to handle the backlash, WE are the one who had to endure the constant harassment, the threats, the doxxing, and dealing with users using us as punching bag nonstop. And he refuses to take accountability or responsibility for his own actions, expecting his team to deal with everything while he just "shut down."
It is disgustingly exhausting, emotionally, mentally, and physically. Yet he doesn't seem to appreciate, grateful, or even be thankful of the hard work his team put into the community and the site
I honestly left the team due to irl work and how busy I will get to the point I will be inactive most of the time. But seeing the current issue and how it is "addressed", I don't think I'll be back anytime soon, or at all maybe. I don't condone such behavior when the situation is this bad.
I respect every single volunteer in the team because I can see the amount of dedication, effort, time, and energy everyone puts into making the community a fun place.
Just a friendly reminder to users to please be kind to mods, because they still have to follow the rules where they can't say things they want, and they're doing their best with everything.
Hello, Iām Aeri or Yuna for those who may not know my name change. For those who may not know me, I was a former server admin on the server.
Iāve been in the team for almost a year, I became a MIT in 04/11/2025. Iāve watched countless of moderators higher ranking of me continuously beg Shep for communication before rolling out features to the users. We were always promised that theyād let us know beforehand but never did, we always got the information the same time as users and never got to properly understand the details which prevented us from helping users out with their issues.
During my time as a MIT, I have received numerous backlash and harassment from users. Nobody took my role seriously as I was āin trainingā, due to this, my anxiety has worsened significantly and often pull back until a higher moderator steps in. I was always grateful to those higher moderators for stepping in to help. Itās just shitty to experience when all you wanna do is help the community. However, Iām glad they changed the name for it as it did reduce the number of users mocking MITS (now known as Juniors).
When I was promoted to moderator, there was an announcement that any moderators who have been moderating for 2 months will he promised nitro. That never happened, it was just for face to make it seem like our work was appreciated when there was no updates about it. A paid staff member had also said they would be privately reaching out to every volunteer staff to see their current standing, I was never reached out to. To the others he did reach out to have said they were left to wait for the conversation that never happened.
I had received more backlash as a moderator and even tw: ||death threats, more harassment and even threatened to doxx me|| sent to my dms. I was severely anxious and my mental health declined more, I spent nights crying myself to sleep because of it. I wanted to help the community but was only met with criticism. I spent many nights staying awake to manage hordes, to the point that moderators from other teams told me to get some sleep as I have been awake for several hours. It wasnāt until a moderator in another timezone was up that I then went to sleep, at least knowing someone will be able to keep an eye on the community.
I have seen many disturbing content just modding the server alone, many of which had triggered an anxiety attack. Regardless I still moderated as much as I could, even in public or out with my family I would moderate even if the content was horrible. Many of the content Iāve seen has made me desensitized as Iāve seen it repeatedly. As we were promoted, we were promised that we would be able to choose the teams that weād like to go into, whether it be staying with the Discord team, site team, ticket team, etc. That never happened, none of us were able to move away from the Discord team and this was promised when the team had actually split away from being just Discord moderators.
For every announcement he had made without telling the moderation team, we were left to deal with the mob of angry users. Fortunately the only thing we were able to prepare for was the UK block as this was something made aware to us prior to its announcement. Other than that, not much communication happened. We have several moderators coming to ask Shep different bugs and such, not a single response from him or the devs. After Leonās departure, the communication deteriorated even more as we barely got any details about newer features.
Even with other moderators demotions, sometimes they never even bother telling you who left or why they were even dropped from the team. Many were left to wonder about their departure, you genuinely have to speculate their removal unless you physically ask them. There were several people where I didnāt even know they were removed from the team as there was no prior announcement.
As a moderator, you were just expected to deal with the backlash. We were not protected whatsoever, regardless of your ranking you take the hit. Many of us would beg to be timed out so that we can focus on our break. Even if most of us were on our break, weād be pinged in to deal with hordes. Honestly, there isnāt really a time you could take a break especially with how small the moderation team is. Many of us had to take a step back or even take days off because of how emotionally and mentally draining it is. Yes, we donāt have to be on the team but we chose to knowing it would help the community better.
After some time I was promoted to a senior mod on 09/25/2025, more work was added onto my plate but I was ready for it if it meant helping the community. Iāve seen many disturbing appeals as well with my promotion, users wishing tw: ||rape and sexual assault|| on us. There was an issue where a group of people were pretending to be ai models causing havoc and chaos on the server. The admin-senior team was told to ban them as theyāre disruptive, I made an announcement regarding it and was met by criticism by none other than Shep who had no prior knowledge to what happens in the server moderation spaces.
I was told by Shep, āI donāt think itās a big dealā, āguys donāt ban fun stuff happening in discord all this rly cracked me up canāt we just mod around it?ā and that infuriated me. Many users complained, made tickets and even dmād moderation staff because of that. Of course he never took it seriously and was telling us to not blanket ban those users as they have personally dmād him to complain. He also said that he doesnāt want words he uses to be banned. I went to bed pissed off with his response which was then spoken about in a different chat where other admins/seniors explained why it was bad and even had a staff member involved. The ban was later reversed due to Shep.
I was an admin for exactly two weeks, promoted on 01/04/2026, I loved the team and dedicated my time creating documents and resources for Junior moderators to use. Of course that was short lived because of this situation, I am forever grateful for the time I spent with the team. I love the volunteer staff who had helped me through everything.
I had expressed my frustrations and asked for an answer from Shep and not the paid staff. Of course, I was still answered by the staff despite me expressing that I do not wanna hear from them but from Shep himself. I was furious and disheartened to read that Shep would rather pay Filipinos as they cost less, my culture is not some cheap labour for your work. That completely went unanswered and Shep still had the audacity to ask about bugs on the site after hours of the situation being aired out. I had told Shep that users do not care about the state of the site as theyāre more focused on the document, telling him that he should take his time to think about the issue and issue out an apology and actual explanation. Again, that went unanswered which shows that he does not care as he proceeded to call the whole thing āsillyā.
Several moderators had called him out for this, at that point, I was done. He didnāt take it seriously at all, he doesnāt care. I had ended up telling Hugo who was in the Moderation situation thread that users did not wanna hear from him but from Shep himself. To which he shortly sent a message out saying heād be logging off. Initially I wanted to help the juniors out and that was the reason I stayed as I lost all trust or hope for the supposed owner of the site. Ultimately I cannot force myself to continue being on the team because it sickens me how heās continuing to treat the issue as a joke.
To be completely honest, I have been wanting to step down for a while due to my ever growing anxiety. However, I didnāt and stayed for the ones I cared about and because I wanted to continue helping the community. Now Iām fully taking a step back from moderating and just focus on my IRL stuff and have permanently stepped down from my position.
If you think anything is gonna change, it likely isnāt. Communication has always been a problem since before I came into the mod team, if it wasnāt fixed before, why would it be fixed now? Maybe when he gets actual employees heād start acting right but whoās to say when he couldnāt treat his previous staff correctly. Even current moderators are still left to wonder if Shep would even address most of the issues or fix the moderation tools.
Anonymous message from a mod who had been around a *long* time.
I was a mod for a long time. Me being part of this wasn't planned but i didn't refused the unexpected offer. I already had a great relationship with some of the mods as i did a lot of helping around as a member, this also made me a bit easier to learn the rules. My role mostly was being part of the server moderation, i haven't touched the site because i just didn't had time for it, i only had capacity to moderate discord. I also helped around new mods, giving them advices or reminding them how the rules work, helping and supporting them. I also functioned as an observer on the team to make sure not only members but mods follow the rules as well. On my time modding here i received a lot of negative things: harassment, bullying, threatening rape threads, scat porn in my dms, imagery of self harm, irl gore, irl porn
. I've seen content that you can only see if you look up to some shady sites. Sometimes after i took care of something i had to do a shorter break because unfortunately I'm not a mentally strong type of a person, and multiple times it happened that i had to take a longer break, disconnecting from the team entirely. But i always came back because how supportive the team was, they protected me when i was being attacked. And even though i never received any money for this, i haven't felt any bitterness about it because the mod community was the payment for me. I remember I've chosen my new phone based on "can i moderate better with this", I've chosen my headset based on "can i echo less on my mic in voice chat meetings". My mindset was around this place, sometimes i was in trouble for it at my work but i didn't cared, because being a part of this, not feeling alone like before was more important to me.
Even before things went downhill for me, I've seen issues with how the devs communicate with us. Sometimes an important message was dropped in the middle of chatting at mod channels, without any announcement or pinging the whole staff so everybody knows about it. Lot's of times happened when we hand to clean up after what Shep did, for example we tried to moderate bad people and Shep came in and joked around with them, forcing us to not continue the moderation that should have been done. Or Shep added something to the server that was against the server rules and we had to deal with the consequences. I always had this feeling of Shep not taking this whole thing as seriously as he should, or at least being serious when it's really demanded. I remember when Shep publicly called me out for banning people because they joked about being a minor, when we can't risk figuring out when someone say something like "I'm 11 haha" that is it a joke or not, we have to act immediately. And then i had to stress around and ask other mods about now what to do. I remember when i was at work, and i saw mods crying over the constant threads they received because Shep suddenly announced an important change at the time when most of us wasn't prepared or even available and lots of members was pissed off at us. I remember trying to convince some mods in dms that no, you should not stay up all night because of a horde, you should not risk your mental health or study for something you're not even payed for, you always should prioritize your mental health first. And when we got the "things will get better" promise, even when stuff improved, later it's all turned down to shit again, or just a promise never happened. And it angered me that this pushed away good mods from the team who i was close to.
Though lots of things were not cool when it comes to the devs, what made me the final push off the cliff was actually because of some mods, and myself. Because when major changes happened around the platform I wasn't able to catch up. Which was by the way the devs fault as all of it happened suddenly without any proper meeting or at least an announcement. The goal was to improve the server, making it more modern and entertaining. And i wasn't able to do it. I felt like i worth less and less because i wasn't able to make long documents, giving amazing ideas because of my limitations. I felt more like I'm not worth for my title, my position. This turned me slowly into a deeply depressed state, and it didn't helped that when i tried to being a part of certain cases or asking for help, sometimes i was treated like i wasn't even there, and everybody else focused on other cases but not mine. But i didn't wanted to quit, i wanted to keep pushing it forward. Unfortunately because of a panic attack i was forced to leave the team again out of nowhere, which i know it's not professional but at that time i felt like i have no other choice. Back then when something like this happened i came back after a couple of weeks. But because other things was more important for the mods, me wanting to go back was a false attempt, my dm message was unanswered, ruining my long days off that i only had once per year, and instead of feeling joy i felt constant stress. This pushed me out permanently, i just didn't wanted being a part of this anymore. I felt like I'm causing more harm to myself if i stay there.
But now i don't feel any bitterness anymore, as i know for a fact i would leave the team later on anyway. If not for the actual reason, then because of more and more people who i "grew up with" left the team, and if not for that then for the document Mikale made. I felt multiple layers of disgust when i saw it, how badly things got turned out. I have zero tolerance for multiple of it's content and it immediately would have push me out from the team if i was still there. And I'm glad I'm not there because handling the fact that i was being a part of this would have been much more soul crushing, at least now I'm in a safe distance and still can give support to those who needs it. And actually I'm thankful for how some mods treated me so i left around the best time i could. For some reason my mind mostly only documented the positive memories which is a rare thing, the time when Kim was in charge, it fills my soul with great nostalgia. But i haven't left with empty hands. I have people who i can still hang around with, playing with them, sharing a part of myself to them. So i still don't feel alone, even if I'm not a j.ai mod. And no fucking way i going to be one ever again.
This is not my story, and this ex-mod would like to remain anonymous.
Hello!!! Some of you may know who I am by the way I type and the things I will say, but I didn't wish this server to go quiet without me speaking. Janitor has been part of my life since day 01. I was there when it launched in 2023, and until now, I stayed close to the community and have met so much wonderful people. If there is something I have never been afraid of is speaking my mind out loud, and yes... I can confirm with a long list of mods that plenty of our requests were ignored.
I was for the most part a Discord moderator, I agree I escalated pretty quickly, but contrary to popular belief, I earned for the job I did. I spent a lot of time helping around, translating, creating guides, threads... pushing a structure that I was very passionate in doing. I do not have any complains about the Discord, Site, nor Reddit *teams*, why? well because we were all part of the same bunch. We were volunteers in a project we adored and had faith in, and like they say, faith is the thing that dies last. The teams were wonderful, full of people with ideas, creativity and a genuine passion to make this community better. To me, it didn't matter if you didn't like this person, if you thought they were "mean or passive aggressive", or "too childish or too much" - we worked, and we worked well...
But what was the issue? It was just *us*. We were left alone constantly, with no care for us aside from two official Staff members who tried their best to help us, but had to stretch thin with their other responsibilities. Three teams running low on morale, time, resources and *answers* that the users were requesting, was doomed to fall.
* Regarding the AnonSolo situation, the three teams received threats, hateful comments, cruel commentary... and Development and Shep did *nothing* to help us. Many times I ignored DMs of people wishing me death, calling me slurs, which at the end of the day - I can stomach, others can't. Shep barely did anything to face this.
* The teams had to back each other, we had no help whatsoever, and it was insanely unfair how we had to back each other constantly. Things like "Hey! Devs/Shep did this, we might get a horde of very angry people, be prepared!" - why should *we* always be the one handling the issues? being the bubble that protects Shep in his little privileged bubble of no consequences? many times I wished to quit, and the ones who can tell who I am by now, *know* how many times I was stressed and fed up, and got people begging me to take a break... but this is what this place did to you. Built you a dependency that you craved more and more, guilt tripping you into just giving more and more, because you can't - you don't want to leave people alone... when it was never *our job*.
* I was a very short helper for Site, and I did very little because time/effort. It was *hard* to learn the rules, guidelines, actions... because yes, they were goddamn vague. They had nothing concrete, I had to ask around and reread the guides over and over and even then, I was scared of doing something wrong and get scolded. Yes, everything you read is true: vague, favoritism, lack of fundamental and legal base, no consideration, no accountability... it was all treated as a joke, and I decided to stay because leaving people I cared for felt like leaving a little piece of my heart.
* I never expected us to be paid, it was volunteering, but I expressed to my close mod friends that at least I hoped the CS team was later on considered to be full time/PAID workers, with hours respected and a salary... well, we all know how that ended. Free labor it's still labor. I wish I could beat that line into someone's head, because time, effort and energy deserves remuneration, no matter what.
* I - like many others- expected a change, we were fed promises, yes, many, many times... but the only way I could describe how Janitor was to volunteer staff, is a toxic relationship. You *know* you should leave for your own good, but you *can't* leave because living without it feels like a curse. That's how bad it is for both users and creators to some extent.
* The platform was so disgustingly cruel and unfair to creators. Yes, there was favoritism! I will never stop screaming that. I saw people in channels be *verified* just because they asked Shep, not because they had good quality bots, or had dedication, or even had creativity. Just for asking. I saw how *that* alone discouraged a lot of creators who decided to leave for good. That is truly the rotten core of how Corporate sees us. Creators are the solid base of what Janitor is, and Shep never seemed to show a proper respect for them, or at least from what I saw since I joined.
* All I can say is to keep fighting; and I know it is exhausting, but changes were never made by saying "please" and "thank you". Be angry, demand, yell, break the windows and burn it all. That's how you get all eyes on you. That's how you get a change. Make them- make him have no other choice. In my opinion, we don't owe them nothing, they owe us their existence.
Please continue creating, continue writing, continue shining ā
Hewo Hewo. Its a me, Tamal u.u
I am a former Discord, Site and International Team moderator, from the time where moderators pretty much learned a bit of everything to help around. As many fellow ex-mods shared, early 2024 was still a time to get things settled down, moderation actions, how to proceed, documentation, guides to help us moderate, that sort of stuff. Communication might've not been the best, but we were just starting out (from mid 2023 to early 2024 we were a really small team) so in a way I see it justifiable. But having dragged that lack of communication up until today... After countless intents of trying to get the devs to communicate to us, to hear our mod voices, US, MODS! All failed.
The segregation of the team into the different Reddit, Discord, Costumer Support, Site Teams, broke what little communication we had left between our teams, being even harder for us to follow on the changes made to the policy and guidelines applied to the site. This left us server mods to our own devices to deal with people that were not happy with something getting deleted off the site (we justified it always as "If it was deleted, there was a reason for it") or someone supposedly banned returning and uploading content as if nothing happened. For whatever reason, there were people coming to the server to complain about something that had happened. We received threats, I had to jump in to defend other mods, redirect people, ask question, get the same answers, bring harsher measures. All to try and bring peace to the community.
The uncertainty to deal with certain topics due to lack of information took us to be vague whether we knew or not if a specific issue, bug or topic was known. We didn't know, and asking our superiors, they also didn't know most of the time. This greatly affected my ability to moderate the server and affected my self-esteem after a year of feeling I was doing a good job. It felt as if I was given the bare minimum to properly mod.
How could I answer someone's question if I myself did not know what was going on? When there were issues about changes in the policy without us being notified (a part of one of the clauses of the policy had been missing after a revamp NO ONE notified us about it and who was in charge of it forgot to add it before finishing), I was completely lost and unsure how I should manage myself moderating.
All of this also affected the International Team, already at the odds from how small it was. We were a very small group within the Discord server moderation team, and we needed to deal with many people who spoke different languages. We were to bring them together, give them visibility because they're also part of this community. Part of JanitorAI.
As the rest of the ex-mods have explained, shared and remarked, the issues with communication were not privy to this last period. It was an issue we had been swimming against for quite a good while it just turned to be exhausting. International Team was not an exception to this issue.
As time progressed, JanitorAI became more popular, the workload triplicated, but it allowed us to grow even more. French, Indonesia and Russian speakers got their own channels, welcoming people and allowing them to have a place of their own. This also made lots of us burn out quickly. Whenever shep rolled out a new feature, tweaked the site or LLM without us knowing (like the time he placed a filter to catch certain words against ToS and the community blew up over it, we mods only got to know of it because people were upset).
Through all of those down times, bugs, upset hordes of people, we had to stay up late, clarify things I was unsure about and just as confused as users were, handling hordes, helping other mods deal with upset people, it was stressing and it affected all of us. Int moderators had to handle an entire channel by themselves and help around others whenever people missed (translators were our best and worst enemies).
If my channel was behaving for a while, I would jump to another language I barely knew to help handle people. And I had to be prepared each time I woke up to find even more upset people over a change that happened while I was sleeping. I missed meals and sleep trying to moderate the server because at a time, I was the only one there to moderate hispanohablantes. This caused even more people to burn out and some had to leave bc irl stuff, others had to take on that workload, burning out the remaining int mods even quicker.
Each new wave of MITs/Juniors only brought us 2-3 people to train, 2-3 people that were going to go to a specific language channel to moderate it. This compared to the English general moderation team that got way more people to train. If we got 3 people on a single language channel, it was already enough for all of us to breathe, focusing ourselves to help in other stuff around the Int Team or the English mod team (those who knew English).
Rowan and Alexys had a lot of ideas to make the International community grow and make them be more comfortable on the site, knowing a lot of our people had poor comprehension of English or straight out were not able to understand the language. Unfortunately, most of those ideas and projects got forgotten. All the translations on official documents for the site, policies, terms of service, guidelines, announcements, all of which carried our love and dedication for the diversity of our community, got forgotten and abandoned.
There wasn't even an announcement that our resources were no longer needed. International Team was slowly forgotten. New MITs/juniors were not enough to fill in the places of people that left because of their own well-being. At some point, we had a crisis on people over the International channels. At some point, Brazil channel had 1 person moderating it, there were none for French, Indonesia and Russian, and even they had to lock Russian channel because there was no one to moderate.
I am deeply disappointed that the International channels ended up being labelled as "non heavy use" channels and not even mentioned in the general announcement of chats being locked, when they were active almost all the time and had become a place to foster many people that made that place their home. It was so disrespectful they got an appropriate message hours after being locked.
Regarding Shep unbanning minors and problematic users who broke rules (and very awful shit), I fell victim to one of our mod actions being reversed by shep. I was flabbergasted at how easy it was for someone to message shep deny ANY wrongdoing they had been found with and return posting on the site like nothing changed.
Like, huh? This was so demoralising and infuriating to know you had spent hours if not days looking at horrible content, receiving evidence of awful people or minors making themselves known on the site and have it all reversed because they went crying to shep's dms, got a slight pat on the back and their account reinstated. Even after we had had conversations with shep to leave moderation actions alone and to NOT ACCEPT dms from users to bring them back because they were "sowwy" and did not know better.
As you can all tell. This behaviour presented itself over and over and over again to count it as a "silly funny mistake" from shep. Its been 3 years of having to deal with this sort of behaviour. And the comments he has done passing it as "funny", outright disgusting.