Fen Spinner

Fen Spinner is an English-speaking pen spinning community created on July 30th, 2020 by V 0 1 D. After frequent disagreements with staff from The Workshop leading up to September that year, Fen Spinner became public and the membership greatly increased, claiming to be a new community separate from those typically associated with UPSB. The community hub is primarily a public Discord server with a secondary website, Fen Spinner Wiki. The community participated in SpinFest 2021.

History

Fen Spinner was originally created on the 30th of July, 2020 to serve as a hangout for several members of the private team OPSD to interact with other spinners who were not members of the team, outside of the major public Discord servers. It served as a social space with little to no rules until September 11th, when several events leading on for the previous months led to a change in direction for the server. Prior to September numerous disagreements had taken place between Fen Spinner members and the administration team of The Workshop, with The Workshop being criticized for having little justification for their heavy-handed approach to managing the community, including being selective about when and how rules were applied, and ignoring the input of its membership. The reply from the moderation team of The Workshop was to call critics children and dismiss all complaints.

Great Fen Rebellion

On September 11th, Fen Spinner members joined into a voice call on The Workshop and were greeted by a large number of spinners, leading to the decision to attempt to get as many spinners into the voice channel as possible. The result was a peak of 30 simultaneous users turning up to see what was going on, talking in both the voice channel, streaming spinning and modding, and talking in the text chat channel. Moderators of The Workshop were invited to also join the voice channel, but the request was ignored. The text channel for voice in The Workshop had been scrolling at a rate not seen in the server before, with messages and images posted, some pen spinning related and some not. There was no previous precedent for what could or could not be posted in the text channel, as memes and unrelated content had been posted many times before between users, just not at the volume present that day.

The administrator (later retired from the role as of 2021) Coffeelucky turned up and began demanding that people leave the channel and move everyone into a private group call. This was met with surprise and ridicule as the limits for group calls is 10 users, less than half of the people present in the voice channel. To make matters worse the demand was changed to making a new server and moving all 30 people to it instead, at which point a rebellion kicked off in which the users of the voice channel started ignoring the administrator and carrying on with what they were doing. The tone shifted to complaints about moderation, particularly criticizing how rules were enforced against people the administration did not like rather than being used to maintain order. An offensive meme was posted of the 2001 September 11 attacks depicting Fen Spinner about to fly into The Workshop while UPSB was on fire next to it.

The call continued from mid-day on Friday all the way into the early morning of Saturday, with no punishments appearing until after the voice channel was emptied. The day after it was discovered that The Workshop had given out punishments during the night, omitting reasons and instead providing the generic "Spam" label to bans, mutes and warnings being dished out to the users of the channel. Notably V 0 1 D was banned for 7 days and Zxntle muted for 2 weeks. The reasons for the punishments took a further 2 weeks to ascertain, with users decrying the punishments and challenging the administration on the reasons, which did not begin to be explained until V 0 1 D was unbanned a week later, and criticized the administration for being heavy handed on matters that were never punished in the past.

After much arguing and additional punishments being given out in the process, it was eventually revealed that Zxntle had been muted for saying "Bruh" in reply to Coffeelucky and that V 0 1 D had been warned (but not banned) for the offensive meme being posted. The exact reason for the ban has never been provided. In the process the moderator abc quit The Workshop, with the administration then falsely alleging that he had been harassed out, but being unable to provide any examples of him receiving abuse, but with counterexamples being shown that he had given out abuse himself. Members DanyOn and Blizzardous left the server in protest of the administration, and moderator DarkT falsely claimed Blizzardous broke rules himself and was not a valuable member of the community. Blizzardous had a clean record and had initially been offered the post of moderator instead of abc for his role in helping most new spinners, but had declined the position.

With nothing resolved on The Workshop's end, and baseless claims of harassment being made by the administration, a significant chunk of the active English-speaking community moved to Fen Spinner and other servers for socialization.

SpinFest 2021

In November 2021, sign-ups for SpinFest 2021 took place, with a number of positions available for communities to enter. Fen Spinner was submitted to the draft and, after the mistake of India's community applying late, managed to make it into the lineup. Original plans for a parody video as the first major release from the Fen Spinner community were quickly scrapped, with ambitious plans being drawn for a genuine show of the community's ability. On April 12th 2021, after months of editing and filming, "Fen Spinner 1st" was released to the international community as the SpinFest submission, surprising those who had initially thought that only a troll CV would be submitted to SpinFest, and laying up plans to potentially give the first community ban from international events to Fen Spinner. Edited by V 0 1 D, it featured prolific use of 3D graphics and special effects, and featured 11 spinners from the community.