Fen Spinner
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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 non-members. It was a social space with little to no rules until September 11th, events leading on for months changed the server's direction. Numerous prior disagreements had taken place between Fen Spinners and the administration of The Workshop, criticizing The Workshop for heavy-handed moderation, ignoring community input and being selective about rules. All complaints were dismissed and critics were labelled negatively.
Split from The Workshop
On September 11th 2020, Fen Spinner members decided to make the largest voice call on The Workshop, peaking at 30 simultaneous users. Moderators were invited to join, but declined. The '#voice-text' channel had a high activity of posts, some pen spinning related and some not. There was no prior precedent for what was allowed in the channel; memes and unrelated content appeared before between users, but not at the same rate.
The administrator (now retired) Coffeelucky demanded people leave the channel and into a private group call. This was ridiculed as the group call limit is 10 users, less than half the people present. Then the demand was changed to making and moving everyone to a new server, and the demands were ignored. Complaints about moderation were raised, particularly criticizing how enforcement targeted 'undesirables' rather than maintaining order. An offensive September 11 attacks meme depicting Fen Spinner about to fly into The Workshop was posted.
The call continued until the early hours of the 12th, with no punishments appearing until after the voice channel was vacant. 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. Notably V 0 1 D was banned for 7 days and Zxntle muted for 14 days. The reasons for the punishments took a further 2 weeks to ascertain, with users decrying the punishments and criticizing the administration on the reasons, which did not begin to be explained until V 0 1 D was unbanned a week later.
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 reason for the ban has never been given. In the process the moderator abc quit The Workshop, with the administration then falsely alleging that he had been harassed out, having received no abuse but having given abuse out to other users. 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, 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 2020[1], 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[2]. 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[3] to the international community as the SpinFest submission, defying those who claimed a troll CV would be submitted to SpinFest. Edited by V 0 1 D, it featured prolific use of 3D graphics and special effects, and featured 11 spinners from the community.