This is pretty obscure drama, and actually fairly mild, but I'm still excited to share it, so bear with me.

Background: Robin, which was this year's reddit April Fools' experiment, was a series of ever-growing chatrooms. You'd start in a chatroom with two people, and if the majority vote "grow," you'd merge with another chatroom of two people, and so on. You'd always merge with a chatroom at the same "tier." One of the cool things about this experiment is that people were able to develop pretty sophisticated scripts that would filter out spam, autovote, let you have chat channels, upload statistics to a robin tracker, etc. One of the more sophisticated scripts was called Parrot.

The experiment was supposed to end on April 8, but on April 7, we finally got to a Tier 17 chatroom (65,536 Tier 1's!), and the excitement of merging two T16 chatrooms with thousands of shitposters caused problems with reddit's servers, so they had to shut the whole thing down a day early. Anyway, people were sort of mad and disappointed, but not enough to cause any drama unfortunately. Much tamer than last year's April Fools experiment.

In any case, the reward for our patience was the creation of a private subreddit /r/ccKufiPrFaShleWoli0 (that was the name of the T17 chatroom), and only those in the T17 chatroom were invited.

When reddit released the source code for robin, naturally there was a desire to make a clone. One of the clones is called raven (website). Here's the old repository. As you can see, it's closed now, with references to "phishing," which is the source of drama. Here's the new one.

DRAMA:

Last night, the lead developer of Parrot, and one of the mods of /r/ccKufiPrFaShleWoli0, user dashed posted this thread (snapshot) and even made it a sticky. He warns us that joinrob.in could "potentially" be a phishing scam, since it asks for registration information but doesn't currently do anything yet. User xereeto, one of the developers of raven, gets in the fray and accuses dashed of being disingenuous and "melodramatic," and explains they didn't intend joinrob.in to be publically accessible.

Some choice quotes from him:

YOU. ARE. PART. OF. THE. DEV. TEAM. Why the hell are you publically posting this shit, making us out to be scammers, when you could just be a polite human being and post a message in the slack chat?

...

Yes it does. By creating this sticky you're publicly announcing to the world that you think we're scammers, which is a really arseholeish thing to do. This issue was a misunderstanding; joinrob.in was never meant for public access and if you'd just voiced your concerns privately we would never have had this big shitstorm.

Apparently all of this was pretty clear before dashed posted his thread, as shown here: https://github.com/joinrobin/robin/issues/9#issuecomment-207917946 (this has way more drama than the reddit thread)

Choice quotes:

Sxw1212 (one of the devs who closed the issue): NEWS ALERT!!! GOOGLE COULD STEAL YOUR PASSWORDS AND USE THEM ON OTHER SITES! WARNING!

Seriously though, this is a risk with every site, and we're working on integrating reddit authentication. dashed: totally unprofessional response; I'm disappointed in you guys.

...

dashed: you do not fucking put a non-functional app into production!

...

dashed: Users don't care... the site is still non-functional after registration; which is very suspicious! xereeto: suspicious of fucking what? we haven't released the damn thing yet xereeto: if you sign up for non-released software and get 'suspicious' because it doesn't work, you're retarded.

And here's even more drama when dashed when on their euphoria chat to complain about this! You have to commend him, he seems quite committed to proper security practices even for a small project like this.

Of course, not being satisfied with arguing in someone else's thread, xereeto makes his own thread (snapshot) explaining the issue.

AFTERMATH:

Anyway, that's all the drama for now, but there's a few things I've noticed in the aftermath.

First, dashed is no longer a mod of /r/ccKufiPrFaShleWoli0.

Second, as you can see in xereeto's thread, one of the mods said:

[stickying dashed's thread] was not agreed upon by all the moderators to do. I'm sorry about all of this. We are still ironing out the kinks in the mod team and sometimes emotions get the better of some people.

Was dashed kicked out?! It sounds like it! Or at least there's some moderator dissenssion. Unfortunately, I was not one of the lucky few to be randomly chosen to mod, so I have no access to the mod logs. Anyone who does, feel free to PM me and I'll add anonymously!

Anyway, I hoped you enjoy this morsel of drama from a tiny, obscure corner of reddit.