Well, Lightpaws is still the convention chairman and there was some reports about drama after a bunch of the con staff quit at once.
Someone who has that information should post it here.
Despite the fact that you've started losing your shit recently, I'll bite and reply to this thread since we're somehow still keeping it relevant.
Yes, there were a number of individuals who quit pretty much all at once for a myriad of reasons. Before we get into that though, let's discuss for a second how I got roped into this lest anyone ask questions about my morals, the fact that I'm already a morally questionable individual notwithstanding.
A friend of mine came to me at MFF and said, "Hey, can you do me a favor and host a web site for me?" It was an innocuous request, and I begrudgingly agreed since this is a good friend. I was put in contact with "Husky" Crone and Shirk to arrange for migrating everything over. They were freaking out already because the individual with whom they'd acquired the hosting package was attempting to yank everything out from under them. Red flag.
"There's a lot of money at stake here," they said. Red flag.
What once was a web site became everything from DNS to mail to database servers to all manner of other value adds that HostGator tosses in on their shared hosting plans. I fought for a while with HostGator to give me the private keys for their SSL certificates and things to no avail; I ended up just eating the cost of the SSL certificate (since I worked for a boutique managed enterprise hosting provider at the time) to get them rolling. Red flag.
That was cool. They liked that. Things ran smoothly until the day of the con loomed in the distance. I got a phone call from the aforementioned friend asking for help to get on-site reg ready for primetime. "Oh, boy," I thought, "This is going to be one of those things where I'm going to be the lone tech guy with the albatross around his neck." Red flag.
(See also: Furries think they know tech, but damn do they tend to fuck shit up.)
That all said, my reasons were mostly unrelated to most of the goings on. I incited drama only when there was some sort of fundamental "Wow, really? What the fuck were you thinking?" kind of brain damage being discussed on the mailing list. Past that, who-fucked-whom and any other sort of gossip-worthy topics stayed the fuck off my radar. I legitimately Did Not Care™.
Naturally, not everyone felt the same way I did. Other folks had issues with the fact that Shirk had a sex offender conviction on his record and that his name was pretty much plastered all over the event. Other folks still had issues with how the corporation was structured, citing that it was a conflict of interest to have the Chairman, Chief Executive, and Treasurer positions filled by the same individual. This is, in fact, a violation of Ohio state law. Red flag.
The corporation didn't have documentation of D&O insurance. Red flag. (I actually retained an attorney to protect myself against this.)
There were rumors still about how the financial accounts were set up. I heard something about the convention's accounts being linked to Shirk's personal accounts or some such contrived nonsense. Red flag.
If I had to have an issue with anything, it was Shirk's leadership style, or lack thereof. He was authoritarian yet sort of wishy-washy, and he made a number of decisions unbeknownst to anyone and pretty much failed to communicate most things about, e.g., the arrangement with the hotel, their requirements for our day-to-day operations on-site, and so on. Red flag.
There was a huge local contingent full of people who were "green" in re staffing conventions. The Dorsai minions who sat in Ops with me all weekend remarked, while we were getting breakfast at Tim Horton's on Saturday, that the dregs of the volunteering barrel at IFC probably could easily make up the upper rungs of volunteers at Furlaxation. Red flag.
From there, it just spirals sharply downward.
