Recent PTO staff changes - PLEASE READ

[Rachel]

I know that some of you will be reading this and thinking "what the heck is going on here?".


The following is David's (our site owner) announcement to his staff which we are now sharing with you.

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You are reading this on April Fool's Day, but this is no joke. There is nothing I would wish for more than this to be a joke.

PTO is now and always has been a community that is for the loved ones of Prisoners, and unfortunately sometimes for those about to go to prison. We welcome the scared and the confused and the frustrated who don't know how to navigate the court systems, prison systems, and finally supervised release. We support these people with friendship, knowledge, advice, and non-judgmental acceptance. We are a 'safe house' to many and we all have worked tirelessly behind the scenes (as staff) to facilitate a place that these people can call home and feel safe and feel sense of community.

As a staff member on PTO you are putting your own situation in the back seat and supporting the members. You are reaching out and doing a community service to your fellow human being. You are being a friend and a confidant and a support system.

Over the years I have been very proud of how the staff of PTO have volunteered their time and resources to not only build PTO, but first and foremost to help others. It makes me very proud to see all these people supporting our vision of Prison(er) support.

Occasionally however, one or more individuals sadly put their personal struggle for power and / or recognition ahead of that of the community. This behavior contravenes the purpose of the community and the selflessness that we should be operating with. Unfortunately I am coming to you now to talk to you about such an incident.

This very struggle for power is what led to Jonathan's eventual resignation, now followed sadly by the removal and subsequent banning of Anthony, Karyne, Teresa, Terry and BooBoo. I know many of you consider some or all of them to be friends - I know I certainly did and I can't adequately convey how hurt and disappointed I am, but no matter how much I personally like anyone, the good of this community MUST come first.

Before I get into details I want to be clear on one thing. I have no problem with anyone starting their own prison/er support community. If anyone feels they can do a better job - more power to them! What I do have a serious problem with is anyone trying to build a community off the back of PTO. All of you know that poaching / soliciting our members insures an instant ban. What has taken place this time however is much more egregious. A disgruntled ex-Admin has essentially poached our staff members and has actively been conspiring with them to utilize their positions at PTO to aid in getting this new community off the ground. If they had simply resigned their staff positions at PTO, this would be a non-issue, with the exception of what we now know were massive leaks of private information.

We first caught wind of this a little over a week ago and have since worked non-stop to limit their access while learning as much as we could. It has been a real hardship having to deal with both the upgrades, optimizations and then this.

Of course we have also been dealing with a lot of issues relating to the upgrades and server optimizations. I truly am sorry for any inconvenience this has caused all of you. Please trust me when I tell you it isn't something I enjoy but it needs to be done. This isn't new.. We've dealt with this a number of times as we've upgraded software and hardware. Also, as I mentioned previous, there is no simple solution. We have to turn features on and off and then watch them over time to try and identify if it is a source of excessive load. If we determine a feature is causing slow-downs we then need to find alternatives that will work better for us. If there are none we then need to look at adding additional hardware (servers). I have no problem purchasing additional hardware as long as it is the best solution. When I find out from other forum owners that they have a forum larger than PTO running on less, and performing much better, it makes me want to get to the bottom of it so we can all have a better experience here.

The one thing I will promise you is that it is going to get better.. The feature set of our upgraded site will be better and the performance will be better... This is my goal and I'm going to do everything possible to realize it as quickly as possible.

I will be posting more of my thoughts as I gather them.

In the meantime, thank you all for your loyalty and hard-work. I am a better person for my association with you.

This is to be continued, please bear with me!

David

[David]

I owe it to Patty (PTO Administrator - formally mentioned as one of the banned staff members) and the rest of you to update what has taken place.

Patty was contacted by Jonathan and solicited to join them in what they were doing. Despite her friendship with him, she put the good of this community above that and contacted me, which kicked off our investigation. Had she not done this they would have been able to continue for some time, most likely unnoticed.

They've called her Judas amongst many other unsavory things.. She may be that in their eyes but she's a hero to me and many others here, and I want you all to know about her actions.

We initially included her in the list of people who were banned in an attempt to keep them from identifying who let us know about it, and we withheld Karyne's actions for similar reasons, though she was just as guilty as the others, and banned just the same.

Thank you so much Patty!

David