User blog:Prism55Writes/The "Daybreak" attacks and why are they happening?

Hello.

I'm sure some of you have heard of this group called "Daybreak". They are a group of self-proclaimed "(some of) the best vandals in FANDOM [1 ]" who are currently engaged in attacking several wikis with vandalism. Unfortunately, one of the wikis that I moderate has also been attacked. Oh well.

But this is not entirely about them. According to a blog post by O175HayStacksO, the group is lead by the users Raptide and Wisest (the latter has been Fandom banned). But why does it matter?

Well, Raptide used to be a user of the now-deleted Free Vandalism Wiki (which will be referred to a FVW from now on). The FVW was a wiki where people were allowed to just vandalize articles however they pleased (provided that it abided by the Fandom rules, of course). It was a relatively active wiki but it was deleted by Fandom somewhere in August 2018.

After the deletion, Raptide posted a thread in which he complains about the removal of FVW and requests that it be reinstated. In the thread, he states the following things:

"Free Vandalism Wiki is a place where vandals can vandalize. If we provide a space for them to vandalize, this can help reducing vandalism on other wikis."

"We didn't encourage bad contributors to vandalize other wikis. We just provide them a place to commit their passion and art."

"You mentioned that you are having an increase in the number of vandals. Let's consider this: FVW is closed, vandals have nowhere to go, some of us is pissed of, and they start to vandalize everywhere. No offense, but closing this is a terribly foolish and ignorant decision."

"In my opinion, FVW allows me to develop my art on vandalism and have fun, while not really hurting others. Believe it or not, I once blanked 90% of FVW's pages just to have fun, and later realised what this community is really about. It is friendly, while allows you to have fun. This also provides a fun place for you, we even got a channel service which allows you to host shows and fanons. After this wiki hot erased, we, including I, have no place to go. I haven't really devoted myself back in raiding, but let's consider this: Tens of hundreds of vandals do not have a place to go for, and are going to run wild cross wiki. Some are experienced, and can be hard to get rid of them in local communities. You sure that pissing them off is a good idea?"

Of course, the thread got ruined afterwards after the user Interception (also known by his old name EnderChas) accused user Popstar of "stalking" and being a troll due to conflicts on a different wiki, but that's unrelated.

What matters is that Raptide seems to have been right, after all.

With FVW, vandals like him had a place to perform their "art" of vandalism; a place where they were free to do their thing as they pleased. I created a few articles there myself, and added hundreds of useless categories to other pages; it was fun, and I felt pretty free there. I was never an active user on the Wiki, but it gave at least a part of the vandals a place to vandalize.

With FVW deleted, these vandals have nowhere to go. Without a community where such vandalism is accepted, what do they do? They begin vandalizing other communities. It only makes sense.

What is the conclusion? I don't know. It looks like the vandals have decided what to do. Of course, not all vandals from FVW are in Daybreak, but they are likely vandalizing other wikis/places now. But it's too late to reinstate FVW now. Keep in mind that this is not coming from a regular FVW user, but a nearly complete outsider who only made 10-20 edits in total.

That's really all I have to say about this issue.