Lightning here. We were like 14-16 when we found out the first time, and as far as I can remember, I don't think we were even sure the profile was him? I don't think I ever saw the listing and I've probably spoken like 10 words to Steve since I met him. I can't tell you what we were all thinking way back when, because I don't remember. (I didn't even remember the offender thing until yesterday just before this drama broke.) But I assume we just figured it was in the past and since he never actually, like, *talked* to anyone, he wasn't doing anything shady. idk, he was the one paying for the forum's server, licenses, etc. so if we had had the wherewithal to do something, it basically would have just meant shutting down the forum and the forum seemed all-important to us as teenagers because, you know, stupid teenagers. As
>>35022081 said, we just didn't have the perspective to do anything and then it didn't come up again and we legitimately forgot, because teenagers have a lot of drama in their lives and this probably just seemed like more of that.
I fully understand the staff/members now who are upset and uncomfortable working with Steve, but I'm also of the opinion that I am not the law. Whatever he did, presumably the law dealt with it and he knew what he could and couldn't do moving forward. Does it weird me out that someone so old ran a site that generally only attracted teenagers? Yeah. I never understood why, but at the time I think I was mostly just thankful that someone older was able to financially support the site I spent so much time on. Maybe if I'd known him better or if he'd had more of a presence, my opinion here would be different, but as it is, I just didn't interact with the guy enough to know whether it was all true or not and then it just slipped my mind as I got older. There was no maliciousness behind our actions nor do I recall any active effort to cover it up.
