Okay, so. I'd just like to offer a little perspective here. While I'll let him speak for himself (if he feels that he needs to - and honestly, I don't think that he has anything further to answer for since the only issue with this has already been well-identified), this was just an Audyism. I am certain that he in no way meant to demean regular members or anyone else. This was just something cool for his friend. It was a bit of an intrusive way of going about it but that's all.
When you're an admin, you've got access to a ton of little tools and plugins which you can use to customise aspects of how PC works in ways which aren't achievable through the normal means. And honestly, it's nice to use these to make PC work in a different way for you or your friends or whoever sometimes. Contrary to what it might seem given that we have the buttons for everything at our disposal, there aren't very many upsides of being an administrator compared to other levels of staff (excluding the discussion involvement), and particularly not when compared to super moderators. Despite this, the comparative workload is far higher in my experience so sometimes we like to just have a bit fun with the powers that we've got because it's not all that often that we get the chance to do things like this. Now, as I said before, I think that the, uh, implementation of... these flying cows was a little intrusive (never thought I'd say that sentence), but certainly I don't think there was anything more to it than Audy wanting to have some fun on his friend's birthday and using his admin tools to do that because they're at his disposal.
Honestly, I'd draw some parallels between this and anybody on the forum having fun with any of their friends. The key difference here is that the implementation was pretty intrusive, which I'll admit, but aside from that there's really nothing more to it. Audy was simply using the tools that he's able to use to celebrate, the same way as one of you might make a birthday thread for someone full of inside jokes (which happens all the time, or at least, did happen all the time last I read through Celebrations). Just because he's a staff admin doesn't automatically make this bias against non-staff and just because Audy used his admin powers to do this doesn't make it power abuse. I feel like this is being taken as some sort of slight against the members or some deliberate glorification of one of our staff, which is not the case at all; take it at face value and you'll see that all it is was one person celebrating another with no ill intentions. This does not exclude anybody indirectly, either, since people make inside jokes all the time with their friends / friend groups. This is not really all that different.
tl;dr, It was a bit over-the-top because it covered the entire forum, and that's the only thing that I think is wrong here. Aside from that, I don't think it's such a crime for an administrator to do something using their abilities for one of their friends, and I don't think that the conclusion that this was done to exclude anybody is sound - nor is suggesting that it excludes anybody unintentionally. It's just someone having a little fun and going slightly over the top and certainly, that's all I'm going to be taking away from this.
