At this time I would like to inform everyone that I am withdrawing as an administrator for MudBytes effective immediately. The past few days have made it abundantly clear that my position of authority is no longer desireable or in the continued best interest of the site.

Cratylus made a false accusation against me based on incomplete data, and though he believes himself correct, I have no means to prove I did not do that which he's accused me of. This has created a general feeling of distrust between myself and the other administrators, who as far as I can tell also harbor some level of belief that there's been foul play involved. Rather than continue to be eyed in suspicion, I will step down.

There has been a further outcry by a small but growing vocal minority of others who harbor the belief that administrators should have no level of participation in sites they run. Though they may not actually come right out and say it, they dance around the issue expecting that nobody will realize that's what they have in mind. I cannot abide by being tied to a general belief that administrators should be barred from participation. I prefer to participate, even in controversial subject matter, so I will no longer be an administrator. Being allowed to speak freely without the shackles of administration is more important to me than being forced to bite my tongue and stay silent.

Further, in having defended statistical fact as presented by Scandum, the general meaning of what I was saying has been twisted to produce the illusion that I support racism, sexism, bigotry, and other forms of hate speech. This erroneous conclusion by many has since been assumed to apply to the site and administration staff as a whole and I cannot allow that to continue. I have essentially been convicted in a court of public opinion with no chance of recovery. My political views are my own. I do not support racism, sexism, bigotry, or hate speech. It is not the policy of MudBytes to support such things either. So to avoid the continued taint against the site, I must step down.

From this point forward, any business to be had with the administration of the site should be directed to Davion, Asylumius, or Kiasyn.

My role in the site's future will likely be limited to my participation in forum discussions, continued development of the underlying QSF Portal software the site is run by, and moderation of any submissions to the AFKMud section of the code repository - assuming the remaining administrators feel this is appropriate.

The domain name is not set to expire until 2010, but it will need to be dealt with sooner or later.

This decision was not reached lightly. I have been deeply considering it for the last few days and I feel this is in the end what will be best for the site. What people think of me should not be held against the site as a whole. I am hopeful that moving forward these issues can be laid to rest.

A sad day indeed that one of the most active people I've met in a while as far as wanting to advance the community, modernize it, and get new blood in the mix, has to resign because the narrow minded and ignorant among the community feel the need to personally tear down anyone seeking to change or modernize anything related to mudding.

The current state of things here has made me feel the need to rethink my involvement here as well, the fact that there are cries for Cratylus to be unbanned after his blatant attack on the Administration in multiple threads, frankly, sickens me. And further proves that it has been an invaluable decision to limit my involvement in the community to just a few sites, of which at one time I was proud to say this was one of. But due to recent events, the call for anarchy here, and now with the resignation of what I felt was the only Admin here willing to stand up to the Community of Trolls that has come to infest our community, I see now that I might have been mistaken in accrediting this place among those which I contributed to, however slight my contributions might be.

I had plans to release several snippets here over the course of the next few months, but unless things here are resolved, the trolls controlled, and a defined set of rules laid down with possible punishments for breaking each laid out in plain view of the members, I don't think I'll be releasing them here. The fact that the remaining Administration seems perfectly content to let this place fall to the same anarchist level as the forums on TMC, most certainly astounds me, and almost certainly drives me to rethink releasing my works here.

Another thing recent events here have caused me to realize is that a good majority of this community has been tainted by the trolls, and is unwilling to take the time to stop and think about a produced argument before immediately jumping to conclusions about the way someone is or thinks. And for those of you who can't figure it out, I'm refering to: Statistics may not be the most accurate of things, but they do afford an insight into reality. And not to beat a dead horse, but I'm sorry to say that even my wife thinks that those of you who called Samson and Scandum (and possibly myself as I was unable to read any replies in the thread started by Tyche before it was deleted) sexists, are idiots, as even she asserts that there are things men are genetically built better to do, just as there are things women are better built to do.

In closing, I'm appalled at the current state of this "community" and it's apparent need for censorship of some things but not others. I fail to comprehend how antagonizing the Admins openly should be allowed, and yet statistical fact should be censored as sexist, racist, bigotry or hate speech.

One suggestion I have though, the easiest way to avoid situations like this in the future: Create a Forum called Off-Topic. And enforce posting guidelines as to what can and can't be posted in certain forums. And if it doesn't fit in any of them, it goes in the Off-Topic forum. Such as the Taser Thread.

I think you're being a little hard on the other admins here…. one wonders what you would have done in their stead.


You'll note that this stuff was already in the "off-topic" section, at least if you go by the description for the "general chatter" section. So here's an IMO better idea: just avoid those conversations, period. And certainly don't encourage them when they come up. That is why I'm not going to respond to your continued comments about the racism/sexism issue: I would have thought that it should be extraordinarily clear by now that it's not a healthy conversation for this community.

I feel the same way. The damage taken by this thread (which I started) has shocked me. You have no idea how much regret I have over that thread. I feel like the guilty party. That said, I'm not going to run. I must atone for what I've done. I don't know how, but I'll try.



A troll does not necessarily need to be banned in order to constitute as punishment. We can get our point across that we don't like it other ways. We have a Trolls group for a reason and as such, both Scandum and Crat have now wound up there. Samson was our figure head. He did all our public relations and spoke for all of us and MudBytes, so why you'd think we wouldn't share the same views is beyond me. But just because people are calling for anarchy doesn't mean it is going to happen. We do need structure, and we do need policies. Some of which has been lacking of late, but we will work to fix these things. We have a thread up about this and want input from all our users, it's just unfortunate only 4 or 5 of them have chimed in on the thread.



I totally understand this and I'm hoping my recent solution to the problem holds to your standards. I'm very confused as to why you think we want anarchy to reign supreme here. The remaining three of us have been tacit because we didn't need to be vocal with Samson around. You will of course hear a lot more from us now.



This is part of a problem. We do have policies about what you cannot post, but none surrounding what you can. It's a very grey area and we're looking to you to help us with it. Samson may have started the thread asking for you help on policies, but we all stand behind that thread and will use it to help shape the future of MudBytes.

For those who don't know, I have removed Cratylus's ban and set in him the Trolls group under a temporary basis, as have I've done with Scandum. How they act on this site will determine how long they stay in that group.

What's the reason for that? Why have a Trolls group when you can just ban them and air out the dirty laundry? I don't see a reason for a Trolls group.

Seems like a good enough reason to me. Tell someone to let go of the leash and start acting like a real Administrator. Talk is cheap.

I can tell you exactly what I would have done. When Crat first antagonized the Administration, it wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did in that thread, it would have been taken to PMs, and had the issue not been resolved, He would have been banned. Plain and Simple. Had he been banned then, this whole situation would have been avoided, and he wouldn't have been able to turn a civilized discussion about the tasering incident into what it was.


I'm curious as to that reason, because I can't find it. It's a pointless group. If you're going to take away their right to post, but still allow them to view the boards, send PMs, they can STILL illicit trouble using the PM system.


Well, what evidence has ever been given to support that you all share the same views? Samson is the only one I've ever seen stand up and moderate. If it wasn't for the Admin Hat thread, I wouldn't have ever known Asylumius was an Admin.


I'm not sure how to respond to this. This further points out to me that you might well want the anarchy. Cratylus ATTACKED the Administration on the site, Twice in the last 2 months, and then further accused the Administration of editing his post to remove a picture. To unban him shows me that you didn't respect Samson's decision. And is quite likely enough to cause me to fail to care enough about anything in this community to continue to contribute.

Thank you, and I agree. Its obviously the sign of a newbie Administrator. The "keep everyone happy" mentality only works when you start out a site and need to make sure you keep your user base. Unless this person is a personal friend of said individual (which might be the case) then they should have been banned for a nominal period of time the first time and then permenantly the second time they did so. I'm sorry but some times you need to weed out the bad apples so that things like this don't happen in the future. Its called tough love. If you want to run a community properly you let conversation go on as long as possible until it becomes disruptive or outright flaming between two parties. If you give the dog too much leash it'll choke itself. To say it in simple terms: grow some balls.

You lost a Administrator that, unless I am mistaken, has contributed more to this website than anyone else (take a look at the post count). You should have taken that into account when taking sides. Now that we know you're going to take sides with the trolls, then maybe next time we'll go with the person that decides to leave. Because your little community is only your pet project because of the individuals that post here (and post code here).

It's also entirely possible that he isn't intimidated by someone's mean words and he doesn't need to be coddled just because he's an Administrator. Not every Admin feels the need to instantly ban someone the moment they feel 'attacked' by one of their users.

Samson made a decision that he feels will help everyone move on from this situation and that will benefit the site, Davion has made a decision that he feels will help as well, and all you are doing is trying to drag everyone right back into it and it's certainly not helping things.

Despite being one of the people asking for Cratylus to be unbanned and us all move on from this, and one of the people that have repeatedly stated that when you speak as an Administrator on a site, you are in many respects speaking for the site on which you are an Admin, I certainly found Samson's decision to be a bit rash. I also find it somewhat frustrating that no matter how many times everyone has countered Samson's assertion that "People in this community feel that Admins shouldn't participate in what they create" he has been unflinching in his decision with that. Sure, you need to watch what you say, but to completely walk away? It seems apparent that once Samson makes his mind up on something, there really isn't any changing it. Given time and this blowing over, I can't help but to think that Samson will find his way back in the Admin role. Despite everything, I don't see any reason why he shouldn't.

We (the four of us Admins) made the mistake of thinking that the MudBytes community could agree to disagree. Eventually, the threads get so off topic, spiteful, and offensive that we've locked them and/or banned someone. Keep in mind that we've never layed a finger on a thread that wasn't pretty obviously in breach of our original posting rules.

–

When it's very apparent that someone is only interested in carrying on a very personal attack, or fueling on, on our public MUD related forums, we moderate. Aside from the taser thing (or more specifically the crap about racism, etc.) we've always used moderation only after the thread got so out of control and off topic that it had no reason to exist on MudBytes.

I don't care what anyone thinks of me, Samson, or anyone else. I don't care what Samson or anyone else thinks of you. Some of these posts just do not belong here. They belong in PMs, instant messages, and e-mails.

One of the biggest things Samson had against him was that we did indeed leave a lot of the dishing of the punishments to him. That isn't to say that we elected Samson our Enforcer of God's Will or something, its just that he has always kept up on what's going on and took a leader's approach to minding the store. Just because Samson locked a thread, banned you, or applied some other form of moderation doesn't mean he was attacking you or acting as the One True God of MudBytes – we always discussed these things.

I personally don't see the point to a Trolls group either. My take has always been that it's a sort of a way of telling the user, "Well you need to cool down, but we still think that you can and want to contribute to the community." This rarely works out.

As a side note: When I got back from deer camp, I downloaded a copy of all the access logs, CP+ logs, shell logs, and a copy of the database. What I found both contradicted parts of what Crat claims and supported some of his claims. I'm not touching this topic publicly again because I'm sure it will spiral out of control, but if Crat himself wants to hear what I found, he can contact me.

You get rid of the person instigating the problem. There's a reason why there are multiple Administrators. There are multiple view points and more experienced people to help you make the choice. Once you ban someone you rarely let them back into your community (what's the point, if they got to that point in the first place then leave them there). If they really want to contribute they'll find another way to do so. Its called earning respect. If you verbally attacked someone in authority you wouldn't expect any type of repercussion? This is a forum (not in the sense of software) with moderators. There's a reason for moderator, hence, *ding* the coined term.

As for everything else that you said; that's personal choice. If he feels that his position of authority is being compromised because of the fact that the other Administrators don't trust him or his decisions then, by all means, I would leave as well. Why should he stand there and make a decision that he knows someone will come around and reverse a few days later? The whole point of being an Administrator is to oversee things, make sure everything is running smoothly, etc. Again, if there is a problem with a user, that's one user. You temporarily ban him, give him the second chance, and then cut his ass loose when he does it again.

You know, it's ironic because that's as much of an attack on an Administrator as anything else I've seen here. If you truly advocate Crat's banning for attacking the Administration, would you support your banning for a similar act?

The ban-trigger-happy mentality is what's the sign of a newbie administrator. If you aren't capable enough to defuse a situation that isn't really that bad to begin with, and the only way out that you see is to silence people, that shows what you are made of as an Admin. That's one of the problems with most MUDs these days, and is certainly not the way that a resource site should be run. How many times have we all seen someone banned because they argued or insulted the owner of a MUD? It's not the responsible thing to ban them for that. None of us want to see this turn into Mud Magic. I don't think we want to see this turn into TMC either, which is one of the reasons why I do support moderation here along with clear guidelines as to what is and isn't allowed.

I've support Cratylus being unbanned so we could all attempt a fresh start, of sorts. Set guidelines, make it clear moderation will be used, try to put the past behind us but try to learn from it, and then see how things go. If anyone steps too far out of line, begin taking measures to deal with them, and if it gets to the point of banning them, then so be it.

Probably more than anything, this entire situation was a PR nightmare. Regardless of whether or not someone liked Cratylus, his banning appeared to a lot of people to be a heavy handed silencing of an opposing opinion, which this site was created largely in part as a 'refugee' effort of sorts from Mud Magic to avoid that type of behavior. As I said to Samson on TMC, if Crat is what he insists he is, then given time Cratylus would given him a reason that no one could have argued with to ban him, and then Samson would have looked like the level headed patient Admin that gave Cratylus far too many chances but it finally came down to banning him. That would have actually made Samson, and by extension MudBytes, look better for it all. Unfortunately, this entire thing was blown way out of proportion and mistakes were made on all sides.

There's so much more to Administration than either 'trying to please everyone' or banning anyone that disrupts the peace.

Because we're not a site based on forums, we're a code repository. There's more to this site than simply the forums. The trolls group simply removes your ability to participate in the forums, and file comments. Kinda like nochan, or silencing someone.



It did get taken to PM's, and it was dealt with. We didn't need to ban him. Also, if you read the taser thread, Crat contributed some very good points to it, there's only a few questionable comments made towards Samson (hence his current punishment). You're just picking out the few bad parts.



If Crat really wants to take it that far, then he will be banned. He can do a whole lot more than send PMs though! He can edit articles, he can post bug reports, he can upload files. He can basically still use this site, just not the forums. In case you hadn't noticed Crat is the figure head of the LP community and probably the #1 uploader of LP content on this site. You want me to think about the health of the site right? Or I guess if we drove away all the LP traffic, you wouldn't care ;).


Err uhh. Um.



And uh…


That is why you saw Samson act a lot more than us. That is going to change though. Give me a chance, eh? This has all happened very suddenly.



A lot of the banning decision had to do that we believed the screenshots he provided where false. Since there's no way to prove it, we cannot use that in decision making. Crat trolled an admin and got thrown in the penalty box. To say he did so bad as to totally cut him off and not only, in one day, loose a very important administrator and then a large part of the LP community when there's a way not to is just foolish and not healthy for the site.

Well, they seemed unwilling to get rid of Scandum, so I don't see how banning Cratylus would have solved anything.


I've found in the rare instances I've had to ban someone, I've also found that after enough time for tempers to cool and showing that I'm serious about not letting them back in, they'll act right. In this instance, I don't think that anyone should have been banned, as there was poor judgment on all sides. Davion is trying to restore the peace and trying to move the site past this. Like I said above, there is so much more to Administration than just trying to please everyone or banning everyone that might disturb the peace.


Needless banning isn't a way to earn respect. There's a large difference between fear and respect. Sure, Kyndig keeps the peace on Mud Magic, but is that because people respect him? I would expect that someone in a position of authority on a site like this, or on a MUD, etc. is there because of what they want to do for the site, MUD, etc. not because they need their ego coddled. Hence why I'll never post on Mud Magic. I'm not in the business of coddling people's ego. If you attacked me, I wouldn't expect any more repercussions against you than if you attacked Davion. Whether I'm an Admin on my game or looking at Admins here, I don't expect the title of "Administrator" to grant them any sort of special treatment. I treat everyone I play with or everyone I post with the same. If I'm someplace where that doesn't fly, where the Admins feel they should be treater better than the rest of the base, or in other words needs their ego coddled, I'll find somewhere else to conduct my business.


To my knowledge, there's never been an instance of one Admin reversing the decision of another Admin a few days later. Sure, we saw an Admin make a decision contrary to a FORMER Admin's, but that's an entirely different situation. One thing I can say about the Administration here is I've never seen them step on one another's toes, which is a good thing. Besides, we don't know what conversations might have gone on between Samson and Davion regarding the Cratylus ban, so any speculation on the issue is that just… speculation.


Sure, if you went to the Kyndig school of Administration. There are multiple ways to handle a situation than coddling everyone or banning supposed trouble makers.

If you have a problem with how I handled the situation, I have a PM, hit it up. Until then, why not move on with the situation, there's a nice little thread here that will allow us to set clear guildlines on how this site is ran. Set up new polices and start moving forward. Unless of course you just want to dwell on the past, sure, distract me in PM's, don't distract the direction of the site please.

What people seem to still be missing is that last month when Cratylus chose to harass the administration ( harassment = rules violation ) the situation was defused. We asked him to take it to PMs at the time. He did, it got discussed, nothing productive came of it, but nobody got banned, silenced, troll-grouped, or anything. We figured it was resolved, everyone moved on. Cratylus, as it turns out, didn't move on. And neither did you, since you came away with a grudge against Asylumius for sarcastically having threatened to ban you. Cratylus took to making plans only he knows for sure - as evidenced by his TMCNet journal. You took to wildly overgeneralizing that we were trigger happy ban freaks as bad as Kyndig. If you're so interested in defusing the situation, start acting like it.

Cratylus burned up his second chance when he ignored our more forceful request to again take his harassment to PMs and leave it off the public forums, then followed it up with a hasty libelous accusation. Again, harassment = rules violation. Administrators should not be any more subject to that than a regular user. A libelous accusation has no place and should not need an explicit rule in place to enforce. Why is it libelous? Because it was untrue and made with malicious intent. It was also defamatory, and he knew exactly what making the accusation would do - even if he believed it to be 100% true. He should have handled it via PMs, email, or some other means. HE chose not to. HE chose to be an ass about it. So the administration did what needed to be done and banned him in the end.

Hades Kane, you're one of the reasons for why I resigned. Attitudes like yours where administrators should give 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc etc chances for a troll to reform. Attitudes like yours where you believe a site's staff should have no right to participate in their own forums. Attitudes like yours, where no matter how justified the action, you insist it was done as a means of censoring someone's viewpoints. Hypocrisy like yours where you believe libel, defamation, and harassment should be protected but controversial views on factual statistics should be suppressed and censored. I hope you're happy with yourself, it looks like you got what you wanted afterall.

I must say, the solution chosen is not something I would have supported as an administrator. I would have insisted on standing firm by leaving Cratylus' ban in place. I would not have punished Scandum in any way, as he's not committed a rules violation that I could see. In fact, I lobbied those positions. I even lobbied the position of deleting the taser thread. From the look of things I guess I would have been overruled.

As an addition - Hades - how many people are in the "banned" group? By my reckoning - 0. How many are in the Trolls group? By my count - 2. Locke was the only other person in the history of the site to be put there, and the group was created then as a means to stop him from making a complete chaotic mess of everything. He's since had his account deleted outright as he wasn't interested in a peaceful resolution to the situation he caused.

At least some investigation was done, and declared publicly to have been done.



Finally. THIS is what I've wanted to see. I'm glad to see that the rest of the Administration is willing to step up and take this site in the right direction. I completely understand Samson's decision to step down and although I disagree with the decision to unban Crat, I do understand the reasoning behind it. He is a major face of the LP Community and to shun away one type of community, well, would make MudBytes little less than MudMagic with the banning of 90% of the major players in the Smaug Community. Sadly, myself having been banned from MudMagic without ever having posted on the forums there at all.

Unfortunately I see a bleak future for MudBytes with Samson gone. No offense to the other administrators, but I haven't seen them doing much site upkeep (from my perspective, anyway). I've been away from MUDs and the community for a few weeks now, and personally I am shocked that things could have spiraled out of control so quickly.

And after actually reading those posts, here is what I have to say:

What are you people, infants?
Administrator + Problems + Offenders.

Simple solution.

Offenders = Banned

Take that kind of petty junk to TMC.

I agree with and support this decision.

I just want to point out that the only reason my say went from leaving Crat banned and lifting the ban was the fact that even though I think he deserves it, the things I found while investigating the signature ordeal left me feeling that it's possible that not ALL of the accusations made against Cratylus were actually true.

As for the Troll group, well, I sorta like how Davion put it. We don't feel that right now Crat has anything positive to post on the forums, but until he abuses the PM system, repository, etc. there's no reason to shut him out of the rest of the site. I hadn't thought of that before.