I've been saying specific steps that need to be taken for the past .. 3 pages? :stare:

It'll become rather clear, my entire tone and mood would change. :P

Indeed you have, Zenn, but so has most everybody here. :wink: Perhaps you can give some very precise examples regarding Kayle's issues?

EDIT:
Kayle, I was hoping for something more along the lines of how we could move forward, as opposed to knowing when you think we've moved forward. :wink:

Oh, in that regard, I'm not really all that sure yet. Something needs done, but I'm just not certain of what yet. In that regard…


I blame GNU for all our problems!


Man I feel better already.

[Edit:] Boy, I guess this whole const thing is frustrating me more than I thought…

Community Leadership – Leadership is the operative word.

Administrators and community moderators should rarely (if ever) be vocal and should never justify defending community interests. It is a defacto standard that an act of administration is an act in the best interests of the community. The vision, mission, goals, and the health of the community rest in the hands of the Community Leadership.

NOTE: This is different from cult-of-personality entertainers, who must maintain the loyalty or a tight grip on their followers and cater to special interests. One must understand the difference and the social dynamics as they ebb and flow. Who then is really in charge?

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/super-m...

Same story…different stage…different actors.

Zortek, a.k.a.
Rich Wermske

Edited by kiasyn to make link work, bbcode parser messed up somewhere.

Everybody knows that remakes are always better.

Haha, right.

Ever stop to consider that the reason I feel the way I do about all this is because despite all efforts all I ever get back is grief and attacks? That no matter how something gets handled the same people come back with nothing but complaints about how it was handled? I find it extremely difficult to understand why this concept seems to make no sense to otherwise sensible people.

I have a nasty ability to be able to distill out what's being said. Most of the time it's right on the money based on past experience. I honestly can't see this as any different. If had predicted ahead of time where this thread would go, I'd probably have been exactly right, but at this point all I have now is hindsight. Hindsight which tells me I should have locked it early on and simply dealt with the abusive emails and PMs doing that generates. Or perhaps locked 3 more threads that would rise up to take its place.

If the past bothers you all so much, stop readin now, because I'm going to use it as an explanation. And keep in mind, if we don't learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it. I don't bring this up as a continuation of a grudge or as hatred for anyone or whatever you may think.

I seem to recall a similar development over at TMS when Lasher took over the site. Synozeer was a laid back admin, much like Icculus. No active involvement in the day to day. No real concern for flamewars, trolling, nasty people, etc. People complained bitterly about it. Arguments flared up. Synozeer got sick of it and sold the site. So Lasher decided he wanted to clean things up. Starting with reigning in the crap that was being posted. Stopping flamewars and personal attacks. Deleting posts, and whole topics where needed. It sparked a thread not unlike this one where someone called into question the new policies that had been enacted. I was there. Lasher explained himself. One certain individual decided it was his entitled right to openly question administrative policy regardless of the number of warnings he received about it. It raged on for at least 4 pages, and I more or less took the side of the moderators attempting to point out where said individual was going wrong and how it had only one outcome. That outcome was reached soon after.

Said individual embarked on a crusade not long after that to smear Lasher's name through the mud. He took to posting pictures making fun of the whole thing. Running around bragging about it and in general trying to make himself seem like the good guy for battling the evil authoritarian monster. Lasher was either unaware of all this or didn't care to respond to it. But either way, the outcome is the same. Lasher got on with it and left such rot where rot belongs. I have great respect for him and wish that I had the kind of restraint and patience he has. It's another one of those hindsight things. TMS's policies have not changed. Posts continued to get edited and deleted. Threads were either locked or purged. Some other people vowed never to return, cursing Lasher's name as a stubborn pig-headed idiot. In looking over the content there now, I'm fairly sure his decision to stick to his guns worked out and the site is much better off for it. They've got a thriving community with good posts and very few if any incidents. Everyone there seems much happier for it now that the troublemakers have either been removed or self-deported.

That's all I wanted here. To nip the flamewars and personal attacks in the bud. Perhaps I overreacted. I tend to think not. At this point I have little doubt that this thread should have been locked and that I should have stuck to my guns. But I let myself get fooled into thinking that "let it ride, see how it turns out, maybe it'll be ok" would work. I don't think it has. This thread here turned into exactly what I feared it would. Tempers have flared. People are once again mad at each other, and at me, and I've done nothing to help that situation at all. It's going to sound hollow and self serving at this point but I would not have begun taking more aggressive action if I didn't care about trying to salvage what's left of this site's usefulness. There's a hell of a lot of potential here left to be tapped and as others have seen, this is probably one of the few places left that's got a fighting chance to try and turn things around other than smaller niche sites. If the hobby or community or whatever it is people want to call it is to survive, fragmenting it into small isolated niches is not how it should be done.

In specific response to HK on the finding another community thing, I sort of already have. It's part of why I had a somewhat renewed interest in trying to straighten things out here. At this point in time, it is a very friendly and helpful group with lots of wonderful contributors breathing new life into things and making the game do stuff nobody thought possible just 6 months ago. I've managed to make a place for myself there and have gained quite a bit of respect among many. Mostly for my ability to crawl in and debug just about anything that comes along.

I joined near the tail end of a massive campaign launched by the company's forum liaison and their senior moderation staff to excise a problem they had with the same kind of troublemakers, many of whom joined with one purpose: to cause as much grief and damage as possible. It led to a massive number of contributors isolating themselves on their own sites and scaling back on their public releases. From what I can gather it damn near destroyed any interest in modding for the game. As I'm sure everyone is aware, commercial gaming is very fast paced and the slightest hiccup that causes a loss of interest is devastating. It's even more of an issue with modding those games since the modders all do it for free and don't even own copyright on most of their work due to licensing. the policies they enacted there would make what I did here seem like a book club debate gone wrong. Posts are actively deleted. Not edited. Moderators have sharp tongues that make mine look like jelly. Threads get locked so often you'd think they have nothing else to do. But in the months or so I've been there, I've noticed it's helping and helping a lot. And you know what? Honest debate still happens. Constructive criticism still takes place. People fight. There are disagreements. But step out of line, and you get a warning. Step out of line again and you'll get suspended for two weeks. Step out of line a 3rd time, done. Banned. No exceptions. Some offenses warrant insta-bans. Others just insta-suspensions. Some members have even been simply expunged from the system. Moderation action is NOT questioned publicly. Doing so gets you banned without another word. That hasn't stopped people from trying, and it hasn't stopped them from posting giant rants about nazis and censorship on their blogs and whatnot. They have literally hundreds of posts a day, if not an hour, to monitor. Obviously they can't be everywhere all the time so they do rely in part on users to report questionable posts. In just the short amount of time I've been there this has led to a clear understanding of what is accepted and what's not. Honestly, if they have posted rules I've not even read them. But I can tell just from common courtesy and common sense what would get me in trouble there. I lurked long enough to get a feel for how things worked and fit right in when I finally chimed in for the first time. I've found this to be more or less standard form on every forum outside the mudding community btw, so it's not just commercial gaming houses that do this.

Now then. To those of you who have shown your support despite my rather blunt nature, I thank you. I know it's not easy when I'm acting like an ass half the time.

For those of you who don't want to see me drop my admin position, I'll leave reinstating that in the hands of Davion and Kiasyn to decide. But I think that if they want me back they should do so with the understanding that performing moderator actions isn't something I want a part of anymore. I'm a much happier person on the back end of things, out of the line of fire. I do think the site needs to bring on at least a couple of forum moderators whose only function would be to deal with thread edits, locks, deletes, etc. and recommending further action that requires an admin to step in such as restricting someone's access or banning them outright.

And for everyone, I apologize for being a dick lately. Especially to Hades, who did indeed try and meet me half way. I simply blew it there and I'm sorry for that.

And that, David, I believe is what I needed to see.

Wow, I did not think that HK epic post would have been topped (and yes i have read every word, when i could have been taking a shower with my wife hehe,), but these are words I would have never of expected to ever hear from Samson. Thank you Samson, that is the type of attitude that will heal rifts and bring unity and I am very glad to see you have taken the plunge. I can tell you from experience that it is hard, but it is well worth it as it resonates throughout your whole life, I know it has in me.

@HK, I dont know where you found the patience to reply to all the various points that have been made and I have no idea how to respond, but I will say, that you made a number of points that have changed how I view a number of different things or have brought clarity to others. Thank you.

I would have liked to add much more, but i have a paper due in the morning and need to spend time working on it rather than discussing this. Someone mentioned how do we move forward from here, I think this is the next important question we need to face, but maybe that can wait for another 60 seconds, or we can wait for HK to publish a sequel. HAHA.

This is probably not going to get a good response, but I also think part of the problem is too many
coders are out there releasing piles of code and codebases. Do not get me wrong I have greatly
benefited from many releases over the years. However, when it gets so easy for anyone to make
a out of the box type mud, why work for someone else.

What we need to do is come up with a way to get people to realize that while yes you can start
your own game with little to no coding experience, that the failure rate is extremely high unless
you have strong support. Starting a mud is not a one man type of activity, though probably many
of us here did start it as one man or one woman.

I had more posted here, but removed it as it gave me an idea I am exploring.

Samson wrote:


Sounds like paradise to me :)

I disagree with your assessment of the TMS stuff, but
I'll limit myself to just posting a link so people
can decide for themselves to read what happened without
cluttering up this thread with a battle you want to re-fight.

http://lpmuds.net/tms/

-Crat

Good post, Samson. I'm happy that you took the time to write it and I'm glad that things seem to be moving forward. I don't agree with everything you said but there is no need to go into that; I think the bulk of it is what was needed. My main thought is that, since moderation does truly seem to make you unhappy (and I understand how unpleasant it can be), maybe a break really would be a good thing. I mean, this is all meant to be for fun, right?

Wow and wow again. Need less to say, I'm having trouble keeping up with this, and I can't go through all of Crat's .pdf but I did see something from Molly about mutual respect replacing moderation. I'll cop to Crat's assessment of my earlier post being naive, but like Lobotomy, I've learned a lot from this thread. And what I'm seeing here is respect. I think this thread proves it can work ("it" still to be decided, and I see another thread for that purpose already).

BTW, I posted something earlier about DH, and several of you seemed to take it seriously and read into it some personal feelings on my part . No, I wasn't actually suggesting or implying David should be banned, that was merely meant to express how serious I think the problem is by presenting a silly example. If David should leave this site, the average IQ would drop by 10 points, and the content would suffer greatly. That's how I feel about David, just to be clear.

(oh, and I did finally remember an example - it had to do with the Sun and the Earth and Trigonometry)

Oh, one more thing about respect. We all need to cut each other some slack and realise we're all inmates of this sanitarium. No doctors, nurses, or even orderlies. Others have bravely skipped along the surface of this pond, so I'll take the plunge. To put it bluntly, I wouldn't spend so much time online if the format didn't improve my chances of success in social interactions. As you can't see my face or hear my voice, here I don't suffer from the miscues that have meant disaster for many RL personal relationships all my life. So despite my age, I'm still rough around the edges when it comes to making a point without making an enemy. I think I might be on the far end of the spectrum, but I believe to some degree we're all nerds. It's understandable we get defensive when we think we're being attacked, but we need to think more often that perhaps, we read it improperly or the poster expressed it poorly. Taking offense at what you assume are the poster's intentions is skating on thin ice, and holding them to what they literally said is aiming for the hole with the red flag. It's a "win the battle, lose the war thing".

Okay. Granny's done preaching. (for now)

Sandi wrote:


Quite. I think goodwill and consensus is building here. I
believe this thread is a good example of the positive
effect of not "nipping in the bud", but rather letting
things be and unsheathing the admin tools only when harm is
actually done, and in a fashion that doesn't penalize
everyone for the mistakes of a few.

Sandi wrote:


Troll! Time to threadlock!

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

PS I'd like to get back to the discussion about how to
improve things *actively*, rather than what we can
*avoid doing*. I'm curious to hear where people think
the community ought to be headed, not just what it
ought to be avoiding.

Fully agreed. Given the nature of online communication, care should always be taken to not assume what somebody else intended. Even if you think you know them, we've seen occasions (even in this thread) where A and B misunderstood each other, and C over there had yet a different impression of what was meant. If it's unclear, the best thing to do is just ask.

And just to throw in a "me too":

Me too. :smile: And thank you for the kind words.


I think that, doom and gloom notwithstanding, this community is in pretty good shape, modulo a few hiccups. I'm all for grand collaborative projects, but I think they're harder to get started, manage and bring to completion than has been said so far. I've been slowly, oh-so-slowly accumulating thoughts and design in my head for the past, oh, seven years or so, and at some point I'll probably commit it to 'paper'. I've also been experimenting with all kinds of code projects, some of which are just about now coming to a head in my development version of Darkstone. Hopefully I'll be able to convince the rest of the staff to let me open-source the whole thing, but at worse, I could perhaps release just some parts of it. Most of the work has to do with using Lua to drive the game logic.

Time for a sequel!

Really though, I'm going to keep this much, much more brief than my last bit.

I'll try to go a bit in order again, and I'm not going to bother with direct quotes this time around.

Kayle and I have communicated privately, and I'm very pleased with the outcome of all of that. Proof that misunderstandings can be resolved and turned into what I hope is mutual respect.

I don't agree with everything Samson said (very brief note on that in a moment) but I am very, very glad to see that my 3+ hours of posting last night wasn't done in vain. I whole heartedly accept your apology, and would like to extend one of my own for the harsh words and any misunderstandings we might have had. I would like nothing more than to put all of this, and any issues we've had in the past, behind us and move forward as a part of the same community with the same goal in mind: to help MudBytes become the best community portal as it can be. Sure, everyone is going to have some disagreements on the best way to reach that end, and that's something I think we can deal with as it happens, and I think all of us (including myself) can start to try to exercise a bit more personal restraint and recommit to showing respect for everyone that posts here. I think stepping away from moderation but still acting as an Administrator might be best for everyone, because I do feel this site would suffer without you, but the moderation aspect does seem to really make you unhappy. I am genuinely glad you do have another community you feel appreciated in. It's the Oblivion Mod community, right? You guys have any plans to cross over into Fallout 3 when it comes out, considering it uses the same engine (I believe) as Oblivion? I loved Oblivion, loved Fallout 1 and 2, and absolutely can't wait for Fallout 3 :p

As far as the main point that I disagree with was about the feeling that perhaps this thread should have been locked long ago, but I honestly feel that the end result justified much of the crap that it took to get here. I feel like a lot of issues have been resolved, I feel like a lot of misunderstandings have been cleared up, and I feel like a lot of the posters here have a much better understanding of many of the other posters. That, I feel, will be very, very beneficial in the long run for our little community here. Despite the time I've invested into the thread, and despite the day or two of actually feeling a bit down about the way things have been going, I'm very glad this thread was allowed to reach the resolution that it has. I think this is a prime example of how a thread that could be locked justifiably can be let to continue to reach some conclusion and everyone can come out of it a bit better than they went in.

Even three years into this site, I feel like overall this site itself is still quite a young community, and with any place like this there are going to be growing pains, and I think what we've experienced in this last week or two have been signs of those growing pains. I honestly have a ton of hope for the direction of the site now, and I feel good about participating. It makes me want to finish pulling out a few more things out of my game to release as snippets :)


I wanted to say to The_Fury that I'm very glad that my post has cleared some confusion up among other people, and I really appreciate you taking the time to say such.

Overall, I'm very appreciative of anyone that took the time to read the entire thing, because I do understand the time investment it must have taken :p I've also enjoyed all of the humor surrounding how large it was.

I wasn't trying to re-fight the battle. I specifically said I was using it as an example of the past that we can learn from. I know you disagree with my assessment of it but in the long run I think the pains they went through to enact the policy that's in place now was the best thing for them as a community. It seems to have worked out pretty well for them so far.



It's not so much the moderation in and of itself. It's the hostility that gets generated as a by-product of it. I think we can all see it's just not something I deal with effectively.

Yes, I was referring to the Oblivion mod community both with where I've found a place to feel appreciated and in my example of how a seemingly draconian policy worked for the betterment of the community as a whole. I'm sure it cost them a few people who would rather have had the ability to go on with endless confrontation and questioning of the site's policies in public but for them allowing that kind of behavior didn't work. Much like it didn't work at TMS and both sites are arguably much better off for it.

There's plenty of people with the desire to cross over into Fallout 3 modding, but that depends on whether Bethesda is going to release a construction set for it. They've been mysteriously quiet about it and posts asking if there will be one or not go unanswered. I'm sure I'll at least dabble in it if the opportunity exists but Fallout 3 should be a hell of a game even stock just like Oblivion is. It would be a really bad idea for Bethesda to not include a Fallout 3 CS. One only needs to look at how much longevity they've had with Morrowind to know how much it helps. They're still selling copies of that many years after it would normally have faded away into history.

If I may be so bold, there might be less hostility toward you than you think, especially in recent times. I understand that for various reasons you feel hostility, but – and I say this with all due respect – I think that you might be exaggerating the negative feelings most people have toward you. A lot of people have a great deal of respect and admiration for you, even if they don't always completely agree with everything you do. To take my personal example, I've strongly defended you on several occasions and in several places and would do so again; yet sometimes I have gotten the feeling that you think I hate you because I occasionally tell you I think you're making a mistake. Anyhow, I'm glad that things seem to be on the mend.

100!

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net/crat_100.jpg