Vivisector
Daggers and Spears and Songs => FA Obsession Collection => Topic started by: Kindrift on April 17, 2009, 12:26:28 pm
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Via a thread on Lulz.net, under the topic "Am I the only guy who can't stand [Dragoneer]?"
I was an administrator on Furaffinity for a year (Sept 07 to 08).
~I do not wish to cast personal insults around, make ad hom attacks. I do not "hate" Preyfar/Dragoneer~
From my first hand experience; Dragoneer/Preyfar does not have adequate management skills to run the site properly or make sure the site has the right staff who can run it properly. This is very important, because the buck stops with him. As you can see from the recent journal drama, he doesn't learn from his mistakes.
He often acts without thinking and can be easily swayed if enough people make a fuss. He can be two-faced, saying one thing in private or to some people and another in public or to other people. He will "re-write history" or selectively remember things in order to present himself in the most favourable light.
Up till the $16,000 in donations, which more or less forced his hand, he kept the finances to himself, occasional revealing some information to other staff but mostly everyone was in the dark. There were occasions when FA entirely depended on the generosity of a single donor. That is not sustainable, but Preyfar made no real effort to change the situation, until absolutely forced to by circumstances. Things like the adverts had been floated for years before he bothered to get them implemented.
He made arbitrary changes to the rules based on his own personal preferences, without telling any staff in advance and then left other people to clear up his mess while he played computer games. He would sometimes spend several hours handling minor infractions, yet would ignore the big picture and leave the site and staff drifting without guidance for weeks at a time.
When I was taken on board, my position was unclear, I did not receive any real guidance or mentoring (as was supposed to) or help. Preyfar/Dragoneer is extremely reluctant to take new member of staff on board in general. I think this might be because he fears losing control of things and because by surrounding himself with incompetents he looks better by comparison and they are no risk to him and less risk of losing control. But as I said, he is lacking in leadership skills, so it almost ended up with Wolfblade in de facto charge of the day to day running of the site and Preyfar was extremely reluctant to deal with Wolfblade himself, tried to palm it of onto others and let him do a lot of damage.
Because he prefers to avoid dealing with things unless absolutely forced too, the staff can behave badly and/or not actually bother doing any work as long as it's lowkey. Preyfar recognized that the staff were lazy and at one point asked me to oversee them for a week or so, while he was away at a convention. I would assign trouble tickets and forum posts for them to deal with, and they would do them. They all promised to deal with the tasks and then they didn't do them. Only a tiny proportion of them were done. Preyfar ended up doing most of them in one of his maniac phases.
He was content to let the project to replace Furaffinity's buggy software, have nothing done on it for ever 12 months, and then after the person nominally in charge departed under mysterious circumstances, to let a teenage boy whose only previous experience of programming was an interactive list of pokemon take over.
He seemed more interested in trying to get a Furaffinity Team Fortress 2 server set up, and to offer web-hosting using the FA server than fixing the broken software.
Many people have offered their help to Furaffinity, including professional programmers etc etc, however to most of them, Preyfar simply says: "I'll get back to you" and then he never does.
The key to understanding FA & Dragoneer/Preyfar is that FA is his big ticket to attention, popularity and his chance to lord it over the community. He wants to keep it that way and enjoys being able to do the same wherever he goes (that's why he wanted an official FA TF2 server, because he could admin it). If he ever had any greater vision or ultimate purpose for FA, he never revealed or shared it.
He mentioned in the admin forums, in a post from about Dec 2005 IIRC, that every time he feels down or depressed, he commissions some art, I say that not as a personal attack or gossipmongering, but simply because I think it explains a lot about how he functions as the site owner.
FA keeps going because as long as the hardware and software is kept patched up, and very major outbreaks contained by the staff, and the submissions keep rolling in, people are Okay with it. But Furaffinity will never fulfil it's potential or be run as good as It could be.
In the end, I don't think most people really care or look beyond the superficialities with him and the staff there as long as the submissions keep on coming in. However those who do or are more perceptive know him for what he is, as you can see from the other posts here.
I tried my best to fix the problems; to work with some other people more competent than I for such a task, but at the end of the day, the biggest problem is Preyfar/Dragoneer and he can't be budged; He owns the domain and the servers.
I remember an occasion (in 07 I think), prompted by some big-fuck up, when Preyfar, mightily depressed and despondent threatened to just give up on FA and just withdraw from it. If only he had.
If only he had.
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re cub porn, I don't want to argue whether it's right or wrong or whatever, but for the record, both Preyfar and his second-in-command Damaratus (You probably won't have heard of him due to his constant fence-sitting and lack of leadership skills) do like cub porn, preyfar also likes babyfurs as well. Pinkuh has done colouring work (IIRC) for Soft Paw magazine.
In summary, Dragoneer/Preyfar runs FA for self-aggrandizement; he is incompetent. Nearly all the staff are incompetents likewise.
But you knew that.
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Well, I was making up a post to post here, but I will augment that quoted thing then. I will post some FA history/my experience of being an admin, then a post which is a run down on the staff & then a conclusion. If you, the reader, know the history truer, correct me. History, repeats, farce, tragedy etc. However, host of what you will see here is not even Farce, it's just pathetic. The tragedy would be all the money the community and certain people have donated, I think.
I can't always remember the exact dates, but this is all in chronological order. Preyfar/Dragoneer/Sean Piche was/is extremely secretive and autocratic and it was often a struggle for me while on staff to learn what was happening and things often only came to light afterwards.
Furaffinity was founded by Jheryn Lightfoot (now goes by Alkora). It was set up around January 2005. Jheryn operated FA with Arcturus. Neither of them was competent to run it and it went down. When it came back up again in Dec. 2005, Preyfar/Dragoneer/Sean Piche (I will call him Preyfar) had stepped in with money and would run it with Alkora, I think Arcturus had gone off in a huff or been squeezed out. Jheryn owned the domain.
Furaffinity had a rocky ride from then on, with downtime, major drama and convulsions aplenty. The software used to run the Furaffinity website was originally meant to run a forum I believe, and it has been patched and hacked but it is like trying to build a grand palace on foundations of sand. Likewise, the server itself was not reliable.
Because the Furaffinity software was bad, a replacement called "Ferrox" was mooted. Jheryn worked on this, however as he was not competent as an admin, he was not competent as a programmer either. A teenage boy who was about 18 at the time, called Crypto/CryptoDragon who (almost certainly falsely) implied that he had experience as a professional IT project team leader was brought on to try and do it right.
Furaffinity was in a stalemate with Jheryn and Preyfar as co-owners. Jheryn ran into some financial difficulties and Preyfar offered to buy him out, however Preyfar pursued this aggressively and Jherny feeling threatened re-directed the domain. Preyfar pilloried him and largely got "public opinion" on his side. End result, Jheryn is bought out for about $3000 and Preyfar is now King. Jheryn is retained to work on Ferrox I think, and as a sort of ornament, being that he was the original founder.
Wolfblade had been ingratiating himself with Jheryn and Jheryn once proposed that Wolfblade be taken on staff as his "assistant", this was rejected. Wolfblade also ingratiated himself with another admin, DragonMyr and DragonMyr proposed a vote to bring Wolfblade on as an admin. The Vote was 1 in favour, 13 against IIRC. It was certainly decisively against it.
An incident which occurred was CryptoDragon hijacking the administration. A trial admin (prospective admin candidates were supposed to spend a period doing something to prove their worthiness) called Wicht, who was lazy and incompetent whined to CryptoDragon about how he was fed up and wanted to be a full admin or he would quit, someone who was helping with the technical side of things, Blueroo, also felt that he should step up to be a full administrator 7 deal with people using the site, drama and so on. There was no one else about at the time on IRC, or chat, and Crypto completely freaked out and made a post on the forums about how "the enemy was at the gates" and used his admin privileges to make wicht and blueroo admins.
The other admins were not happy about this, however Preyfar was all mouth and no trousers over it and ended up rubber-stamping what had happened.
Under circumstances which were never really made clear, Wolfblade was taken on staff as a trial admin and then made a full admin, despite the originally vote against him. I think it was Preyfar arbitrarily deciding to do it.
I had been fed up with the amount of submissions which were against the rules (compute games screenshots etc) cropping up. I started reporting all these en masse. I was very frustrated that the administrators were not dealing with them. I hoped I would be taken on staff in order to be able to deal with them myself.
I didn't believe in putting myself forward or asking to be taken on staff, due to being English, so I waited. I was asked to look over the terms of service/posting guidelines and to edit the help-wiki for the site. I waited. Eventually I sent a note to Preyfar offering to help hint hint. I was so annoyed at all the work I was doing (far more than the majority of the admins) and being ignored, that when Wolfblade made overtures to me I was happy to "work" with him, he had an agenda and wanted to impose that on Furaffinity, I was Okay with helping him with that and thinking rather grandly about the whole thing, I suggested over IM things like making sure to stack the staff with people who agreed with him and his agenda. He said he would do everything he could to ensure that I got on staff as an administrator.
Eventually I got a reply saying that I would be taken on staff as a trial admin. This was around June 07. The thing which tipped the scales in the end was Yak (main technical person) suggesting that I be taken on to oversee the help-wiki.
At the same time as me, LikeShine was taken on as a trial admin.
There was no guidance, no mentoring, no direction, no clear roles. The staff was in disarray with most of the administrators doing nothing or just the absolute minimum. Likeshine, probably due to all this never really found a place and eventually stopped playing any part on staff and faded away.
I decided that I would start dealing with all the submission violations and I started sending out notes asking people to remove submissions which were against the rules (standard procedure at the time was to ask, then three days, then delete). I was going more at that point, than all the rest of the admins put together. Naturally, I had my problems, however I was not given any support, guidance or correction from the other staff to help deal with them, except long after the fact and grudgingly.
Eventually after much wrangling and back and forth, I was made an actual administrator with an admin account on the main site and forums.
During this time, BlueRoo came to believe that an Ex-Member of staff was inciting people to disobey the administration and rebel. He used the admin tools to go through many peoples private notes and posted them on the admin forum claiming that this was his proof. After his claims falling on stony ground (Wolfblade believed him) he exploded and quit in a storm of drama.
Preyfar was site owner, he appointed Damaratus as "Lead Admin". Preyfar never really defined what "Lead Admin" was, or their powers or their role. Most accepted that they were to do the day to day running of the site, have the final say on staff appointments, discipline etc. However Damaratus was a fence-sitter and always preferred to put things off as long as possible. he did enjoy the *position* (but not responsibilities) of being lead admin and always clung onto it.
Wolfblade's agenda, which was that there was a more or less organized group of trolls and anti-furries who wanted to take over the site and who had to be dealt with by merciless bannings and him being in control, would, I believe have caused site-wide drama and damage, since he was hell-bent on bannings and thumb-screwing up the rules. In the interests of preventing this, I went to Preyfar and Damaratus and asked that he be removed. Damaratus admitted that Wolfblade was having a corrosive effect on the staff and that his presence was poisonous. Preyfar agreed likewise. They both agreed he needed to go. Preyfar palmed the task of getting rid of him onto Damaratus. Damaratus sat on the fence for months.
During this time, I was doing more work than the rest of the administrators put together. This caused me much stress, because no matter what I did, things kept on piling up, for I was only one man and I was spending several hours most days of the week dealing with things on FA. I asked Damaratus and Preyfar to get the rest of the admins actually doing some work, or to cull them and recruit new ones. They alternated between agreeing with me & promising to do something and then not following through or attacking me for rocking the boat.
Because of Damaratus/Preyfar's inaction, Wolfblade waged a whispering campaign amongst the staff to try and save himself and push me out. In the end, he himself quit after realizing that his position was untenable, however despite Preyfar and Damaratus's acknowledgement that Wolfblade had to go, they immediately tried to sweep the entire event under the carpet.
Crypto/CryptoDragon had done literally no work on Ferrox for over a year. He eventually departed under murky circumstances after trying to blackmail the staff, threatening that "the people who keep this site running" will quit, using his romantic partner, KesKitsune, to rely these threats via a Journal.
I eventually quit after I realized that despite Preyfar and Damaratus's promises about making the staff work, culling the lazy ones, they would never follow through and that Preyfar will not change nor learn from his mistakes.
Re FAP, There was a *lot* of glee on the staff IRC channel after It went down. Preyfar said that the original source of his hate for Ekigyuu was that ekigyuu stole a sketchbook of his.
Something interesting is, Higgins Dragon (He of artspots) at one point offered to help with developing Ferrox and wanted to be taken on staff. Eevee was petrified I think, that he might lose control of Ferrox and the rest of the tech staff reacted negatively. I only found out about this afterwards.
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The people,
Technical staff:
Yak - He put vast amounts of time into Furaffinity and it would not be here today were it not for him. He also had a more or less monopoly over keeping it working for a long time, I wish he had used this to try and force the issue on things like useless lazy admins but he preferred not to.
Crypto -
This is a quote from the Furaffinity staff IRC channel:
[18:01] davehyena: How come ferrox is 15 months late and literally no work was done at all on it for several months earlier this year? I still can't get my head around that one
[18:02] thecrypto: ...
[18:02] thecrypto: Fuck you Dave
[18:02] *** thecrypto has left #FurAffinity-core.
He thought he was all that and was aiming at a lead-admin position. He was lazy and incompetent.
Eevee - Crypto was replaced by Eevee. Eevee was/is a teenage boy best known for his infantile behavior on the forums which persistently attracted complaints. Dragoneer promised that he would deal with him, but did not. His only previous experience of programming, so I was told, was making an interactive pokedex. I have no idea how he came to be appointed to head Ferrox. Something that I found genuinely disturbing was that eevee was obsessed with making it easier for people aged under 18 to view adult content on the site. when I pointed out that a measure he proposed would make that possible, he said that this would be a good thing. He persistently pushed this kind of thing and would sound off extensively about how injust it was that FA didn't allow people who said they were under 18 to view mature/adult art. I was told after I quit that he has no secondary education and lost a job at a pizza delivery place for backtalking. He once tried some ham-fisted blackmail, trying to bargain on IRC that if we were to have a certain feature on Ferrox, the staff would have to interfere less in drama.
NetCat - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowung people aged under 18 to view adult content.
Tsawolf - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowing people aged under 18 to view adult content. He was obsessed with Something Awful and thought FA should be run like Somethingawful. He was given an admin account to help with fixing things on the specific condition that he not carry out admin duties. He did start carrying out admin duties and did them incompetently. Preyfar had some lame excuses about how lack of staff blah blah, never mind that he could have taken more staff on board.
The admins:
Pinkuh - Longest serving admin. Bragged on the Furaffinity staff IRC channel about how she was a petty and vindictive bitch. Perma-banned TheGreatHamster basically because Pinkuh didn't like some of her submissions: No rules had been broken. She compounded this by not saving any evidence and doing the permaban improperly (there was supposed to be a vote) and not even bothering to tell TheGreatHamster that they had been banned! Another admin had to clear up Pinkuh's mess when she refused. She once mistakenly banned someone because someone else was using their art to spam the site with, and assumed the originall artist must be behind it without even bothering to check. She did the absolute minimum amount of work and often not even that, but absolutely refused to give up her admin position and clung onto it for dear life. She gave it up once, temporarily, after getting some job, but kept admin position on forums/IRC then demanded to be made an admin again so she could vote against an ex-admin giving some help over Christmas, because she personally disliked them. Preyfar tore her a new one over that and indicated well his contempt for her, but in the end she was allowed to return because he was completely spineless. She was ugly where it counted: On the inside.
BijouxDeFoxxe - Never did anything, except mouth off occasionally about inane things. You could have replaced her with a little sign saying: "I agree with everything Pinkuh says" and no one would have ever noticed.
Kyoujin - Mostly appointed because he was a friend of Preyfar as far as I know. Did about 12 trouble tickets in 10 months I think. His excuse was that his girlfriend wouldn't let him use the computer. He whined when his favourite forum on the FA forums was up for the chop, due to it having no rules and generating vast amounts of spam posts, and demanded it be retained, but refused to step up to moderate it. (Dragoneer had created that forum, one night, without telling anyone first, it had "no rules" and so no one was sure how it fitted into the scheme of things and we twiddled our fingers while Dragoneer ignored it and it created problems, until eventually with some prompting from another member of staff I posted a poll about it and after much work, other had people cleared up Dragoneers mess).
Ankhana - A somewhat popufur artist. AFAIK, she was chosen with the idea in mind that by being an artist she would be a token of "look how caring about the art community we are etc", however she suffered from an illness and did virtually nothing and was still not familiar with the rules after a year. This didn't stop her from occasionaly sticking her oar in and trying to appoint herself chief admin in charge of dealing with drama (her technique was mostly to threaten to ban people a lot IIRC). I have sympathy for the illness, which was geniune, but she refused to give up that @.
FoxAmoore - He was in charge of Music submissions. He did his job I think, but rarely said much. I lost nearly all my respect for him when he pitched a fit over having his forums account being put into a different user-group, because he feared he was going to loose admin powers and threatened to GO TO PREYFAR over it. The idea was, there would be brought in separate admins for forums and main site, so they could focus solely on one thing, and being put into the different use-group was just a peperation for that and Fox was never interested in modding the forums anyway.
Glaide - Friend of Preyfar. Did absolutely nothing at all (even more so than everyone else) so astonishingly, preyfar let him go. However, Glaide had purchased Preyfar's old Laptop from him in an auction on Furbid and this had nothing to do with the fact that Glaide was, after giving his solemn word to do stuff, soon back in the saddle. He promptly broke his word and went back to doing nothing. Preyfar let him get away with it. Appeared to be only semi-literate.
Wolfblade - Pure poison. Manipulative two-faced liar. Paranoid. Believed that FA was under threat from anti-furries and organized bands of trolls who were trying to take over, drive people away etc. Imagined conspiracies. Planned to take De Facto control of FA. Nearly succeeded. Wrote absolutely enormous amounts of <words>. I put one post he made in the admin forums into a word count, and it was over 2200 words.
Damratus - A good Admin, but not a good LEAD admin. He had no leadership skills. Realized this as he confessed to me, but absolutely refused to give up his position. Tended to lash out to draw attention away from his own failures.
Preyfar - Vain. Control Freak. Autocratic. Would fuck things up and then hide and let other people clear up his mess. Extremely secretive about things like the finances and hardware. Arbitrarily changed rules based on his personal preferences. Rarely bothered to consult other staff, or even give them heads up on things like introducing the advertising system etc. He is ultimately the source of all problems with Furaffinity because the buck stops with him. Honestly, I don't mean this to insult him or being gossip, but I got the impression that he might have been Bipolar from his behaviour and activity patterns.
Myself - I wish I had had proper guidance at the start, I made my share of mistakes and more (since I was the single most active admin). I wish that I hadn't often tied myself up in knots trying to justify or work out the technicalities of Preyfar's inconsistent and confusing rules and just said screw it and went with common sense rulings. Sometimes focused too much on the smaller picture. I was too harsh with people mocking or making fun of me, I should have ignored it all or considered why they were doing it and questioned what I was doing/saying. I kept on giving things "one more chance"; one more chance for Preyfar/Damaratus to finally follow through and cull the lazy staff etc, but they never did. Eventually I cut my losses and walked. I was burnt out by the experience.
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Preyfar runs FA for self-aggrandizement; he does not have the skills to run it well. Most of the staff are incompetents and/or lazy likewise. Most of the community don't care about that as long as they get their daily porn and the site is usable (not run well or administrated well, just usable).
I feel better for typing all this now, like I can finally close the chapter somewhat on this. I did put a huge amount of time and effort into the site, which is why it was/is such a heavy thing for me and I have typed so much here.
I expect that in time, when Preyfar steps down (as if) or FA goes the way of all flesh, the community/subculture will forget Preyfar soon enough. But there will never be any shortage of people desiring to lord it over others, to feed their ego, to push their agenda; no matter how pathetic it is in the end.
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Glaide - Friend of Preyfar
The guy with the jester hat and pixie stick at cons?!
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Wait, so you're davehyena?
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Eevee -- All of this shit. (http://friends.portalofevil.com/sp.php?pi=1000507142) His Pokemon thing is here. (http://veekun.com/dex/pokemon)
Pinkuh -- Like Sechs Fuckheaven, only she appears in photographs, and isn't intelligent enough to understand politics. Ugly on the inside AND the outside.
Dave Hyena -- Reported everything that had a negative flavor to it. Very little understanding of the rules, just shotgun reports with the idea that if he'd keep sucking up they'd make him full admin. Massive cock, the sort of the person you'd expect to show up here. 8)
Wolfblade -- All that was said, AND he was rude me to at Further Confusion. Hurf durf.
Princess Piche -- Runs FA like his own private Olive Garden. Runs FA because he was kicked out of Olive Garden by the Pennsylvania furries. Was kicked off Anthrocon staff due to personality conflicts, has ongoing fueds with Giza to this day. Has dedicated his life since then to making negative attention into positive attention.
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Even the ego-driven, thick-skulled, "fuck you unless you have a Daily Deviation" pieces of shit known as DeviantArt Admins look like holy saints compared to the massive pile of fail that is the FA administration "team".
When you can make DA's admins look good in comparison to you, you REALLY ought to take a step back and re-examine your shit.
(Before you start in on me: yes, I've probably got no room to talk, what with my horrible managing of Fchan and the way I run TGFB...but hey, at least I have enough of a spine to admit it when I fuck up, unlike 'Neer.)
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dang
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Tsawolf - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowing people aged under 18 to view adult content. He was obsessed with Something Awful and thought FA should be run like Somethingawful.
Oh, come on - if FA were to be run like SA it would be awesome.
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Glaide - Friend of Preyfar
The guy with the jester hat and pixie stick at cons?!
Yes. He also whined, after being de-admined, that not being an admin on FA was making him depressed. He would go months without bothering to post on (or even look at) the admin forums or turn up on IRC.
Wait, so you're davehyena?
Yes, but I am a (snow) pigeon now in furry-land due to their nobility, grace and beauty. I seem to remember that I deleted some of your submissions which were 'gainst the rules and deleted shouts you had made stretching your page. I think I threatened to ban you at one point. This was a complete waste of time and needless when I should been dealing with real issues and problems. The odd desktop screenshot/app screenshot & stretching your own page was *nothing* compared to the constant stream of second life screenshots. For what little it is worth, sorry.
Pinkuh -- Like Sechs Fuckheaven, only she appears in photographs, and isn't intelligent enough to understand politics. Ugly on the inside AND the outside.
I also forgot to mention, that Pinkuh would threaten to resign and throw tantrums when things didn't go her way and also threatened to do something against the FA United convention, which set Preyfar all in a tizzy. Damaratus's opinion of her was that "she runs off her emotions". Preyfar & Damaratus acknowledged that she wasn't fit to be an admin and she was supposed to have been assigned to admining the #Furaffinity IRC channel only, because she could not be trusted with anything else. They never actually managed to do this and only recently she posted a journal insulting the people behind sexyfur IIRC and encouraging them to pirate their art. She is still an admin.
Dave Hyena -
...
the idea that if he'd keep sucking up they'd make him full admin.
Yes. That is true.
Some of what I reported was because the rules were vague about it and I hoped it would be clarified by simply reporting it and thus forcing the admins to decide. The rules which replaced the previous vague ones, in June 07, were dashed out by Preyfar in a night on the back of a napkin (replacing a better set of rules which had been written by the staff), and very definitely "his" rules. Strangely, for someone who commissions so much, Preyfar had a real thing against people who posted their commissions to the site. He hated people using BBcode to make their text rainbow and wanted to be able to have a button to stop certain accounts using BBcode because of this.
I remember with Kindrift that I banned him for three days under the Railfoxen name/account because he had been insulting towards some Nevadan furry (f-wording and petty insults I think(?) or were it both people at it, I can't remember fully. At the time, you were supposed to only warn people that they might be banned, by yourself and any bans needed a vote. However Wolfblade had told me via IM that it was OK to ban people for up to three days by yourself so I did, I was also very frustrated at how often most admins simply wouldn't bother to vote on bans due to laziness so you didn't get the majority needed to carry them out. I later realized that this "three day ban" had no basis in any rules or guidelines and Wolfblade simply thought it *ought* to be a rule. I made a post about this on the admin forums pointing this out and saying we needed to re-establish the correct guidelines and rules. They were clarified at that point, however amazingly, Damaratus thought admins should actually be able to hand out three day bans on their own and that should be made into a formal guideline. I (and Yak I think) argued against this and they were not allowed.
I don't think I ever apologized to anyone about the three day bans which were "illegal". But to you Kindrift, I will now say sorry, for what little that is worth.
Massive cock, the sort of the person you'd expect to show up here.
Well thank you. Whatever else may be then, the size of my shall not be in question, and why, I wasn't aware that anyone did show up here, apart from the usual "crew". :)
Wolfblade -- All that was said, AND he was rude me to at Further Confusion. Hurf durf.
I think it might have been that convention that he went around telling people that I had a "functional logic error". Judging from forum posts of his, he also believed there was more to 9/11 than the government told people and that there were hidden truths. He really really hated soundhound, KayeDarktail, Bridgeport Cat, Yak & others.
Princess Piche -- Runs FA like his own private Olive Garden. Runs FA because he was kicked out of Olive Garden by the Pennsylvania furries. Was kicked off Anthrocon staff due to personality conflicts, has ongoing fueds with Giza to this day. Has dedicated his life since then to making negative attention into positive attention.
He implied in a CV (which I saw and was soon removed from the web) that he ran FA mostly by himself, certainly overstating his actual role. He also thought he knew a lot about IT and computing, in areas where he didn't and after the $16,000 donation went down, I think Yak certainly and other staff were afraid Preyfar might not actually buy what FA really needed and that he would have to be "managed" into getting what it needed. He was in the end I think. He did certainly at one point buy hardware more suited to a gaming computer (I think an Nvidia motherboard) than to a web server.
He remarked that he had spent so much money on commissions that he couldn't keep track of it all. He once talked on staff IRC about how he spent hundreds of dollars paying for a sushi(?) meal for various people at some furry convention. He dropped over $500 I think on commissioning Muzz/Sputnik for pictures of the FA staff to put on the staff page (never actually used AFAIK).
The Fender character which Preyfar made has an account on the site, originally it was supposed to be a shared account used by the admins, but soon enough Preyfar took it over and treated it as a personal account to use as he wanted to. This is small, but symptomatic.
He took a load of commissions to help out with money at one point, and delayed on them for a long long time. I distinctly remember Vitae posting months afterwards, in a sad tone, on one of his journals asking if he would ever do her commission. I think he at least refunded some/all people their money in the end.
Tsawolf - Again, unsure how he actually got on staff. He also hated the idea of Furaffinity not allowing people aged under 18 to view adult content. He was obsessed with Something Awful and thought FA should be run like Somethingawful.
Oh, come on - if FA were to be run like SA it would be awesome.
It probably wouldn't be worse than Preyfar & pals.
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Two admins I forgot to mention,
Wicht - Occasionally did the absolute minimum amount of work. Would complain all the time about how he was depressed and lonely and busy at work and thus unable to actually do anything. Went for months without even bothering to check the admin forums. Eventually was de-admined and then re-admined against after he promised that he was cured of his depression. One of the first things he said after returning was that he was in terrible pain that no one else understood his pain and how miserable he was and nothing could comfort him. Stated on the staff IRC channel that he was "too lazy" (his own words) to deal with submissions which were against the rules. I asked for Preyfar & Damaratus's opinion on this, i.e why is this person still around, they never bothered to reply to my note. He once engaged in roleplay on the admin IRC channel where he put a collar and leash on and injected with mind control injections another admin.
Silver Wolfe - Okay. Just stopped doing anything after a while and didn't communicate for months and months. Eventually de-admined. Later returned.
More on Damaratus - His reluctence to give wolfblade the boot was compounded by the fact that wolfblade owned Damaratus a $300 commission. I think Wolfblade used this as leverage, because he knew he could get away with a lot since Damaratus knew if he booted Wolfblade, bye-bye $300. I think Damaratus eventually got some prints out of it, but I don't think he ever recovered the full value.
~an incident involving F-chan and RavenRivers/Schroedinger who used to be in charge of it for a time under SageNadia, but then left/was forced out:
RavenRivers, after leaving F-chan sent an ingratiating private message on Furaffinity to Preyfar (Preyfar shared it with other staff) where he spoke about how he valued Preyfar's opinion a lot since Preyfar was such a competent and successful manager etc etc and asked for his opinion on what happened and he would sure like to help with FA cough cough. Dunno what Preyfar said in reply. This worked its magic and Preyfar was soon proposing to take Raven Rivers on staff (Also because he thought it would be a slap in the face to Sage Nada/Ayukawataur, who he hated). RR made ingratiating and obvious trouble ticket reports as sort of "look how interested I am in helping". When pushed on the fact that Raven Rivers had only showed interest after leaving F-chan and asked whether or not Raven Rivers was really interested in the community or helping the site, Preyfar backed down. Raven Rivers claimed on the FA forums that he wasn't interested in being on staff, but was called out on it by people who saw what he was about and then he vanished AFAIK.
~How Preyfar would "Get back to you":
Someone called NRR found some faults with the site software, ones which could lead to bringing it down (this was not hard to do so I am told). He went to Preyfar I think, and offered to fix them, wanted to be taken on Staff. Preyfar said "I'll get back to you" and ignored him. NRR became frustrated and brought down the site. Later, Crypto, having more or less free hand and no supervision demanded that NRR be brought on staff to develop Ferrox. Damaratus and PReyfar OK'ed this (in secret because he'd brought down the site) and Wolfblade and I pitched a fit over that and the secrecy. In the end, NRR departed from the Ferrox team because he couldn't get along with the rest of them allegedly, but since they were not doing anything I don't know how that worked.
~How Preyfar managed to get all the staff banned and the site hijacked:
Preyfar went to some furry convention and accessed his account over an unsecured wireless network. Someone got the password to it via that, and then promptly banned all the staff and put up a message about how Jheryn had a sandy vagina and was making a pearl(?). Eventually I think Crypto managed to get back control of the site. I don't think there was any proof per se, but it was believed it was Arcturus who did it. There was some kind of confrontation at the convention where I think Preyfar and Damaratus shouted at Arcturus or put their hand on his shoulder or something.
~How Preyfar failed to get the millionth submission and half-millionth:
Preyfar planned to give some money to the person who got the 500,000 submission on FA. Arcturus (who Preyfar hates) had a polling script running (this monitors how many submissions there are on FA) which automatically got him the 500,000th submission. Preyfar sulked on the admin forum about it and debated not giving him the money, but I think in the end did hand it over via an intermediary. Preyfar had a big plan for the millionth submission to Furaffinity, it would be a special flash animation and I think it would be posted using the Fender account. However Arcturus had a polling script running again, which got him the millionth submission.
~How the Furaffinity software is so crap:
The Furaffinity software doesn't have e-mail verification for new accounts (though you still have to give one, but it can just be made up). This mean that people could create hundreds of spam-bots which would over-load and bring down the site by posting thousands upon thousands of comments very very easily. They often did. For extra fun, they would making the spam-bots having insulting names, where they would take an existing account name and add something like "fucks-dogs" to the name of the spambot account. You could only ban accounts or IP adresses, not e-mails for example. The ease of creating new accounts led to much grief with some guy who might have been mentally ill or a script and who would make new accounts over and over for hours at a time which would then be used to upload photographs of cars, and due to lack of e-mail verification and banning by E-mail, he just used the same e-mail over and over. We had to ban them all by hand.
Because the Furaffinity software uses the account name as the identifying field (better designed places use a unique number) in the database to act as the thing which makes each account unique, accounts cannot be re-named or deleted, because that would screw up the database. Acknowledged this would be fixed but it was always just around the corner. The trouble ticket system would duplicate the trouble ticket if an admin replied to it more than once.
The Furaffinity private message system does not let you delete messages (you can move them to trash, but they cannot be deleted from there). This is because when you see a private message in your outbox, it's actually the message which is sitting in someone else's inbox, If you deleted it from there, it would be deleted from their inbox. The system would also occasionally put messages straight in to the trash folder instead of in the inbox.
~Rojadrik and the video:
Rojadrik trolled FA with Encyclopaedia dramatica related memes and other unfunny stuff. He was perma-banned for it. He then "discovered" that FA doesn't have e-mail verification and made a video of himself, in internet-tough guy mode, pointing this out and made threats that he would release this video onto the internet and in certain places and that such a horde of trolls would descend on FA as never before, so we better unban him. He was ignored. Nothing happened.
~Furbuy and FA
There was originally a plan that FA and Furbuy would merge, so as to offer an integrated auction feature into FA. However, Preyfar and Jurann both having large egos, clashed, and soon enough they were spreading rumours about each other and having petty slapfights in comments on FA. Preyfar has burnt a lot of bridges over FA.
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dang the thing with nrr sounds exactly like the thing with me, minus actually taking down the site
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Preyfar was extremely paranoid about things being leaked from the admin forums; the serfs finding out what was happening up in the castle etc, so at one point he intended having a legal professional draw up non-disclosure agreements re Furaffinity and he would require all members of staff to sign them.
He eventually forgot about the idea.
Preyfar would stop some people from viewing adult material due to being under 18, but he would deliberately let others do so. See attachment (it's from a journal where one "Min" pitched a fit after I stopped him from viewing adult material due to him being under 18 and clearly saying he was on his profile). I mentioned this to Wolfblade and he tried to talk to Preyfar about that, but Preyfar just blew him off.
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This thread is the best thread.
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This thread is the best thread.
Agreed 100%.
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Wait, so you're davehyena?
Yes, but I am a (snow) pigeon now in furry-land due to their nobility, grace and beauty. I seem to remember that I deleted some of your submissions which were 'gainst the rules and deleted shouts you had made stretching your page. I think I threatened to ban you at one point. This was a complete waste of time and needless when I should been dealing with real issues and problems. The odd desktop screenshot/app screenshot & stretching your own page was *nothing* compared to the constant stream of second life screenshots. For what little it is worth, sorry.
Again, you miss the point. At the time, the submissions weren't against the rules. With the next revision of the AUP, well... See, it wasstill is like none of the people in charge ever read them, then when I ask them to point on the rules where the bad man touched them, they clam up. Next revision, illegal.
Say what you will about Eevee, though, at least he tried (with net-cat coming in a close second):
163 Eevee
105 Net-cat
17 IndiCoyote
9 Koinu
9 Douglas
6 Crypto
5 TimonThese statistics are based on the latest Ferrox git repository, Fri Mar 6 2009. Eevee has since resigned from the Ferrox project, and no work has been done since. (nb, this may be due to things like the end of the semester on net-cat's side)
Preyfar was extremely paranoid about things being leaked from the admin forums; the serfs finding out what was happening up in the castle etc, so at one point he intended having a legal professional draw up non-disclosure agreements re Furaffinity and he would require all members of staff to sign them.
Oh, so I shouldn't have that part where wolfblade was worried that if he banned me I'd "damage this site beyond what yak is capable of preventing or repairing"?
Also, in a way, I miss wolfblade. It was such great fun to elicit 2kb of text in response to my one word reply ("no").
Regarding the code, I really don't know why they're still maintaining the old'n'busted PHP codebase, let alone adding *features* to it. Shouldn't Yak be working on Ferrox? iirc Eevee even had a working import tool into what was then the latest Ferrox.
the staff would have to interfere less in drama.
Really, the staff shouldn't have anything to do with drama. If users are bitching one another out, that's their own damn problem.
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I'd forgotten about that, but it does bring up a point. Some years back I was forced to take a short vacation from FA, yes. My local super emo furry drama queen was acting up at the meets and pushing rumors when he thought he could get away with it. Since the only contact method I had to reach him was FA, I used that to get in contact with him. Told him he was a negative feature of the community and suggested that he off himself. (He's fucked off to Vegas now.) We're damn fortunate those guys never offered email services.
More recently Damaratus contacted Shiuk to demand that Shiuk get myself and the rest of the local community under control. The locals had habits of WRITING IN ALL CAPS in the comments and questioning Princess Piche's monetary policies. That was nothing against the rules, but it was important enough that staff decided to name a local artist our community leader, and then go through the backpath to shut us up.
We're waiting for the day FA bans Reno entirely.
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Damaratus seems to have a more 'crowd control' mentality based on whipping people who are esoteric at best on the impact to the community. I mentioned the CYD sock puppet account once to him (just the fact it exists, no naming, etc) and you would have sworn from the reaction I got I must have said something about selling his mom cocain.
He's incapable or unwilling to address REAL staff issues, so he has to play peon justice with a nearly random profiling.
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fun fact: Pretty much all the FA admins have problems; I've had to deal with many of them personally, including mr. pigeon ::)
disclaimer: most of you already know my personal beefs, but as far as sucky admins go let me just say that most of them will privately admit their flaws and if you bother them enough will attempt to correct the situation instead of cracking your skull open and tossing you off a bridge. Except the really really petty ones, who I'm assuming aren't even admins anymore.
Like Myr and Wicht 8)
first bastard got me so banned from FA that I didn't even know I was banned, the second one took the liberty of going through my entire gallery and finding technical reasons to delete as many submissions as possible. Professional :D
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Again, you miss the point. At the time, the submissions weren't against the rules. With the next revision of the AUP, well... See, it wasstill is like none of the people in charge ever read them, then when I ask them to point on the rules where the bad man touched them, they clam up. Next revision, illegal.
Most of the admins hadn't read the rules. When Preyfar posted up the new rules/revisions, they usually just rubber-stamped them, or didn't bother to respond to the thread. One of the things was, they were so inactive they were not able to speak from a position of knowledge about or interactive with the community who used tho site; they couldn't consider that perspective.
After the lazy administrators, the badly worded rules were the biggest issue. As I said, Preyfar wrote the Acceptable upload policy on the back of a napkin, things which were unequivocal violations ("I found this on the internet, This is my counterstrike screenshot) were OK, but there was a lot of grey areas. One at least one occasion I can remember, in anticipation of the new rules going live within the next few hours!!11, I pre-empted them by asking people to remove stuff (Obvious mistake) and then the rules didn't go live and then it's time for either legalistic tangling or going all quiet, not responding to note etc.
One problem was, Preyfar floated revisions, and was all "We'll put these in tommoroww!!!!" but then they'd sit for months and wouldn't necessarily actually solve the problems, and they would only be tweaks to his existing ones. Wolfblade also had his own ideas about what should be in the rules.
I believed the current AUP, which was put in January 09, had been sitting around for about 3 or 4 months in the admin forums, occasionally getting bumped. Always with the "We're going to be putting these live in a week!!11" type message there.
Say what you will about Eevee
The first time Eevee came to my attention was when he got involved in a fucking stupid slapfight (and he started it) over something to do with computer operating systems or hardware with someone (who wasn't very bright IIRC) on a submission. The artist naturally wasn't very keen on the sprawling retarded arguement and abuse which resulted and wanted it deleted. He continued in this vein through the time I was there. There was various other slapfights and journal trollings too. Mouthing off about legal issues he didn't fully understand etc.
Any work he did on Ferrox was more than outweighed by his trolling and aggressive behavior towards people offering suggestions and help with Ferrox and in general on the forums, he lost FA a lot of goodwill from the community. I certainly heard more complaints about him than any other member of staff ever and more than some of the most annoying and worst people who used the site. Higgins Dragon actually had a working art site and software, www.artspots.com, under his belt which was far more than Eevee ever managed. That Dragoneer managed to let teenage boys end up running Ferrox twice over explains why it's mythical. His obsession with making it easier for underage people to view adult content was the single most creepy thing I encountered over my time there and that Portal of Evil post mirroring his Livejournal entry probably explains a lot. Just as ever though, wouldn't have been a problem if Dragoneer/Damaratus were competent. :<
Oh, so I shouldn't have that part where wolfblade was worried that if he banned me I'd "damage this site beyond what yak is capable of preventing or repairing"?
Wolfblade leaked, Damaratus leaked, Preyfar leaked (Though he probably didn't consider it leaking when he did it), Glaide leaked, I leaked in order to elicit further opinions and advice when I felt out of my depth (due to lack of mentoring and support etc) Everyone was at it.
In theory even your Significant other wasn't to know a single thing about what you were doing on pain of death. Unworkable.
Shouldn't Yak be working on Ferrox?
Yak had/has(?) to keep the current software patched up I think. He was supposed to take over Ferrox and Tsawolf take over running the software I think.
Really, the staff shouldn't have anything to do with drama. If users are bitching one another out, that's their own damn problem.
When Eevee had evacuated over that submission I mentioned, the artist naturally wasn't very happy about this and wanted it gone. Likewise, when people drop personal infomation or think it's very funny to create a throwaway account and spam someone's pages/submissions. Or if someone keeps on going around making unfunny trolling attempts time and time again on many submissions.
If it's two people bitching each other out, that doesn't need so much intervention, but trying to bargain ferrox features in such an obvious way was dumb.
Damaratus [...] He's incapable or unwilling to address REAL staff issues, so he has to play peon justice with a nearly random profiling.
"Peon Justice" is a wonderful phrase to describe it! I didn't really learn exactly what it was, but there was some event in his real life where he failed at a leadership role. He saw being (lead) admin on Furaffinity as his chance to re-assert himself as a "leader", however he was paralysed by inability to take deceives action when needed and was generally weak and ineffective. He veered between acknowledging this and trying to rectify things (always failing to) and shooting the messenger & attacking me for rocking the boat. He enjoyed the "kudos" from being lead admin, and Preyfar had a sort of strange little infatuation with him and his "big brain" and his science degree and so on. That & the fact that Damaratus lived near Preyfar at the time IIRC lead to him being appointed lead admin. (Near him, because = more control!).
Once Gearotter was trolling Starfinder with an alternate account. Damaratus for some reason got very upset over this and went and told Starfinder who was behind the account, instead of just dealing with Gearotter and telling starfinder that it was dealt with. It was not very good form. :<
Like Myr and Wicht 8)
first bastard got me so banned from FA that I didn't even know I was banned, the second one took the liberty of going through my entire gallery and finding technical reasons to delete as many submissions as possible. Professional :D
Wicht is still an admin right now.
Session Start (Irc.Furnet.org:#FurAffinity-core): Mon Feb 04 16:45:31 2008
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[03:26] * Wicht rescrolls and reads, "I sound way more jaded then I like to come off. I think I need a new line of work." -.-
[03:26] Damaratus: Or just give yourself a chance to see some varying perspectives.
[03:26] Wicht: It isn't that.
[03:26] Wicht: Its just RL stress.
[03:26] * Damaratus nods
[03:27] Wicht: I rather have a problem, except if its some douchebag like Nobuyuki.
Because Wicht was put in as an administrator when Crypto hijacked the administration, he set his own terms as it were: he was only going to focus on deleting old submissions which were against the rules. I.e stuff that had been lying around for months and years. The problem with this was, if it had already lay around, it could lie around longer; it was more important to get the new submissions coming in, so that more were dealt with each day than were uploaded and people got the head up on the rules.
However in practice this was mostly theoretical since he didn't do anything for months at a time (see lazyness quote), just occasionally turning up to stick his oar in. He could be quite abusive and aggressive; When Wolfblade was plotting, he manipulated Wicht easily enough, and wicht just one time out of the blue started swearing at me on PM in IRC, making veiled threats and claiming that I was frightening the rest of the admins and that was why they were all so lazy: they were afraid of me. He wouldn't be a problem if Dragoneer/Damaratus had just let him go.
Wolfblade imagined conspiracies involving the "Artplz people". I remember that you made an animated .gif of wolfblades head, with an endless stream of <words> coming out of it. That was very amusing.
Sidenote, what happened to artplz? (which was going to be an art-based community site like FA IIRC) I remember registering for and posting on it's forums. I assume it had something to do with Arcturus. :<
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Blueroo's root password to Furaffinity didn't have it's password changed for months and months after he quit, so he had root access all that time (He didn't do anything and I'm not saying he would have) but that no one checked it was a bit of an oversight. :<
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there's a lot of words here
You really are coming off kind of wolfblade-y yourself right now. "crypto hijacked the administration" etc.
Most of the admins hadn't read the rules. (...) After the lazy administrators,
I do hope you're including yourself in this.
In defense of Eevee (nb, him and I get along and might even be considered friends)
That eevee post was mirrored from '03, apparently he was 16 at the time. We've all done stupid shit when we were younger, no?
I've seen the code Higgins offered FA, it's nowhere near as complete as you seem to think. As for veekun, since it's got an open Subversion feed I can actually see what the code looks like. According to sloccount, it's a 6000-line Perl project (Ferrox as of Fri Mar 6 2009 is ~5k lines of code; i'm not sure how much of this is boilerplate). Eevee obviously isn't an incompetent programmer.
It's hard to find someone who's both a decent coder and good at dealing with people, alas.
When Eevee had evacuated over that submission I mentioned, the artist naturally wasn't very happy about this and wanted it gone. Likewise, when people drop personal infomation or think it's very funny to create a throwaway account and spam someone's pages/submissions. Or if someone keeps on going around making unfunny trolling attempts time and time again on many submissions.
This is why "block button" and "delete comment button" were invented. And even the "mass delete these checked comment" cf livejournal.
Hell, the middle one shouldn't even be hard to shoehorn into the current codebase.
Sidenote, what happened to artplz? (which was going to be an art-based community site like FA IIRC) I remember registering for and posting on it's forums. I assume it had something to do with Arcturus. :<
nrr keeps talking about unearthing it every once in a while, or rewriting it in some other language, or something of that sort.
As is usual, I've got a copy of the source code. It's competently written PHP, which is a rarity these days.
And, y'know, I keep offering to be an FA admin, but apparently I "cause too much trouble".
Blueroo's root password to Furaffinity didn't have it's password changed for months and months after he quit, so he had root access all that time (He didn't do anything and I'm not saying he would have) but that no one checked it was a bit of an oversight. :<
Heh, one of the places I worked hasn't changed the root password since '06. Not that it matters, because I'm in /etc/sudoers.
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Preyfar leaked quite a bit through Calorath, his bestest fuckbuddy from Tapestries since years back. I'm not aware of Calorath ever being in any sort of staff position, but he had access to the admin forum and liked to lord it over others. I understood Blueroo quit partially over that reason.
Artplz was Arcturus' project, after losing FA. He fired it up as a Gold Of My Own when Jheryn made it clear that the hardware monkeys don't get say over who gets admin rights. Artplz was going to use the FA software, for a while it was going to use the entire FA DB. It died painfully when Arcturus was unable to legally procure the FA software (lol why would you want it) and found he couldn't easily steal or write his own. Arcturus also started Chanplz, an fchan clone, but some brittle and useless shits (Arshes Nei and others) threw tantrums and withdrew their support from Artplz, further dooming it. He moved on WTFur, under WTFux, but again attempted to steal everything and quit when he wasn't appointed grand high god of everything.
Eevee still does a lot of stupid shit, eg spending more time writing stupid shit and waving his e-penis around on FA and LJ than coding or sleeping. His only redeeming feature is his ability to shout obvious things at very stupid people. Good for you!!!!!!!!!!!
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Preyfar leaked quite a bit through Calorath, his bestest fuckbuddy from Tapestries since years back. I'm not aware of Calorath ever being in any sort of staff position, but he had access to the admin forum and liked to lord it over others. I understood Blueroo quit partially over that reason.
Calorath never had access to the admin forums, that was checked in the forum logs, account records and so on. Was quite thoroughly gone over since Preyfar and Damaratus demanded it after Blueroo quit. Someone who did have access to admin forum stuff was Marthean. He was an admin who quit after cub art was allowed on FA, but he had subscribed to the admin forums while an admin, and this resulted in him getting posts made to the admin forum sent to his e-mail. It was only after the whole Calorath leak and Blueroo quitting that Yak discovered it. I don't think anything was ever proved, because anyone sensible would pass stuff on outside FA however. Calorath just enjoyed stirring and the attention and never actually gave out any real info on how he got the leaks AFAIK. It might have also been Vitae since she had access to the admin forums for a time, as an "admin alumini". Blueroo saw conspiracies where there were none, like Wolfblade did.
There was in 08, one of many plans floated to try and get FA back on the right track, which involved Calorath and Arshes Nei being brought on board to "fix things up", anything was better at that point, than carrying on like things where. Didn't really get anywhere because Preyfar. I gave him some information about some new forums software which Preyfar was considering (The current software was about to fall over, people offered to pay for some quality forum software, yet he dithered), and Calorath jumped the gun on talking to Preyfar about it, before he was "supposed" to know about it and Preyfar, curiously, came over all distrustful of Calorath. Calorath wanted to help FA and Preyfar and told Preyfar that he ('far) was bad at managing it (it's what friends do and all that), but gave up after a while because Preyfar doesn't change.
You really are coming off kind of wolfblade-y yourself right now. "crypto hijacked the administration" etc.
[...]
Most of the admins hadn't read the rules. (...) After the lazy administrators,
I do hope you're including yourself in this.
Oh he really did that. It and the aftermath was all documented in the admin forum replete with IRC logs in a post called "The raiders are at the gate and no one is listening". That's how I found out about it since it happened before I was on staff. I made my fair share of mistakes but I wasn't lazy, since I did as much as or more than the rest of the admins put together. I remember Yak posted up a system log of admin actions, in the forums, I'd done more than any other admins, and more than most of them put together. Being so active while the others just vegetated was what completely burnt me out. With regards to Eevee, there must be a mould somewhere turning out 18 and 20 something techie programmer types who idle on IRC channels 24/7, use Linux, is above the common herd, loves "down and out in the magic kingdom" (because it's a novel that was released under the creative commons license), is a "white hat", technological singularity and post humanism and cyberpunk libertarianism and who "shout(s) obvious things at very stupid people." Muck accounts optional. blah blah blah <words>.
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Preyfar leaked quite a bit through Calorath, his bestest fuckbuddy from Tapestries since years back. I'm not aware of Calorath ever being in any sort of staff position, but he had access to the admin forum and liked to lord it over others. I understood Blueroo quit partially over that reason.
Calorath never had access to the admin forums, that was checked in the forum logs, account records and so on. Was quite thoroughly gone over since Preyfar and Damaratus demanded it after Blueroo quit. Someone who did have access to admin forum stuff was Marthean.
Well, I do recall marthaen hanging out a lot on calorath's IRC channel. That makes a modicum of sense.
there must be a mould somewhere turning out 18 and 20 something techie programmer types who idle on IRC channels 24/7, use Linux, is above the common herd, loves "down and out in the magic kingdom" (because it's a novel that was released under the creative commons license), is a "white hat", technological singularity and post humanism and cyberpunk libertarianism and who "shout(s) obvious things at very stupid people." Muck accounts optional.
To a third-level approximation, this describes me :(
Anyway, I don't think you should receive accolades for being the admin who most-prolifically misapplied the already vague rules. Sorry?
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Hello, It is me, Crypto Dragon.
I would like to bring attention to what actually happened during the Ferrox Debacle. I will take some blame but I am not the villain that Dave Hyena is making me out to be.
I graduated college at 19. I had already been working on various open source projects and had a degree at that point. I had been developing software for the bioinfomatics lab too.
I had been dragged into the FurAffinity project by Gushi, who hosted the servers for FA for a long time. Gushi contacted me because he respected me as a programmer and basically told me "The software is literally causing hardware damage. Please help them." I got in contact with Dragoneer and at that point I ran two "CREATE INDEX" calls on the database and suddenly the site was running.
However, about the time I started to get involved, I also started a new job. At the beginning I thought I would have hours of time on the side to work on Ferrox. It was a loose startup environment and everything else. Instead it was a total lack of motivation and caused lots of stress upon me. And any of the programmers here will tell you that that situation really reduces your productivity. I also believed at the time that I could do it all myself. This would be one of my screw ups which is trying to do a massive project like FA all by myself. I had gotten tsawolf and Ice-Wolf who were both quite good at what they do to start helping me but it really never went anywhere.
Eventually, I did the recruitment call. I deleted all the message but I literally had HUNDREDS of resumes that I had to sort through to find some competent people in this fandom who would be interested.
This is when the Ferrox project really started. When I made that "Fuck you." statement it was around the time I had completed that recruitment process and we were finally starting to get to work and instead of getting any praise for what I did do, instead I got nothing. I had been setting up Trac and other project management software, I know I showed it to the admins on a number of occasions and even told them "Please, give me input!" and I got nothing to work off of.
The issue with me taking control happened on one occasion, what happened was there was an active troll attack one night, and Dragoneer has one of his infamous emo moments and said "I'm done!" and signed off IRC. We were in the middle of stuff and nobody else was around. I immediately took a poll of people and took control for one evening explicitly stating that should Dragoneer return I would gladly turn the reigns over. After getting chewed out for being that passionate about the site I lost lots of the passion too.
I did so much for that site. Anyone remember when the site went down and was replaced with an extortion notice from Alkora? I was the one who talked down Alkora to turn the site back on and hand the DNS over again. Dragoneer had already said fuck it at that point. I spent money on multiple occasions for the site. I initially registered all of the furaffinity.* domains as well as ferroxart.* in case we were forced to switch.
My issue wasn't that I was trying to become an administrator and Eevee repeated this point in the same way when he quit too. It wasn't that either of us wanted to be administrators in the slightest. In fact before I left the team completely I had removed my own admin bit from the system and just tried to focus on development, pulling myself completely away from the drama. The reason was the input we were trying to give to the administrators was not being listened too at all. And after doing lots of research on project management (which I was doing for the ferrox project) this is yet another thing which remove motivation from programmers. Programming is inherently a creative task, and telling creative people to sit in a room and do what they are told is not the way to get good stuff out of them.
I really had only two suggestions. The first was try and follow what the users are doing with the site and make it most useful for them, while still keeping a firm focus on the art. The thought was that people are using FA as a photobucket because they need to have "content" to be part of the community. If the only content they have is photobucket, let people use it as such. Just make it easy to filter that crap out. The second part was to put the users more in control about what was happening around their content to remove load off of the administrators
The biggest example of the difference would be shown in what I will call the dragon103 issue. What happened was that a user dragon103, who had obvious mental issues with an inability to separate fantasy from reality, commented on a picture of another character Hida, who is a voreaphile, being eaten from the creature from pan's labyrinth. The thread went back and forth showing that A) dragon103 had no ability to separate fantasy from reality and B) had a crush on Hida that was unrequited. This thread went on and eventually he makes some comment along the lines of "This picture would be fine if the dragon was smiling or something like that." At this point soderjen makes a parody picture along those lines. soderjen got banned.
What should have happened under any sane system is that the user should have been able to click on dragon103's content and go "Nope" And delete it or "screen" it like LJ does. Or under a sane administration team it should have been deemed that dragon103 was the one originally harassing the artist and because of the backlog on the administration team was not able to be resolved until it had devolved to that point. Instead soderjen and a bunch of people attempting to "police" the thread by trolling it got banned and dragon103 got away free. This is not the way to run a community. There are books written on this topic and this is exactly the wrong way to go about it.
Dave, I am more than willing to discuss whatever disagreements you have with me over some live communication method too. But I would wish that you would stop ruining my name and spreading lies about me too.
Crypto
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I did so much for that site.
Session Start (irc.furnet.org:#idlefurs): Wed Dec 26 15:49:51 2007
[15:49] *** #idlefurs was created on Wed Dec 26 15:47:29 2007.
[...]
[23:50] yak[away]: until recently (two months i think) no actual coding was done for ferrox. nothing at all. icewolf has been mia all the time and not once i ever saw him. crypto didn't do a thing not only for ferroxm but not even fa when he was considered it's coder
[...]
[23:50] yak[away]: the only coding being done now for ferrox is by net-cat, who is learning python as he goes
[...]
[23:51] yak[away]: at this rate duke nukem will be out before ferrox
[23:51] Preyfar: I told Crypto to abandon Ferrox, and just start recoding FA from the ground up as it is, fixing everything - filters, search, etc.
[23:51] yak[away]: at this rate duke nukem will be out before ferrox
[23:51] Preyfar: Then we will worry about new features later.
[23:51] yak[away]: crypto has been throwing firestorms in the channel recently due to speaking to you i presume
[23:51] Preyfar: I honestly feel like I could go back and learn coding and do it all myself by the time we'll get anything done.
[...]
[23:55] yak[away]: you do not know how this frustrates me. how i have to do everything myself every time an issue happens on FA. how i have to do the damage control in addition to actualyl fixing the stuff. how i have to put up with gushi, who's speach can be so damn grating to get even the tiny bit of stuff done on the servers that i can not do withouf physical access. how nobody is ever around to help out when i clearly see admins being online at that time.
[...]
[23:56] Preyfar: yak[away]: Everytime I bring it up to Crypto he says "Yak said he wanted to do it all."
[23:56] yak[away]: yes i did, want to know for what reason?
[23:56] Preyfar: And frankly, Yak needs to be in charge of that because out of all of us, he knows what's a realistic expectation of time, importance and more.
[23:56] Preyfar: I can't believe we're sitting here over a year later and don't have a line of code on the new system to show for it
[23:56] yak[away]: because i do not want to distract them from working on the code. but i see no work done, and i'm bleeding here for nothing
Sorry Yak :( , I'm sure this won't make you happy, but it is for those who care about such things and that sort of care is what will keep people questioning FA, for what palliative affect it has.
Viz. recruitment calls, It was odd how despite all these hundreds of people applying, all the ferrox staff ended up being friends of yours or from your social circle. I think they all even hung out on the same IRC channel (#hackfurs).
Communication was appalling, even trying to get the names of those who were on ferrox took a long time and even with a specific forum just for the Ferrox/FA technical & programming stuff, it was never used. At one point there was more information about Ferrox on Livejournal than on the FA forums.
If you didn't want to be an admin, trying to interfere in how the site was run; harping on about photographs, I counted about 20 odd sample days, to settle this later with Wicht and photographs were never usually more than about 8 to 9% of the daily uploads and Ferrox was wanted to have separate folders to take them out of the main submission stream anyway. Plus FA was from the start a community-based art site (photographs allowed as part of that), not solely "an art-site" as you thought it should become. Sticking your oar in when your friends came into contact with the administration (I think that's why you got all het up about Dragon103 incident) going on and on on IRC and not shutting up or making a post about it on the forums, kept on demanding that Kaye Darktail (I think she used to go by Sian Silverhair) be taken onto staff was funny way of showing it.
The only tech monkey who genuinely earned the right to be an admin was Yak.
Dragon103, doubt this will cut much ice, but he made some stupid comments, I told him off for it and a few people tore strips off him for saying those silly things, but then lots of people saw an easy target and started leaving a constant stream of comments on his page, spam, catchphrases, crude insults, and harassing him to a great excess and that had to be dealt with. Sonderjen, had already been in contact with the administration before due to harassing people and so got a proper voted on temp. ban for it. The mistake I made there was not removing the "B& for being an idiot" bit which Sonderjen himself had put on his page. I didn't want to be seen to be altering peoples profiles, but fuck, that was a big mistake not to there because people thought I'd put it there. As I said, I made my fair share of them.
As for reputation ruining, ah come on, I doubt you're a terrible person in real life or away from FA. I always assumed that these people were mostly your average joe outside their role as a member of staff on Furaffinity. The only people who mien and conduct was so deeply unpleasant that I wouldn't want to be in the same room as them would be Preyfar & Wolfblade.
Side note, are you helping program/on staff with Inaki's Yiffit/Furverts/ (Now BlueTaboo) site? I hope that goes okay, whether you do or not, since any alternative to FA is good thing! Though I sure wish Higgins Dragon had enabled Artspots adult content facility, since trying to replace Yerf was doomed & having two separate sites, one adult (blue taboo) & one clean (artspots) is nowhere near as "competitive" as FA, even if they were to have shared logins as I think was floated(?). :<
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I don't think, past entertainment value, any of us give a shit about the issues with FA. On that note though, damned if this isn't entertaining...
I graduated college at 19. I had already been working on various open source projects and had a degree at that point. I had been developing software for the bioinfomatics lab too.
Who uses his vast knowledge and legendary modesty for hobbies such as Googling himself.
The issue with me taking control happened on one occasion, what happened was there was an active troll attack one night, and Dragoneer has one of his infamous emo moments and said "I'm done!" and signed off IRC.
Active troll attack. Not just griefing, but a griefing in progress!
Programming is inherently a creative task, and telling creative people to sit in a room and do what they are told is not the way to get good stuff out of them.
Except that's how virtually every software company on Earth operates, but hey stick it to the Man with those pokedex!
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Quotes like that one above, taken out of context, tend to give a very skewed perception of the situation, Dave.
I really wish it hadn't been posted.
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Wow that sure is a lot of words.
This thread is dangerously close to being locked.
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Viz. recruitment calls, It was odd how despite all these hundreds of people applying, all the ferrox staff ended up being friends of yours or from your social circle. I think they all even hung out on the same IRC channel (#hackfurs).
When I did that call, which I posted to my personal FurAffinity journal and to the site. Most of the people who submitted were beta testers who I all listed. There were only two in my recollection who applied who weren't in that group. One was an old school hardware guy, and one was Jurann. Indi did not hang out in #hackfurs, net-cat wasn't there either, nor was kalu. And as a note, yak hangs out in #hackfurs as well.
Communication was appalling, even trying to get the names of those who were on ferrox took a long time and even with a specific forum just for the Ferrox/FA technical & programming stuff, it was never used. At one point there was more information about Ferrox on Livejournal than on the FA forums.
I will admit I am not the biggest fan of forums, and I much prefer live conversation like IRC. Given that a number of the other people involved were on IRC this was just easier. The other thing is that wikis and ticketing systems are much better at organizing which is what the Trac instance I set up was for.
[snip about dragon103]
I was not trying to say that no one else was blameless or should not have gotten a ban for things. I was really trying to say the administration seemed to always been in cleanup mode rather than dealing with things pro-actively. And because of that, the administration's actions always looked suspect. I had no relation to dragon103 till someone in an IRC chatroom (not #hackfurs) had tossed me the link. Some of my frustration came from even when I clearly said "I am not an admin." people would still come to me with complaints. And I think a number of those complaints were valid, and instead I was ignored.
Side note, are you helping program/on staff with Inaki's Yiffit/Furverts/ (Now BlueTaboo) site? I hope that goes okay, whether you do or not, since any alternative to FA is good thing! Though I sure wish Higgins Dragon had enabled Artspots adult content facility, since trying to replace Yerf was doomed & having two separate sites, one adult (blue taboo) & one clean (artspots) is nowhere near as "competitive" as FA, even if they were to have shared logins as I think was floated(?). :<
I am working with that group now on a sidelong project that has already had some releases. I really hope for a good art site to come out of all of this.
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Programming is inherently a creative task, and telling creative people to sit in a room and do what they are told is not the way to get good stuff out of them.
Except that's how virtually every software company on Earth operates, but hey stick it to the Man with those pokedex!
Two things here. One, I wasn't the one with the pokedex. Two, virtually every, but not all. The two places I have worked at, both startups, have some level of input from the development staff. And the one I am at currently has significantly more than the first. We don't get to steer the whole boat, but our sections we certainly have some input upon.
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Retrospectacle? Is that some kind of reunion, or what? :)
Quotes like that one above, taken out of context, tend to give a very skewed perception of the situation, Dave.
Mhmm. FA tends to run on "out of context" whispers-and-gossip, though, and hasn't been able to raise itself from that level.
Like admins hacking into PM notes where a one-off personal discussion comment is being made regarding /general/ reservations on how they've been interacting with the community which causes them to blow sky-high and demand the individual be banned from the site immediately and, when that doesn't work, poisoning the water and stirring further conspiracies for the next year or two. Of course, no-one admin-side would actually bother to discuss with the individual to find out the truth and get things cleared up before the poison set in, would they? So much for trust...
I really wish it hadn't been posted.
Not sure what started the current thread, but I guess locking everything away in private hasn't really stood FA in good stead, either, from management and development perspectives. Still ticking along, though, which is good to see even if achievement has been delayed or deferred. Thanks as ever for the good work on that, for the community.
Cheers,
David.
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Running online communities is like building a life size replica of the Eiffel tower with snakes.
*rofl* Ain't quite /that/ difficult, yak.
Nice quote, though. ;)
d.
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The two places I have worked at, both startups, have some level of input from the development staff. And the one I am at currently has significantly more than the first. We don't get to steer the whole boat, but our sections we certainly have some input upon.
Scientists are hard at work trying to discern the quantum of how little I care, but they have yet to devise a way to look into care-quarks and other sub-caretomic particles. In short, if the measurement of me caring were to set off a poisonous gas mixture into a sealed box with a cat... it would probably not care either.
I dunno. Why are you still typing? Are you writing a sequel to Moby Dick?
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My favorite thing about Wolfblade McDipshit was how he would swoop in and defend his sycophantic furry buddies when they were clearly violating the very rules he went out of his way to enforce on everyone else without...even stopping to think how incredibly poorly it reflected on him/the admin team.
Clearly admin material right there :)
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Wolfblade was a humorless dipshit to the Nth degree. If his purpose was to make everyone else look good with his unbelievable prickitude, I'd have to say he was successful.
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Artplz was Arcturus' project, after losing FA. He fired it up as a Gold Of My Own when Jheryn made it clear that the hardware monkeys don't get say over who gets admin rights. Artplz was going to use the FA software, for a while it was going to use the entire FA DB. It died painfully when Arcturus was unable to legally procure the FA software (lol why would you want it) and found he couldn't easily steal or write his own. Arcturus also started Chanplz, an fchan clone, but some brittle and useless shits (Arshes Nei and others) threw tantrums and withdrew their support from Artplz, further dooming it. He moved on WTFur, under WTFux, but again attempted to steal everything and quit when he wasn't appointed grand high god of everything.
shit summary, but manages to stay (mostly) true. Thing was a team effort from the beginning, and I have no fears now saying that it was from encouragement from a few key people that the original FA was taken down and the code re-accquisitioned by us citing some GPL crap (which I believe was perfectly within the scope, but any of you nerdy legal fags can correct me if they remember this drama).
"What happened" at the end was basically regarding Arcturus, who btw could've easily continued the project if in fact it wasn't actually a team effort. Team broke apart after some disagreements over various things which I suppose is needlessly picking off a scab to mention but involved some unprofessional behavior which didn't stop even after the rest of the team made efforts to clean up the act and get away from a shitty reputation we didn't deserve thanks in part to paranoia from the old FA crew. There were one or two incidences of shennanigans I don't even remember now that were sorta the last straw, after getting blamed several times for FA getting hacked (because it was full of holes like security swiss cheese) -- always getting blamed for shit we didn't do nor take credit for, and then fucking shennanigans happened which ruined the good word and reputation of everyone on the team. Like Pi said, the idea for artplz is still kicked around from time to time, but if it did come back it wouldn't be some DA clone -- I've been doing some write-ups on ideas to make it a viable business model outside this community should there ever be another serious effort to revive the project
ChanPlz was done by Arcturus, with all the moderators being anonymous except for him, because he refused to do so (which is also why he was the only one with a name attached to be hung out to dry when the shit hit the fan). I guess in his mind there was glory to be had from stirring up a lot of drama over the furries' (at that time) very warped attitudes over copyright, fair use and the like. I thought it would be more trouble than it was worth to have our names attached to the damn thing even though it was obvious who was running it, for the sake of avoiding direct ad hominem attacks over trying to moderate an anonymous board (for the record, nobody in the damned community seems to understand or respect proper imageboard culture), and also because at the time nobody knew that Sage Nadia was also Ayukawataur and I felt there was a good chance any of us with a lick of respect left in the community would get blackballed anywhere she had influence over what happened at ChanPlz (remember at the time, the only place you could do business with auctions was FurBid!)
tl;dr, essentially, Arc was a perpetual drama magnet, and after a while the quality/quantity of work started to slip and become nonexistent after a while; a re-write of the original FA code from the ground up was never made/completed, and we only had experimental versions of the FA-based code with our improvements running. nrr was given the task of doing the code after arcturus was forced to step down as the head of the project and for various reasons that never went anywhere and the project is now in duke nukem forever limbo 8)
sorry for jumping around back and forth a lot in this post