FA Retrospectacle

[a pigeon]

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
...
[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. :<
-

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. :<

[Pi]

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.

[Kindrift]

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!!!!!!!!!!!

[a pigeon]

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>.

[Pi]

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?

[cryptodragon]

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

[a pigeon]

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(?). :<

[LordNagetiere]

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!

[yak]

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.

[ProvincialTwit]

Wow that sure is a lot of words.

This thread is dangerously close to being locked.

[cryptodragon]

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.

[cryptodragon]

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.

[uncia2000]

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.

[uncia2000]

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.

[LordNagetiere]

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?

[Captain Cowgirl]

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

[rodox_video]

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.

[nobuyuki]

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

sorry for jumping around back and forth a lot in this post