FA coder is unpaid after 100s of hours of work - Exploited by FA

[Conan]

Yak: Here's your problem. I found it, and it's called Yak. He may well be the single greatest obstacle to forward progress in FA's history, and the amazing thing is that for all I know he's being *paid* to be it. His unwillingness to trust any new developers beyond himself means that he has cemented himself as the sole king of the IT assets of FA. The code he writes reminds me of myself in the early 2000s, except he's writing it today. It is also highly likely that the open-sourced code that I released, the rewrite that secures and modernizes the FA web application, will never be implemented on the production servers, and he will be the sole reason.

The funny thing is...I think the people *inside* FA know what a train wreck they've gotten themselves into, but they know that if you were to yank Yak's access overnight, he would still have 20 different ways to wreck shit up, and there's no way they could catch them all at once.

Now imagine trying to rebuild the system from the ground up knowing you have that giant roadblock waiting for you at the end. Knowing the astronomical odds that anything you're doing will be worth anything in the end, because the guy in charge of implementing it is scared to death of losing his relevance. Welcome to my life.

One of the things that has always been interesting about Yak is his involvement in the fandom, or rather that he doesn't seem to be involved very much at all. Did you ever see any evidence of this?

Yak has a very shady back story that begins with him just appearing one day as a "bug tester" back in 2006, then rapidly becoming a developer before getting full system access. This happened before Dragoneer even owned the site, and the people who were on the dev team with him when he appeared on the scene have no idea where he came from. He's never really seemed to be involved in the fandom at all, which is why so many rumors surround him. Why does someone with no involvement in the furry fandom have such a death grip on one of the furry fandom's largest social hubs?

[Rowedahelicon]

Yak: Here's your problem. I found it, and it's called Yak. He may well be the single greatest obstacle to forward progress in FA's history, and the amazing thing is that for all I know he's being *paid* to be it. His unwillingness to trust any new developers beyond himself means that he has cemented himself as the sole king of the IT assets of FA. The code he writes reminds me of myself in the early 2000s, except he's writing it today. It is also highly likely that the open-sourced code that I released, the rewrite that secures and modernizes the FA web application, will never be implemented on the production servers, and he will be the sole reason.

The funny thing is...I think the people *inside* FA know what a train wreck they've gotten themselves into, but they know that if you were to yank Yak's access overnight, he would still have 20 different ways to wreck shit up, and there's no way they could catch them all at once.

Now imagine trying to rebuild the system from the ground up knowing you have that giant roadblock waiting for you at the end. Knowing the astronomical odds that anything you're doing will be worth anything in the end, because the guy in charge of implementing it is scared to death of losing his relevance. Welcome to my life.

One of the things that has always been interesting about Yak is his involvement in the fandom, or rather that he doesn't seem to be involved very much at all. Did you ever see any evidence of this?

Yak has a very shady back story that begins with him just appearing one day as a "bug tester" back in 2006, then rapidly becoming a developer before getting full system access. This happened before Dragoneer even owned the site, and the people who were on the dev team with him when he appeared on the scene have no idea where he came from. He's never really seemed to be involved in the fandom at all, which is why so many rumors surround him. Why does someone with no involvement in the furry fandom have such a death grip on one of the furry fandom's largest social hubs?

That's actually a pretty good point, I've never thought about that before. I've never seen anything like a fursona, or even an actual picture of him. I'm totally thinking he has something on Neer but what could be that bad that he's been allowed to run freely (or lazily) for a decade?

Apparently from someone I've spoken with, Yak does have himself hard coded into the system. if($userID==$yakID) $admin = $user sort of hard coding. So if anyone does manage to get him out, I'm sure he has a plan.

[rodox_video]

One of the things that has always been interesting about Yak is his involvement in the fandom, or rather that he doesn't seem to be involved very much at all. Did you ever see any evidence of this?

Yak has a very shady back story that begins with him just appearing one day as a "bug tester" back in 2006, then rapidly becoming a developer before getting full system access. This happened before Dragoneer even owned the site, and the people who were on the dev team with him when he appeared on the scene have no idea where he came from. He's never really seemed to be involved in the fandom at all, which is why so many rumors surround him. Why does someone with no involvement in the furry fandom have such a death grip on one of the furry fandom's largest social hubs?

People have been asking this question ever since 12/16 and getting no real satisfying answers. The closest thing to an answer that comes up is that they somehow became BFFS4eva when they met in Kyrgyzstan on that contract job. (If that's even where they met - am I mixing something up here?)

BTW, did you know that in 2010 there was a massive private notes leak from FA? Some details here:

https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php?topic=434.0

IMVU would probably want to know about that sort of thing.

i think imvu either a) knows all about 12/16 and doesn't give a shit or b) is in a position to know all about 12/16 and has zero interest in learning anything about it

it's pretty much the only way things would have happened the way they did

[Kindrift]

And so does Sean Piche draw ever closer to Chris Roberts, minus the $110 million, but with 10 years less development and both nothing to show.

[ProvincialTwit]

And so does Sean Piche draw ever closer to Chris Roberts, minus the $110 million, but with 10 years less development and both nothing to show.

The FurCitizen ethical behavior module is delayed again

[Anarcho-Loser]

I've never seen anything like a fursona.

I have, actually. Exactly once. So at one point in time Yak at least made some token attempt at participating with the community.

This was ten years ago. It was an adult TF pic on the website of artist Keenan Woods AKA Blackrat.

The artist no longer has a website and I havent been able to find the image again, so its probably lost somewhere on the internet.

I only remember it because that was the first furry art website I had ever seen and served as my introduction to the beautiful trainwreck that is the furry subculture.

[Gryphoneer]

They've indicated that the FULL payment I'm owed is headed my direction as of this afternoon, and I'll be able to confirm that has arrived in the next day or two. After that, I'll post up a video indicating that the biggest of my worries is, thankfully, over.

That's... actually a much better outcome than I expected, nice.

Now that you're solvent you could hire a lawyer and prevent Piche from grifting anybody else ever again by suing him six ways from Sunday. Or you could sit on your ass and do nothing because furries.

[N]

Now that you're solvent you could hire a lawyer and prevent Piche from grifting anybody else ever again by suing him six ways from Sunday. Or you could sit on your ass and do nothing because furries.

Sue him for what? He's been paid, IMVU upheld their end of the contract. Yeah, it's late, and yeah it sucks... but there's not really much else that can be done about it.

[Gryphoneer]

I don't profess to be an expert in U.S. law, but I have the nagging feeling that letting somebody work under false pretenses - like saying there's a binding contract where there is none - or putting somebody off with false claims to delay payment do constitute some sort of legal breach.

He should sue Piche in any case for the scare alone. That oughta teach him a lesson or two.

[Anarcho-Loser]

There's no way I would use what little money I have left to "prove a point" to FA/IMVU. The biggest point has been proven by the video and the response of the community, shattering any illusion that the site is almost universally loved by the fanbase it serves. That video is staying up despite the payment having been received, because the culture that prevented me from delivering what I had worked to produce is still there, and the furs in general are no better off in the end.

Exactly whos illusions here are being shattered?

[Gryphoneer]

It's not so much about proving a point than bringing belated punishment to an unrepentant criminal who aided and abetted rapists and dog-diddlers, but your situation puts the kibosh on that.

Something different, what about the rest of the team? Did others leave or new ones join while you were there? Do they have something to say to the sudden end of their recode project?

[Anarcho-Loser]

None of this is new information though.

Who are the senior leadership you are referring to? Actual IMVU staff?

[N]

I don't profess to be an expert in U.S. law, but I have the nagging feeling that letting somebody work under false pretenses - like saying there's a binding contract where there is none - or putting somebody off with false claims to delay payment do constitute some sort of legal breach.

He should sue Piche in any case for the scare alone. That oughta teach him a lesson or two.

Piche probably isn't personally liable. There's a very very thin potential you could say tortious interference (interfering with the fulfillment of a contract) but that's very unlikely. US law is very focused on curing actual monetary damages, and unfortunately doesn't care about the emotional toll most things take when it comes to business relationships. Since both parties have now fulfilled the contract (albeit late) there's not really much of a remedy left.

I hate Neer as much as the next guy, but IMVU would likely be the only defendant and they've made it clear that they want to make things right with Slvr.

[Conan]

None of this is new information though.

Who are the senior leadership you are referring to? Actual IMVU staff?

I'm referring to FA's leadership, not IMVU. I had only encountered IMVU as recently as this week, and far and away they've been responsive, professional and classy folks.

Have you brought up the various points you've made here with IMVU? I would love to know how they reacted to, say, being told how negatively people view the site, or what they seemed to think about Yak, etc.

There is very little I wouldn't do just to see the expression on the IMVU exec's face when they find out the site is essentially under the control of some Moldovan guy nobody has met who refuses to let people look at anything.

[rodox_video]

There is very little I wouldn't do just to see the expression on the IMVU exec's face when they find out the site is essentially under the control of some Moldovan guy nobody has met who refuses to let people look at anything.

Again, there is just about no way they don't already know this and therefore no way they aren't OK with it. Nobody, especially not a company that pinches pennies as much as IMVU allegedly does, drops ~50K without doing at least a little poking around.

[Dima]

Silver Eagle is currently preparing for legal action from IMVU after having been told that the legal dept may be coming for him, confirmed by being permanently banned for "plagiarism and theft of Furaffinity assets"

He created a video talking about the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6oFM0BxxuI

[an hoopoe]

Silver Eagle mentions in the video that he was phoned up personally by the Vice-president of IMVU who threatened legal action. I suppose then that IMVU is indeed down with Princess Piche and doesn't care what he does or actively supports him. :/

Here is Dragoneer, from a skype chat log, telling Silver Eagle that he's OK with open source:



And here is the ban mssg. Silver Eagle had saying that open source is not OK:

[graeme]

That seems pretty basic.

The documentation, graphics, and some css were copyright FA.   Opensource products (of which I still contend, the Apache license only applies to people running it, and the only people running it were internal FA devs and IMVU, therefore the only people allowed the source would be IMVU) often do not include the graphical assets and text documentation.  That's why there are separate documentation based licenses that are used.

He took something that didn't belong to him and distributed it to the world, as well as used it as a basis for his own business.  That gets you banned, sued, and rejected no matter who you are.

[DJ_Izumi]

Huh, they also say he stole the UI code for their new site?  Does this 'FurryDigital' exist?  I can only find a GitHub that 404's.  If the UI isn't open source, then any work he did for FA was almost certainly a 'Work For Hire' where the work he produces belongs to his employer, or at least I'd be shocked if his terms of employment didn't have that condition.  So if he's taken the code he made for IMVU and is trying to repurpose it, yeah, he's fucked.

[Conan]

I'm more amused that Princess Piche communicated most of this to him via a ban notice.

Eagle fucked himself over when he accepted the money from IMVU, end of story.