Re: The thread for flipping shits (and tables)
12-20-2011, 01:07 AM
I like to think that most of the time I am not a very hateful person. There are few people I dislike (hell, I can't think of anyone on this board, and less than I can count on one hand on MSPAF) who I dislike, even fewer that I can say I outright hate.
In fact I can only think of one guy I really can't stand.
Unfortunately he also owns the webspace to the board of which I am admin.
Does that situation sound stupid to you? It is. There is basically no reason for this to be the case at all, this is how it happened:
Still, after both communities were united on this one single board everything seemed to be going sort of OK, there were no arguments about which board had been better and people seemed to forget they had ever been two separate communities in the first place.
We try and run a vaguely democratic system where the staff are elected by the members and any particularly important changes are also voted on.
Except, of course, it turns out that it's impossible for the person who creates the board not to be admin.
And then it turned out that really he just wanted to host it so he could be god king of the community (and that's my title damn it, but that's not why I hate him (honest!!)).
Yes, he was paying for the hosting space, but no that does not mean he should be allowed to be above the rules. He deleted the posts of anyone who disagreed with his (often honestly slightly ridiculous) opinions in topics and when someone sent him a (admittedly slightly rude) PM asking why their post was gone they recieved a month long ban. It took me and my wonderful partner in crime (except the opposite of that because we're staff members) about a page of arguing to get him to reduce it and then still had to covertly drop the ban time in the admin CP after he'd stopped paying attention before he'd reverse the thing.
Eventually it took me quoting several absolutely terrible things he said about both his position and other board members in public so everyone else could see what was going on (he'd also delete any post in which I reprimanded him along with his own :|) before he backed off a bit and vowed that he'd just stick around as admin so he could fix technical problems.
Despite promising that he still struggled incredibly hard against the idea that someone who wasn't him was in charge, reversing changes that (as I mentioned earlier) people had voted on and arguing against any action me or the other staff guy took.
He is basically an intolerable douchebag that we can't get rid of.
Oh and he's participated in a grand total of one out of the two hundred game topics we've had since the forum's creation.
And it was patently obvious that this was going to happen ever since the very beginning.
This isn't the first time this guy has offered his hosting services! Previously, he ran an image host purely for users of both forums which was very kind of him. The one day he got bored of the game, killed the file host and deleted everything. I mean fine, he was paying for it out of his pocket (with advertising) but he didn't think to let anyone back up their images first or warn them.
There were countless topics then rendered completely unreadable to anyone, considering the game is very heavily image based.
Then everyone decided to think "nah, he won't get bored and abandon his duties this time"
Now that's all bad enough
BUT THAT'S NOT EVEN WHY I AM POSTING THIS
In the recent months he's actually barely done anything, to my honest relief. He sort of seemed to have lost interest again to be honest, but is still hosting the board. He pops in occasionally to ask "any technical problems?" so he can appear to be actually useful, to which we always reply no.
Oh, except this time we didn't say no! Two of our members (one of whom is the beautiful Sanzh with whom you are all surely acquainted) are suddenly completely unable to post, receiving an error whenever they try and post or log out. And on top of that, the forum has actually been out of date for at least a month, with a red box popping up saying "your forum is out of date, please update to the latest version downloaded from here to apply vital security updates and bug fixes"
So we asked him if it were possible to look into a solution to the bug (my staff partner did actually find a solution but it turned out it was for a newer version than we were running) and update the forum. To which he answered "no".
Despite being the only person with access to the board's code and the file hosting, and thus the only one able to apply any code changes or board updates.
Despite the fact that he had changed the board architecture from one me and the other staff member understood purely because it was easier for he, on his end, to update.
Despite this being the one thing he was expected to do and that he himself had promised to do.
Despite the fact that someone being unable to post on a message board removes the point of them even being on the board in the first place.
Because apparently updating the board would remove the two manual changes he made by himself (these being "coloured names for staff" and "rotating avatars won't bug out and look awful" (oh and that second change didn't even work)) and thus is too much effort to fix the problem that some of our users suddenly can't post (and there's no guarantee the number is not going to rise from two, they didn't both lose this ability at the same time).
I politely (that is not sarcasm) pointed out these facts. This was his response verbatim:
So yeah. This is the one man I actually hate.
I'd be perfectly happy to pay for another message board myself and in fact I would have done this over a year ago and avoided this whole thing if he hadn't just said "I'll do it" and hosted one without asking anyone (when we already had a board and never needed a new one in the first place).
But now that would take convincing our fifty odd members to move again, abandoning another 175 army reference topics and 205 game topics over stuff that has almost entirely happened behind the scenes where they can't see it. Only the tiny cool crowd that hang out in our underpopulated IRC channel are aware that anything bad is happening at all, and even then they only know bits of it and despite being pillars of the community I don't know how well their opinion would sway anyone else's (if it even aligns with mine at all).
And I am not sure if I would even be able to manage that if I even tried.
In fact I can only think of one guy I really can't stand.
Unfortunately he also owns the webspace to the board of which I am admin.
Does that situation sound stupid to you? It is. There is basically no reason for this to be the case at all, this is how it happened:
Still, after both communities were united on this one single board everything seemed to be going sort of OK, there were no arguments about which board had been better and people seemed to forget they had ever been two separate communities in the first place.
We try and run a vaguely democratic system where the staff are elected by the members and any particularly important changes are also voted on.
Except, of course, it turns out that it's impossible for the person who creates the board not to be admin.
And then it turned out that really he just wanted to host it so he could be god king of the community (and that's my title damn it, but that's not why I hate him (honest!!)).
Yes, he was paying for the hosting space, but no that does not mean he should be allowed to be above the rules. He deleted the posts of anyone who disagreed with his (often honestly slightly ridiculous) opinions in topics and when someone sent him a (admittedly slightly rude) PM asking why their post was gone they recieved a month long ban. It took me and my wonderful partner in crime (except the opposite of that because we're staff members) about a page of arguing to get him to reduce it and then still had to covertly drop the ban time in the admin CP after he'd stopped paying attention before he'd reverse the thing.
Eventually it took me quoting several absolutely terrible things he said about both his position and other board members in public so everyone else could see what was going on (he'd also delete any post in which I reprimanded him along with his own :|) before he backed off a bit and vowed that he'd just stick around as admin so he could fix technical problems.
Despite promising that he still struggled incredibly hard against the idea that someone who wasn't him was in charge, reversing changes that (as I mentioned earlier) people had voted on and arguing against any action me or the other staff guy took.
He is basically an intolerable douchebag that we can't get rid of.
Oh and he's participated in a grand total of one out of the two hundred game topics we've had since the forum's creation.
And it was patently obvious that this was going to happen ever since the very beginning.
This isn't the first time this guy has offered his hosting services! Previously, he ran an image host purely for users of both forums which was very kind of him. The one day he got bored of the game, killed the file host and deleted everything. I mean fine, he was paying for it out of his pocket (with advertising) but he didn't think to let anyone back up their images first or warn them.
There were countless topics then rendered completely unreadable to anyone, considering the game is very heavily image based.
Then everyone decided to think "nah, he won't get bored and abandon his duties this time"
Now that's all bad enough
BUT THAT'S NOT EVEN WHY I AM POSTING THIS
In the recent months he's actually barely done anything, to my honest relief. He sort of seemed to have lost interest again to be honest, but is still hosting the board. He pops in occasionally to ask "any technical problems?" so he can appear to be actually useful, to which we always reply no.
Oh, except this time we didn't say no! Two of our members (one of whom is the beautiful Sanzh with whom you are all surely acquainted) are suddenly completely unable to post, receiving an error whenever they try and post or log out. And on top of that, the forum has actually been out of date for at least a month, with a red box popping up saying "your forum is out of date, please update to the latest version downloaded from here to apply vital security updates and bug fixes"
So we asked him if it were possible to look into a solution to the bug (my staff partner did actually find a solution but it turned out it was for a newer version than we were running) and update the forum. To which he answered "no".
Despite being the only person with access to the board's code and the file hosting, and thus the only one able to apply any code changes or board updates.
Despite the fact that he had changed the board architecture from one me and the other staff member understood purely because it was easier for he, on his end, to update.
Despite this being the one thing he was expected to do and that he himself had promised to do.
Despite the fact that someone being unable to post on a message board removes the point of them even being on the board in the first place.
Because apparently updating the board would remove the two manual changes he made by himself (these being "coloured names for staff" and "rotating avatars won't bug out and look awful" (oh and that second change didn't even work)) and thus is too much effort to fix the problem that some of our users suddenly can't post (and there's no guarantee the number is not going to rise from two, they didn't both lose this ability at the same time).
I politely (that is not sarcasm) pointed out these facts. This was his response verbatim:
Quote:I wont be repeating any work, my work here was done a long time ago.
So yeah. This is the one man I actually hate.
I'd be perfectly happy to pay for another message board myself and in fact I would have done this over a year ago and avoided this whole thing if he hadn't just said "I'll do it" and hosted one without asking anyone (when we already had a board and never needed a new one in the first place).
But now that would take convincing our fifty odd members to move again, abandoning another 175 army reference topics and 205 game topics over stuff that has almost entirely happened behind the scenes where they can't see it. Only the tiny cool crowd that hang out in our underpopulated IRC channel are aware that anything bad is happening at all, and even then they only know bits of it and despite being pillars of the community I don't know how well their opinion would sway anyone else's (if it even aligns with mine at all).
And I am not sure if I would even be able to manage that if I even tried.