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4 days ago
Current bbbbbbbbbbbbomboclat
2 likes
7 days ago
the real crime is trying to get people to play league of legends
8 likes
7 days ago
its a bit ironic coming from me but be nice to new stupid people. they're new and stupid and this forum is too dead to chase away every stupid new person
2 likes
8 days ago
DE POLO OP MIJN BODY ZIT VOL MET BLOED VAN STERVELINGEN TERWIJL IK 8.6 DRINK
11 days ago
i won't lie i got a foot fetish, but i can never taste defeat
5 likes

Bio

i like being on the most active roleplaying community oriented forum on the interwebz.

Most Recent Posts

Before I even begin replying to this mess of a post, I have to say, you really outdid yourself more than you ever have before Catchambers. I think the only time I was more amazed by you was the time you spammed threads filled with [@Mentions] of Mahz and got banned for it. You've managed to not only miss the point more often than I drink coffee in the day (I drink lots of coffee) but also have you managed to not understand most of what was written. I am amazed. You will find my comments inside.



Reading catch's post was what tuned me into this, but I did in fact use the new guild join feature that was in the general chat. It made things rather easy. I saw the message, clicked into the thread and had a welcome put up split seconds after the user posted. It's entirely our issue to welcome people, and I try to throw at least some sort of welcome to people who haven't had a response when I feel like hopping over there, which is fairly frequently.

In other words, when it comes to welcoming, we're just a lazy old bunch of bastards it seems.


Yup. Whether or not it's really an issue that is worth fixing is another matter but an attempt was made, now it's up to the people to take it. They won't but that's out of the hands of anyone at that point.

Okay, if you're in/running a fandom RP, and the best you can come up with for a character is "son/daughter/girlfriend/third cousin of canon character" then you need to try harder.


I'm Boruto's dad.

<Snipped quote by Odin>

I don't quite get your meaning.


How many immigrants come to the USA yearly? That's a lot of fish to sieve through and that is just to establish 'potential' POI's. Then you drag a smaller finer net through that batch to get the people who actually are suspicious. Mind you, by that time you're left with, what, maybe 1% of all immigrants. Seems like you're looking for a needle in a haystack and using the most inefficient way to do it.

What I'm saying is, from the article I infer that they're using big data on a pool that is incredibly large. But they're using it in a way that isn't effective. Eh, we have this thing called 'dragging nets' or sleepnet. It's a net you drag through the ocean at the bottom and catch fish with it that way. It's nice because you catch a lot of fish with relatively little effort. But it's bad because the net gets tangled and you catch things you don't need - it's not very specific.

It's the same with surveillance. If you use a net like that (net referring to the method of detection) you're gonna get stuck a lot and you're gonna catch a lot of things that are not what you need (like, you're looking for herring but you catch a lot of trout or w/e. In surveillance, you want to catch the bad guys, but you're gonna just end up catching a lot of guys who google 'egg timer' and 'camping propane tank' or people who just happen to write something weird).

I'm not saying the entire idea of this is erroneous because it could be used, but they haven't refined it and taken extra processing steps to the point where they can minimize the amount of false reports. They're just analyzing big data and not knowing what they're looking for. It's a problem that has existed in US intelligence agencies since.. forever. That's why there's so many reports of people being watched for no reason or getting swatted for weird reasons.

Waiting until we have a problem and then acting is foolish. It is easier to stop a problem from developing in the first place than it is to untangle it after it has already developed. To look at the situation in Europe and then say that maybe migrants aren't a problem is obtuse. The cost of migrants outweighs the benefits.


The situation here is more just one of intense stupidity and the EU's idiotic structures. I mean, pairing up all the different things that go into this, it's just stupid and we never should've gotten into it. Letting the EU decides who takes how many refugees? Retarded. Letting the EU dictate the vetting process? Retarded. Letting Turkey hold us hostage with refugees? Retarded. Putting thousands of refugees in countries that already have failing infrastructure for housing? RETARDED. Putting refugees in countries with plenty of population while not giving more to the countries that need population? Makes me screech like a retarded kid on /pol/ that thinks the jews are behind everything. It really makes me mad.

Maybe this is my god complex talking but I think if I was in charge I could've done something far more efficient than the shit we have now. It's just plain bad and stupid. Now with the recent German elections we might get Merkel to tone it down a bit before she loses even more votes.
@boomlover Yeah, that one is still alive I think.
<Snipped quote by Odin>

Any form of moderator rank makes you a representative of the guild's staff team, and that is the angle that I approached the self nomination with. Moderators on this site simply do not nominate themselves if they want to be truly considered. And yes, I don't see the point in offering the rank piecemeal - it's far more effective, based on what I've seen on this site and others, to have teams with full capabilities (and perhaps specific things that they do on the side) that manage the site and its offshoots as a whole as compared to plopping moderators in each section to make a chaotic structure.


Two of the current moderator team have nominated themselves to Hank. Despite you saying it didn't happen - it did. I should just correct you on that - please not that I'm not disagreeing with everything you said, but just saying that the way things work here isn't according to a standard set of rules, it's down to whatever the moderators feel like. This structure has worked for 10 years now, it seems, but we can all agree that post-guildfall things have changed.

Who is "the community"? Who stands for them? Who has properly collected the views of what is referenced as the "community" in any of the posts of this nature? I consider myself a member and wasn't asked about it to form that base.


Perhaps you weren't involved in the first thread that was made where we saw a wider reach in terms of users coming in and putting in their two cents (which is where the first list of suggestions came from). Although I vaguely seem to recall you participating, I'm not sure and I'm not in the mood to go hunting for it.

Yes, you were asked to participate, but my lack of capability to really publicly ask people + the fact that suggestions is the single least used sub section made it hard for me to attract a real group of representative users. My apologies for that, really, sincerely. I wish I could've done a better job but PM'ing all members of the forum 5 members at a time but that is just logistically impossible.

You see where I am going with this no? No, the suggestions are perhaps not entirely representative, but they're representative of the people who took time out of their day to participate. And you know, I think participating in a thread like this at least gives my bitching some legitimacy because unlike others who whine and complain, I go out of my way to at least try to help.

ArenaSnow, I think you're a nice guy, and we've had some nice posting back and forth in other threads. But now it just seems like you're attacking the credibility of this process as a whole based on factors I can't really do much about. No, not everyone on the guild participates, and yes, perhaps that means it's not representative at all. I hope you can also see that I'm trying to achieve something close to that regardless of the limited means I have as a standard user with no access to the discord.

not all advanced rps are slow as all hell mind you. Their was one who's name ive saldy forgotten but i do remeber it going bloody fast. Like post after post. that and the fact we got like 40 applicants. in the first few hours. Point is advanced rules. And it can go fast but if it goes as slow as every post a week people loose interest. especially if the ooc is somewhat dead. Hence the reason why this rp had a discord channel.


Was it the space one? I remember that one having a lot of applications at the start.
<Snipped quote by j8cob>

Any moderation role on the site is representative of the guild, even if it's on discord. Hank can do whatever he wants, pretty much, as a co-admin. I'm no more "qualified" to "analyze" your role than you are "qualified" to nominate yourself when that's clearly not even how the guild's promotion system has ever worked.

At the end of the day, my point is simple. Nominating yourself makes you look like an ass. You've only proven the point.


I mean, I get where you are coming from and I agree in part. But, I also think that j8 nominating himself isn't that crazy. He's in the politics channel frequently enough and out of all the participants might just be the one most sane one.

That said it makes no sense to have section specific moderators. It's either everything or bust. Having section specific moderators just means we need people that can only look at certain areas and have no influence elsewhere, so if something goes wrong and they're there, they can't even do anything. You should be a moderator for all sections and maybe just pay attention to the areas that need it.

Had the same route to Ruby been taken with me, it would have been handled. Once it stays public, it's less a plea for moderation and turns into a shit slinging contest. As I said before, any issue brought to me in PM has been handled, including an appeal for a warning overturn. I could have handled it better, but it wasn't like it was handled fine by all parties involved anyway. Then again, Nyte says I'm not a 'Real' mod, so that's probably why he went to Ruby instead of sending me a message. Or whatever he reason was.

Despite my claims of laziness, people have had little issue coming to me with reports and all on Discord. My PM box here and there are eternally open, and so far aside from me not handling that issue, I don't think there has been any issue with how I handle reports, at all. Unless they are just not brought up in my presence.


I don't really take this as a satisfactory response. It wouldn't turn into a shit slinging fest if you were quick with your response, or in fact, were proactive. If someone is spamming, you shouldn't need a report to do anything, you should just man up and tell whatever kid is spamming to shut the fuck up. It's not that hard. So why did you need a report when by Nyt and Chai's statement it was clear you were in the discord at that very moment?

Like Chai said, it's not a sign you're a bad mod. But it's a sign you may have done something else that would have worked better. Nobody is asking you to apologize (even if you did, you can't buy anything with sorry) - we're asking you to look back and see if perhaps you could've done things differently so that things may improve for the future. You're being given feedback, and your response isn't to think about it, but instead to deflect it and give excuses? Why?

I also want to comment on the real mod thing because that's something a lot of people are confused about apparently. A lot of people simply aren't aware you're no longer 'just' an arena mod. Something that could've been fixed with a simple alert from the mod team. There has to be some function that allows admins or moderators to PM all users at once, so why is that not being used? If there is no such function then why isn't there a moderator log in the news section where changes, updates or even just small casual messages can be posted by moderators?

It's something that wouldn't even take much time and that would give so much clarity to a lot of these situations. Something I've said about thrice now in separate threads.
<Snipped quote by Odin>

Not so fast... Also, ISIS has second-generation and the like.

I could keep going but you get the point. This isn't a fictional threat.

Now it's true -- Europe's situation is worse. Europe is closer, Europe is taking more refugees in. Europe is getting hit more -- except of course for Poland, which takes in zero refugees and has suffered zero attacks. A stats analyst could probably find a pattern there, but that's beside the point. If we know Islamist terrorism is a threat, and we know that Europe -- taking more refugees from areas with Islamist movements -- suffers a greater number of attacks... Doesn't that justify restrictions on refugee intake from those same areas? Our national interest would seem to dictate precisely that course of action.


Ah, I was under the impression that this referred to Islamic immigrants from areas like Iran, which is what most of the attention has been shifted to given recent changes.

It seems that this is more shifted towards immigrants in general. Which could be better or worse. Sounds like you're dragging a net through the ocean that doesn't have many fish to begin with. But, we'll see. If it's immigrants in general then it makes a bit more sense, but still seems like this isn't the right step forwards.

As for Poland - not true. Poland took in refugees - it's just that the moment the refugees arrived, the very next day they'd already escaped and went to Germany instead.

That said, the Netherlands hasn't suffered an attack yet either and we do have refugees. So, there seems to be little causation there in terms of your actual argument. Does it contribute? Yes, 100%, taking in refugees from those areas is a risk. But it's not a guarantee.
<Snipped quote by Odin>

Hank as Co-Admin has changed things on a Moderator level. All the functionality the position could use may not be there yet, but from a point of view you don't have access to there have been changes.


Let me put it this way - what little he can do, I am supposing that he did. This doesn't change the fact that he still can't do most of the meaningful things, agreed? Ergo, the functionality has been helpful to a degree but otherwise, when it comes to being able to run the day-to-day adminning in Mahz' absence, it's entirely useless, agreed? Because that was its' intended feature - to be able to run the guild effectively and make administrative changes without Mahz' needing to do it.

Which, correct me if I am wrong, is still not possible, unless we saw a sneak-update that nobody knows about.

Things get reported, both on Discord and the Guild itself. I've actually noticed an increase in reported incidents.


Good. You'll agree a report button would still be a neat addition to simplify things?

Mahz was seen just the other day, but aside from that: this has long been a community complaint. Site staff does the best we can with the hand we're dealt, but personally I don't see this one doing a turn-around change any time soon. I knew it was an issue before I became a Mod the first time, and having seen it from both the viewpoint of community concerned RPer and Moderator, it's always an issue. This is the nature of the way he built the Guild.


I know those things. I've known them ever since guildfall. But I don't think 'this is the way things are enjoy it' is the proper way to deal with it in situations like these where things can get changed, and frankly should get changed. And when you look at it like that, then what you just told us doesn't really tell us anything new, does it?

The entire moderator team is fairly active. Again you don't have access to that point of view, but I do, and I've seen all of them recently active and doing something. Two have been preoccupied with IRL, but that's life and the rest of us have handled picking up the slack just fine. (And we've still heard from them recently even busy as they've been IRL--one even handled an issue before I could get to it the other day.)


I can't do much with your point of view if you refuse to tell me. Regardless, perhaps I was unclear. There is a difference between your activity and the perception of your activity. It doesn't matter if you're online 24/7 if you never show your face because I would never know you are active. And even in that sense, 'active' means something different in my optic than 'being online.'

We're even pro-active: even before complaints about the Contests sub-forum, I was asking Aria about it behind closed doors.


.. this doesn't actually bring things further. If Aria/MDK are both busy then it's time to consider if they are the right choice for that type of position. Which I'm assuming it's because they're busy, because we weren't given a real explanation as to why the contests stopped. Similarly the titles previously earned by other members still haven't been given out apparently, according to someone I spoke to. Not sure who's in charge of that. Probably should've done something for that.

It's possible there's more to this story than most people, including yourself, know. That is really Kangaroo's business, at the end of the day. The group of people who know were happy to have him back though. I don't expect the people that feel entitled to knowing more to be content with that, but there is a rational reason for it all, yes.


I'm not asking for the story - I don't care for the story. I respected that Kangaroo saw that he had no time and decided to step down because it was a showing of the ability of introspection. I appreciated it, because he was a good moderator when he was more active, and he had realized that he just hadn't been active.

Regardless of the story, it feels strange to me that someone who had no time, and mostly continues to have no time from what I can see (again, perception of activity, the dude hadn't been online for 3 days when I wrote this so I can do nothing else but draw a conclusion from that because no status update was posted or anything of the like) is made moderator again under the pretense of 'we need more active moderators'.

You have your unique perspective. I don't. Saying 'well there's a good reason that I can't disclose because it's private' isn't helping. Again, I'm not after the story. I don't care in the context of this discussion. I care that we have moderators that can better fit the need of RPG. If you say that the needs of RPG are more moderators that seem inactive, I think you'd be wrong.

Already responded regarding the others. There's no "situation between us." At least not on my end. The last time I tried to reach out and be adult about it, the effort was screencapped and used to harass me on both the Guild and Discord. Safe to say this situation is one-sided. I've fielded complaints about you rather recently, and decided there was nothing to them, so I dismissed it. I've got no personal vendetta against anyone.


Word it as you may, perhaps you also have some introspection to do. I didn't really intend to talk about this to begin with, since I obviously don't like you and as I told you previously when you tried to 'bury the hatchet' I am under no real obligation to like you either just like you don't have to like me.

But I'll help you with this one - perhaps your attempt to reach out wasn't as adult as you seem to remember. You felt the need to treat me like Mr. Fung Lee who had just arrived fresh off the boat and was taking his first ESL class by clarifying that burying the hatchet was an (English idiom) as if I were some boy with an extra chromosome. Perhaps my English is a little off at times, I sincerely apologize for that, but for someone who learned English as one of four languages in school, I like to think I do pretty well for myself. I'll excuse you for calling random strangers 'honey' in the most condescending way you could have ever done so. Please don't do that to strangers. We'd never even spoken before, I didn't know you before that point, I'd prefer not to be called things like that by people I don't know.

I mean, that's even ignoring that previously to that you decided to insult my 'whomst've'd cheap hack writing' for no real reason. And when I reminded you of that, the answer I got was basically 'hehe I thought you were a troll! lol oops' which wasn't much of an excuse as it was you deflecting.

The next time you insult my writing and English skills, however, I would kindly ask you at least try to write in an easy manner. People like me who cannot into the English language have trouble deciphering words like 'whom's'. (Or perhaps that word shouldn't belong there whatsoever because it is incorrect English, but who am I? Ah, mr Fung Lee. Never mind then.)

Do you really feel like this is the best time to talk about this though? I'm sure not. I'd love to know what you have to add, but perhaps it's better to PM me instead. You have access to the guild right? Contact me there.

The last time I had a private talk with you, you came across hostile and more interested in throwing salt than discussing the issue at hand. (An issue which you dedicated a single sentence to.)


The last time? The last time you politely informed me I was being banned. When I replied that I was appealing it, you said 'ok'. Then I gave you some tips. You didn't like said tips.

What, did you expect me to dedicate more time to me being banned? It was and is idiotic that I got banned. That's about all I have to say. My appeal was denied, as in, I never got to have an appeal. That's the end of the line, isn't it? The next step is begging Hank and Mahz on my knees 'please please can I enter the discord again, I promise I'll be a good boy!' and that really isn't happening.

If you want to apply the rule you banned me on equally on said offense, however, just search 'bellybutton' in the discord. You'll find a whole list of people harassing someone, and then you can ban them. Be consequent (is that the right word?) with the rules please. I already explained the idiocy in the reasoning behind my ban to Nutts and I'm sure he relayed it so I won't waste words here.

I've yet to see anything reported not get at least a response to. Prehaps you could offer concrete details of reports with nothing given in response?


Terminal informed me that all his PM's to you all have been ignored as he tried to get people assigned the titles they won during the time the contests were still alive and ran by him mostly. Perhaps that's a starting point.

Mahz decided we didn't need different versions of the rules stickied, and he's stated multiple times he thinks the fastest way to get people to not pay attention to something is to sticky it. I can't recall which of us actually removed them. Some of them were even posted by accounts we don't have access to. So if many in the Guild feel that would help, we could copy/paste the site rules into a sticky for each section. This is the first time I've ever seen anyone make a suggestion of this since the new rules went up, I will point out, so maybe we haven't met the "many" part yet.


I mean, yes, I'm sure Mahz knows a thing or two about coding. But I find it hard to believe that he would say a tried and tested and universally used forum standard is somehow a bad thing. I would really like to know what his line of logic was there because frankly I don't even believe he would say something this... well, stupendous, really.

That said, even if nobody reads them, who cares? If you pin them up there you will have even more to fall back on. If someone breaks the rules and they say 'I didn't see the big button on the front page' you can say 'well, what about the stickied threads?' It's redundancy. It's not like it hurts anyone either.

We care, and act when possible: like when I went to Aria regarding Contests. I never used Contests. Even back in the day when Jorick would try to talk me into putting in a submission, it was just never my thing, but I always loved that he enjoyed them. I still cared enough about the community to go to Aria about the section's current state, even though I personally never used it.


That's great - I presume you reached an agreement as to the future of contest then and we will either see it deleted or restarted soon then? Because that's the sort of outcome I would expect from moderator behind-the-doors talk. Something with an outcome. And not just a personal talk. So I'm eager to learn what will happen with RPG contests.

The majority of this is nothing new. We've had these issues in the past, as I stated in the above. Some people stayed and continued on with the Guild, some people went elsewhere and created new homes on other sites. We want improvements, we want resolutions to issues, we always know we work at the speed of Mahz and just try to keep the site functioning in accordance with site rules in the meantime. It's not perfect.


I'd imagine you want to keep people on this site, as a method to foster the community and make it grow. Ergo, you must work to fix problems as they arise. Perhaps not all the problems I perceive are real, I am willing to admit that, and perhaps not everything is as perfect as the moderator team likes to say it is, I am willing to show you that, and because of that we need to find a middle ground.

Then fine. Let's find that middle ground. Let's find what is working and what isn't. But for that, there needs to be a dialogue, and that dialogue is very far and hard to find. It seems that the moderators really want to work on things - at least, I'm being naive here and I believe that that is what you guys all really want. But they want to do it in their own way, entirely on their own, with nobody else interfering.

I'm telling you that won't work for all of us.

Perhaps you're .. well, not scared. Scared is a strong word and if we're being real, there is no way someone higher up the hierarchy would be scared of someone as small as me. But perhaps you're not entirely sure as to the intent I have. I don't mean to get people booted, I don't intend to harm RPG, I don't intend to be a guild terrorist. I intend to help RPG and I intend to do what I can to make it better. But I do it in my own way.
<Snipped quote by Odin>

Caution =/= fear


.. nowhere did I imply that it was, but yeah, you're right.

Doesn't mean caution is warranted. The threat in America is about as real as Godzilla when it comes to immigrants, compared to Europe.
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