They're posting a massive update today, as I understand it. We'll see if it has been fixed, and if not, I'll be sure to bring them to their attention personally, okay?
Has this update gone through? It is still not accessible to me through Safari (stalls at a blank page).
Work, mixed with having a sine wave like internet posting history.
It's all been transfered, I never visited any other Curse site before either, and just by putting my MTGS-registered email and my MTGS password, I already had a "reserved" Curse(d) ID.
Okay, if that's the case, that's really unfortunate.
You're already signed up. All of my emails now log in as Curse ID's. I never signed up for anything. I've never used a Curse site before in my life until now. I'm not sure why people weren't given the option of not signing up, maybe retiring from MTGS.
It's pretty invasive.
Hmm, I've never visited any curse site nor the beta site, so I don't think I've signed up (even unintentionally) for anything. I'm more curious what happens if I don't. Does anything transfer over if I don't do anything or do I need to be proactive to actually prevent transfer?
Note that Curse ID is different from MTGS username - you can still keep your MTGS username. For example, my Curse ID is the not-even-remotely-awkward SeneMTGSalvation, but my username is still Sene. By the way, your Curse ID will be created when you log on, it's not a lengthy process. Just log on, then choose your Curse ID, then choose whether you want to keep your old username or make a new one. And you're set!
What happens, for example, if someone *isn't* interested in getting a curse id? Does anything move to the new site (like their information currently stored in the MTGS database), or if they never sign up is there just nothing there except a post trail for a non-member?
Considering the context of the rest of the post, it was pretty obvious I was referring to the gutter and so that was just used as an opportunity to take an unnecessary pot shot at the staff. And frankly, the concept of the mod lounge is necessary and has been around since MTGNews. Guess how much drama there was back then over information that users need not be privy to? Zero, because they didn't empower instigators through acknowledging and validating them.
Lol, nice conspiracy theory there dude.
I think the MSL, and other subforum-specific lounges are absolutely necessary to the functioning of those areas. I do not agree that the centralized mod lounge is. The big one just breeds a victim complex (as can be seen in several posts by mods in the leak thread) and causes delays for consensus building when, many times, the right answer is obvious from the beginning. Empower good mods and let them do their jobs. You don't need some control group breathing down their necks or anything.
As an example, when I was a moderator for MS, I had an apologetic other mod from MS (as in, he *knew* I was doing a good job, but sigh, it had come up with another group) talk to me about my 'error rate' in issuing warnings/infractions. Well, I provided the data (that should have been obvious to the people complaining about my work, had they bothered to look - which, coincidentally included me being blamed instead for reading errors by one of the people in the group criticizing my work) and it was clear that I was doing a great job. But, because there was this other centralized lounge, other than the well oiled machine that is the MSL, people groupthinked their way into some mis-informed ideas and caused grief.
And, it's really not fair to pin all drama on the gutter anyway. Here are the people who have the top postcounts in the major drama threads over the last couple years around here (as determined by number of posts, in both cases):
logicX 7
brandon 6
harkius 6
belgareth 5
glimrypost 5
misclick 5
nai 5 (staff)
teia 4 (staff)
azrael 3
binary 3
faheyUSMC 3
galspanic 3 (staff)
kaitscralt 3 (gutter member)
kijin 3 (gutter member - now banned)
kpaca 3 (gutter member - now banned)
mystery45 3
NS 3 (gutter member - now banned)
rianalnn 3 (staff - at the time)
senori 3 (staff)
These people have a wide variety of opinions on the matters in the 12 threads I checked, includes a number of upper and lower staff members, gutter members, and non-gutter members. Neither gutter members nor staff members occupy the top several spots of people most active in the most drama threads. It's fair to say that propagation is not at all one group's doing. Not all of these people were intentionally feeding drama. But they are all people who post a lot in a lot of drama threads, for one reason or another. And the gutter posters are certainly not the main posters (thread propagators?). Neither are staff members.
In fact, merely on postcounts as I've outlined here, if you take away the 3 gutter-specific threads (which are basically due to staff self-proclaimed bad-handlings of closures), the gutter members show up in very few other drama threads, few enough that they wouldn't make the ~25% of the remaning 9 drama threads list.
He was reffering to that gutter, not the mod lounge.
Not at all apparent from the paragraph, and any way is equally applicable to both.
Without the Mod lounge, where would private mod issues be discussed onsite without prying eyes. Don't anwser with Private Messages, as these are not feesable.
I'll just flat out tell you as the founder of this website:This website was not made for you to idle in an invisible sub forum and to provide you a soap box. This website was created as a haven for Magic: the Gathering players who want to discuss the card game and to save a community that actually had problems that lead to the entire staff leaving it's former home (the ridiculous comparisons of which to our small time political bullcrap need to stop, by the way) The fact that all this drama has stemmed from a subgroup that doesn't even remotely have to do with Magic: the Gathering discussion is a load of bollocks, and insulting to everyone who registers here for the purpose of being part of the community proper. Posting here was, is and will continue to be a privilege, not a right. Having a Debate, Water Cooler Talk or hidden sub forum is also a privilege. It's time that those users started to recognize that fact, and it's time for the staff to begin to enforce that fact. To further provide some perspective, those were an addendum to the forum structure that was brought over from MTGNews. MTGNews functioned without those and was very, very active in it's prime and frankly we would've been fine too. Stop and think about that for a moment.
Couldn't agree more! If there wasn't a mod lounge, there wouldn't be leaks of mod lounge material.
Don't think of it as something being taken away. Instead, be thankful for the duration of the time it was permitted to exist.
The subforum was going to go one day and it was inevitable. It's not even about the drama it may or may not have caused. You have to remember that, at the end of the day, there is no such thing as a free lunch. No one is under obligation to host your secret, ultra exclusive clubhouse.
Now it has its own website. The 40 year old has officially moved out from his parents house. It's all for the best for everyone.
I don't think that is a very good analogy.
It would be better to say they are friends who roomed together during college and one of them still likes to have fun on the weekends while the other one slowly forgot how they'd originally become best buds (it was while binge drinking and finding ways to fight 'the man'), because a couple years after that he joined a fundamentalist sect and began to see everything that his friend did as anathema. He alternated between obsessively attempting to convert his friend and wistfully wanting things to be like how they were. Eventually, the relationship becomes so toxic one of them moves on. Neither one is blameless in the loss of the relationship, but they were getting along pretty well before the one latched on to a rigid belief system that espouses a narrow definition of 'correct'.
My experience on other web communities is that there is a very high degree of correlation between a lack of 'civil unrest' and moderators that are both trusted and respected by that community. It is a symbiotic relationship. Everyone benefits from good moderation (note, this is a general term, many of the communities I speak of have very few codified rules and are largely self-policed, so good could be as simple as embodying the 'ethos' of the community), and so it's in the community's best interest to have a good staff, which fosters a good community, which trusts and respects their staff, which means you get happy staff, which means they act in the best interests of everyone.
This isn't to say that these communities don't have bumps every so often, but these are rarely, if ever, due to an unjustified incident. I've seen people run out of their positions, but that was solely because they (a) lost the community's trust and/or (b) lost the community's respect by doing something counterproductive to the direction everyone was pulling at the time. The longer you keep people that have lost one or both of these things, the higher the probability of posters lashing out in frustration.
Also, sarcasm may seem funny to you, but it makes it very difficult to take you seriously when all I am trying to do is make a point. However, based on your avatar, and attitude in this thread, I have accepted there is no point, however legitimate, I could make to sway you. You clearly believe the behavior existed by the unknown leaker, and those of you who received the information and refused to tell the staff is acceptable. I (and I think I can safetly say most of the staff), believe it is unacceptable. So, we have ourselves a stand-off.
How you figure that I wasn't *also* trying to make a point, and instead using sarcasm is beyond me? I even suggested a plausible course of action based on what I saw in the post he quoted! That that course of action was taken as an affront (I assume?) is not on my shoulders. I cannot control how others will respond to the posts I've made, or whether they will take offense for something that wasn't offensive (or, certainly, vice versa!). It is up to each individual to decide how they are going to read them.
I get you're concerned that people not pile onto acradic for the vitriol in the post he was carded for, but the real question is, why not go to each of them personally (via PM for instance, rather than posting here), tell them why that post was unacceptable, and coach them on how to make it, for lack of a better term, more palatable? Directives from mods carry weight, do they not?
For example, you can say this:
"I know you're frustrated at acradic's behavior, but what you've posted is unacceptable language. Why not instead try something like ___________ (<--this is where you get to practice your coaching) if you feel the need to express your opinion on this matter?"
Then you could point them to the staff code of conduct and the section on staff image,
Quote from "staff code of conduct" »
With regards to post content, as a representative of the forum, you are expected to conduct yourself in a professional manner at all times. If you might be unable to do so for any reason (emotional duress, intoxication, et cetera) refrain from posting, or at the very least from performing staff duties.
and suggest that rather than making vague complaints they could read up on how staff are supposed to conduct themselves and instead make a well reasoned and impassioned, but acceptable post language-wise, that explains how they believe arcadic is seemingly not living up to a pledge he signed and how they feel this undermines the type of community these forums are attempting to create.
This was just an example, but rather than assuming an avatar tells you someone's response, maybe you could try and actually have a conversation with them and see! Telling someone they can't fish the way they're fishing is infinitely less productive than taking the time to teach them to fish the correct way!
How can you, with a straight face, ask everyone to stop being so negative and stop sniping when in the same post you tell anyone who thinks Arcadiac should have been demodded to shove it?
Further more, how can you ask for people to work together, then state that anyone who disagrees with you you can't work with?
I notice also how his entire post is a long string of pot shots at other people. Seems like a long, hard look in the mirror is in order. Tensions are running high again around here, and there is absolutely nothing in the post you quoted that does anything to calm them, and in fact is basically does exactly the opposite. Ouch.
:/ Your information is somewhat faulty. The mod lounge discussion about the Gutter is still ongoing, even now. So saying we had come to a decision is very premature.
And since this is a new thread, I'd like to remind everyone that the bannings and suspensions surrounding this are all currently under review by the staff.
I know my opinion isn't worth a huge amount to a lot of the people that live in Community Issues, but based on all of the discourse and discussion with the people at Curse, I am actually pretty excited about this. Obviously we can't say too much about the details, but all of my "oh dear god they are going to ruin X" fears have been pushed aside. It could be a trainwreck, it could be nothing, but after talking about this for what seems like years, I am very much looking forward to the changes.
Jobie, Shazbot, ein, kijin, and anyone else in that conversation (cryptic I know :-/), all I can say is that I am very sorry. When I was talking with you about how to solve site issues and move forward this wasn't really something I had the information to factor into that. The ______ is dead, Long live the _______
I would feel just as oppressed as I feel whenever I hear someone being told in my LGS that they can't swear because it's a family store -- IE, not oppressed at all.
So because *you* don't feel oppressed, someone else can't. get over yourself dude.
Huh? The first several songs sound like they are throwbacks to the Kiss Me/Disintegration/Wish era. 'Underneath the Stars' and 'The Only One' particularly, are VERY Cure songs (and are reminiscent of the late 80's/early 90's Cure).
Has this update gone through? It is still not accessible to me through Safari (stalls at a blank page).
Work, mixed with having a sine wave like internet posting history.
Okay, if that's the case, that's really unfortunate.
Hmm, I've never visited any curse site nor the beta site, so I don't think I've signed up (even unintentionally) for anything. I'm more curious what happens if I don't. Does anything transfer over if I don't do anything or do I need to be proactive to actually prevent transfer?
What happens, for example, if someone *isn't* interested in getting a curse id? Does anything move to the new site (like their information currently stored in the MTGS database), or if they never sign up is there just nothing there except a post trail for a non-member?
I'm having the same problem. It spins and spins and then just never goes to anything.
Ugh, yuck. No thanks. =/
Lol, nice conspiracy theory there dude.
I think the MSL, and other subforum-specific lounges are absolutely necessary to the functioning of those areas. I do not agree that the centralized mod lounge is. The big one just breeds a victim complex (as can be seen in several posts by mods in the leak thread) and causes delays for consensus building when, many times, the right answer is obvious from the beginning. Empower good mods and let them do their jobs. You don't need some control group breathing down their necks or anything.
As an example, when I was a moderator for MS, I had an apologetic other mod from MS (as in, he *knew* I was doing a good job, but sigh, it had come up with another group) talk to me about my 'error rate' in issuing warnings/infractions. Well, I provided the data (that should have been obvious to the people complaining about my work, had they bothered to look - which, coincidentally included me being blamed instead for reading errors by one of the people in the group criticizing my work) and it was clear that I was doing a great job. But, because there was this other centralized lounge, other than the well oiled machine that is the MSL, people groupthinked their way into some mis-informed ideas and caused grief.
And, it's really not fair to pin all drama on the gutter anyway. Here are the people who have the top postcounts in the major drama threads over the last couple years around here (as determined by number of posts, in both cases):
logicX 7
brandon 6
harkius 6
belgareth 5
glimrypost 5
misclick 5
nai 5 (staff)
teia 4 (staff)
azrael 3
binary 3
faheyUSMC 3
galspanic 3 (staff)
kaitscralt 3 (gutter member)
kijin 3 (gutter member - now banned)
kpaca 3 (gutter member - now banned)
mystery45 3
NS 3 (gutter member - now banned)
rianalnn 3 (staff - at the time)
senori 3 (staff)
These people have a wide variety of opinions on the matters in the 12 threads I checked, includes a number of upper and lower staff members, gutter members, and non-gutter members. Neither gutter members nor staff members occupy the top several spots of people most active in the most drama threads. It's fair to say that propagation is not at all one group's doing. Not all of these people were intentionally feeding drama. But they are all people who post a lot in a lot of drama threads, for one reason or another. And the gutter posters are certainly not the main posters (thread propagators?). Neither are staff members.
In fact, merely on postcounts as I've outlined here, if you take away the 3 gutter-specific threads (which are basically due to staff self-proclaimed bad-handlings of closures), the gutter members show up in very few other drama threads, few enough that they wouldn't make the ~25% of the remaning 9 drama threads list.
Not at all apparent from the paragraph, and any way is equally applicable to both.
Those messages aren't private?
Couldn't agree more! If there wasn't a mod lounge, there wouldn't be leaks of mod lounge material.
I don't think that is a very good analogy.
It would be better to say they are friends who roomed together during college and one of them still likes to have fun on the weekends while the other one slowly forgot how they'd originally become best buds (it was while binge drinking and finding ways to fight 'the man'), because a couple years after that he joined a fundamentalist sect and began to see everything that his friend did as anathema. He alternated between obsessively attempting to convert his friend and wistfully wanting things to be like how they were. Eventually, the relationship becomes so toxic one of them moves on. Neither one is blameless in the loss of the relationship, but they were getting along pretty well before the one latched on to a rigid belief system that espouses a narrow definition of 'correct'.
This isn't to say that these communities don't have bumps every so often, but these are rarely, if ever, due to an unjustified incident. I've seen people run out of their positions, but that was solely because they (a) lost the community's trust and/or (b) lost the community's respect by doing something counterproductive to the direction everyone was pulling at the time. The longer you keep people that have lost one or both of these things, the higher the probability of posters lashing out in frustration.
How you figure that I wasn't *also* trying to make a point, and instead using sarcasm is beyond me? I even suggested a plausible course of action based on what I saw in the post he quoted! That that course of action was taken as an affront (I assume?) is not on my shoulders. I cannot control how others will respond to the posts I've made, or whether they will take offense for something that wasn't offensive (or, certainly, vice versa!). It is up to each individual to decide how they are going to read them.
I get you're concerned that people not pile onto acradic for the vitriol in the post he was carded for, but the real question is, why not go to each of them personally (via PM for instance, rather than posting here), tell them why that post was unacceptable, and coach them on how to make it, for lack of a better term, more palatable? Directives from mods carry weight, do they not?
For example, you can say this:
"I know you're frustrated at acradic's behavior, but what you've posted is unacceptable language. Why not instead try something like ___________ (<--this is where you get to practice your coaching) if you feel the need to express your opinion on this matter?"
Then you could point them to the staff code of conduct and the section on staff image,
and suggest that rather than making vague complaints they could read up on how staff are supposed to conduct themselves and instead make a well reasoned and impassioned, but acceptable post language-wise, that explains how they believe arcadic is seemingly not living up to a pledge he signed and how they feel this undermines the type of community these forums are attempting to create.
This was just an example, but rather than assuming an avatar tells you someone's response, maybe you could try and actually have a conversation with them and see! Telling someone they can't fish the way they're fishing is infinitely less productive than taking the time to teach them to fish the correct way!
I notice also how his entire post is a long string of pot shots at other people. Seems like a long, hard look in the mirror is in order. Tensions are running high again around here, and there is absolutely nothing in the post you quoted that does anything to calm them, and in fact is basically does exactly the opposite. Ouch.
I am confused... this contradicts this:
Nah I'm cool. But bad posts need to be pointed out.
So because *you* don't feel oppressed, someone else can't. get over yourself dude.