I've read very little of this thread but Senori's the only person making any sense. e: oh hey seds sup you're also making sense
Any form of this is basically the worst idea I've ever heard. MTGS already takes its moderation about ten times too seriously and this compounds that by a whole lot.
I will give this weighty moderation issue the amount of attention it deserves by not posting in this thread again. Seeya!
Basically a datestamp on my intellectual property.
Don't you know that if you declare something copyrighted on the internet then you automatically own it?
Goblinboy stop acting childish please. You post it people will play it(if its worth it) - that's the deal here.
My lawyer is on a bus here from colorado right now. You wanna do battle with the patent office buddy? Bring it.
Of all the variants I like B/U the most, if they let Academy Researchers to resolve with Fool's Demise on them it is going to be such a pain. Excluding the combo capabilities, just how bad can recurring 2/2 body be?
It's like nether spirit except that it's a two-card combo and vulnerable to instant speed removal, so not that good really.
For this combo to be viable, they'd either need to print a really good outlet in llorwyn, or it needs to have something else to do with the researchers like Verdant Embrace. I do like the Bitter Ordeal secondary win, though. For now it's just a "noncompetitive but supercool combo that belongs to me."
First off, I got permission from seds to make this thread so there ya go. Secondly, I used to be a giant socially impossible nerd who cared too much about the internet just like many of us here and I have been able to improve myself a lot in two years. I'm going to assume that is also the case with anybody I say negative things about here. This drama is ancient, and nobody should be getting worked up about it. I'm only posting it because it's a cool, and sometimes funny, story, and because most people never really got a chance to know what was going on behind the scenes.
ANYWAY, this is a story about a little site called MTGSalvation.com and all of the crazy stuff that went on in the mod lounge. I'm going to cover September 2004 to December 2005 when I became admin, as that's when all the most interesting stuff happened. If you have any requests for stories that I didn't mention or stuff that happened while I was admin, make a request and address it to Unca' Gobberboy as I will not respond to any other name in this thread so there.
September 2004
There was a little bit of a scare at MTGNews and people thought that rancored_elf might leave due to the nutso admin Subterranean_Spirit. People were unsure whether the site would survive without him (answer: kinda, but not really), and so a few havens to congregate at just in case were made. MTGSalvation was made by founder Xenphire, then known as The Numenn, Kuberr. It was a crappy little phpBB board with white-font-on-black-background hosted on Woodwolf's (we'll get to him later) Magic humor site Urza's Bathroom. A few people such as myself joined and posted for like three days until the crisis cleared and we all went back to MTGNews.
January 1, 2005
There was a big scare at MTGNews and rancored_elf did leave due to the nutso admin Subterranean_Spirit. Xenphire saw his opportunity and led a spamming campaign to pepper advertisements for MTGSalvation anywhere and everywhere possible on MTGNews. This did the trick, and MTGSalvation became the post-News hangout. The first few days were incredibly hectic.
I was made a mod of the incredibly prestigious Forum Games forum due to the fact that 1) I modded 3CB, 2) I had joined in September, 3) I was gay and so was Xenphire and he figured us gays oughta stick together (this one was more implied). This was the first time I got a chance to peek at the Mod Lounge, and it was going nuts. All the moderators were new and only a few had any experience. Everyone was talking about what was best for the site and plans and what to do and everything. Feyd_Ruin joined up and began making a bunch of fixes to the site. After a day or two, rancored_elf joined up and made MTGS pretty much the official heir to the News throne. Soon after, Hannes made the offer to host the site (Urza's Bathroom couldn't possibly handle all the traffic) and we accepted. With Hannes came the mtgsalvation.com domain and a vB license thank GOD.
Everything was going great, and the whole site, especially the mod lounge, was running high on internet adrenaline. The admins were Wolfwood, Xenphire, and Sakabatou, a friend of Xenphire's I think. It was not long before things would start to get super entertaining!!
Turnover (Jan-Feb 2005)
MTGS was formed and populated in the wake of an overbearing administration at MTGNews and decided to be pretty much the opposite: a complete democracy. We were going to be a site "of the community, for the community" and make sure that we never did anything without considerable input from pretty much everybody. This is pretty much where all the problems started, since it's almost impossible to run a website like this. Not only that, but it gave all the mods a sense of entitlement towards how the site would run, and everybody started to picture themselves as crusaders for the community, watching out for overbearing administration and pretty much whining a lot. Every decision was second- (and third- and fourth-) guessed. This made things very difficult for the admins, especially Sakabatou, who liked being able to do his own thing.
A few mods (mostly led by ButteBlues and Qwerty, if I remember) decided to start unannounced, several-hour long meetings in AIM chatrooms. At these, they would discuss what they thought was wrong with the site and how to fix it.
Now I might have the following bits mixed up chronologically, but they all happened:
Sakabatou held a contest to make the new MTGS banner at the top of the page. The initial idea was to put the winner up to mod vote, but then suddenly, after the mod vote was half done, Sakabatou started a user vote. The mod lounge got angry. There were lots of arguments and the term "the community" was used approximately a million times. Extremestan won the user vote, but the mods wanted a different one (it was the one that just said "MTGSalvation" with a halo over one of the letters) and eventually that one was used. This pissed Sakabatou off pretty heavily, and he started talking to Xenphire over AIM about how he wanted to get rid of all the staff and start over.
Meanwhile, Xenphire had similar problems. He had started "The Room With the Moose" which was a place where suspended users would see it as the only forum. He was also giving special insulting custom titles to users he didn't like. Mods got mad that Xenphire was treating users with "disrespect."
Then, Xenphire appointed a new mod who nobody had heard of as a Global, Alex (now Alex+). The mod lounge felt a little cheated that a Global spot was given to someone nobody had heard of. It didn't help that he was really horrible at modding.
The mod AIM chatroom squad decided that something had to be done about all these horrible things (among others)! They had the grand idea of "confronting" Xenphire about things. They invited him to the chatroom and grilled him for a few hours, trying to get him to agree to change stuff. Xenphire was put off by all this, and MAY OR MAY NOT have talked about what Sakabatou MAY OR MAY NOT have said to him about getting rid of all the staff and starting over. That definitely wasn't popular with the mods.
So then the mods went over and "confronted" Sakabatou about getting rid of all the mods. Sakabatou got pissed at Xenphire for talking about his plan behind his back and got REALLY pissed that the mods had the "audacity" to talk to him, an admin who surely should not be subject to such horrible scrutiny. Sakabatou said that Xenphire had lied about what he'd said and that it was a very insulting and horrible thing to do.
The mod AIM chatroom squad decided that this was morally horrible and something had to be done! So, in our very cavalier shining-democracy mindset, the mod AIM chatroom squad shared what they had found out and convinced the rest of us to have elections for admins.
Sakabatou and Wolfwood were shoo-ins, but Xenphire didn't get a single nomination. Pissed about it, he posted in the voting thread saying something along the lines of "You will only be voting for two positions. I am in charge of this site and you will keep me on as admin and there is not going to be a vote about my position and I am sick and tired of being questioned all the time and people are lying about me and I am pissed off." which got everybody else to respond with something along the lines of "nope, sorry." So we went through with the elections. Wolfwood was in by a large margin, as was Sakabatou. Belgareth was the new third admin (I came in fourth :3).
Before the admin changes could be made, Xenphire got really pissed and demodded most of the staff, including Sakabatou and Wolfwood, and made an angry post in the mod lounge saying he was starting the site over again and **** you all. Hannes stepped in and de-admined Xenphire and remodded everybody. Xenphire then tried to pass it off as a joke, but it obviously wasn't. Xenphire, who had founded the site, was no longer in power. He was kept on as a moderator with no forum (I have no idea why) but went on to cause more drama and was eventually banned. Later he made some more accounts and those got banned.
Shortly thereafter, Sakabatou decided that Wolfwood and Belgareth were "teaming up against him" and left angry. I looked back through the Admin Lounge archives when I was an admin, and that wasn't really the case, but Sakabatou was never really the calmest guy anyway. The only admins were Wolfwood and Belgareth, then.
The Belgareth Era (Feb-Dec 2005)
The site had calmed down a lot by this point, and the "MTGNews Discussion" forum had been laid to rest. Similarly, the mod lounge had calmed down a lot. It was around this time that I was made a Global, and kept in close contact with Belgareth, talking about site policy and what to do in certain situations. I was also in close contact with Qwerty, Belgareth's right-hand-man-of-sorts.
Nothing too monumental was going on, but several months into Belgareth's being admin it became clear that Wolfwood wasn't really around anymore. He never posted and certainly never did any administration. It turned out later that he had left the site to get married. I'm glad for him, although I always found it confusing why Bel seemed to pretend that he was still around and that they were discussing decisions with eachother. When I got access to the Admin Lounge archives, I didn't find much discussion at all from when Bel was admin.
Around then Wolfwood was de-admined, and it was clear that not only was Belgareth the only admin, but he had been since something like the end of February. While the "the community" democracy cavalier vigor had died down a lot from when the site was formed, it was still there, and people were bugging Bel about when we were going to have new admins, preferably by vote.
Eventually, around August I think, Feyd_Ruin and I made a thread expressing that we would like to be admins. Obviously, asking to be an admin/mod is a huge no-no among internet administration, but in this case we were tired of waiting for the slots to be filled and figured that if we nominated ourselves it might speed things up. Nope. More delays. When asked about it, Bel would generally suggest that he was waiting on something from Hannes so that we could be admins. But it was just a few days away, wait a little longer!
Near the end of November, no new admins had been chosen. Then, Crazed_Mike and ButteBlues decided they were tired of it, and posted several threads saying some nasty stuff about Belgareth and Raia.
Raia was mod of the Artwork forum, and she and Belgareth had an online romance going. Bel ended up moving to Canada to be with her, I think. Anyway, Crazed_Mike said that Raia had been hired on as a mod only because of her connection to Bel (because letting your girlfriend be a mod is clearly unacceptable ). It turned out that Bel had hired Raia as a mod before their romance started, but the whole debacle ended with Crazed_Mike and ButteBlues being demodded (Mike was banned too I think), and Belgareth going nuts. Like I said, I chatted with him a lot on AIM, and he started getting the air of a paranoid man. Suddenly there were conspiracies of people out to get him.
He was apparently talking to Hannes like this too, as Hannes posted a chatlog between them that went something like
Belgareth: Oh man you have got to stop this this is unacceptable these people are out there to TARNISH MY GOOD REPUTATION and you have got to do something and this is unacceptable and I have to go out there and defend myself!
Hannes: well what do you want me to do? it seems like you're taking this really personally. maybe you should relax
Belgareth: Oh is that how it's going to be huh? Well maybe I should just be deadmined since I'm CLEARLY doing such a horrible job. Is that what you want, huh? To deadmin me?
Hannes: *sigh*
Hannes: If that's what you want, then yes, I am going to deadmin you.
Belgareth: UGH I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU ARE DOING THIS THIS IS PERSECUTION
Feyd wasn't all that interested in being an Admin by this point, so I was quickly chosen as the replacement admin, unaware that I was a "replacement" rather than an "addition." Belgareth was deadmined shortly thereafter and immediately started AIMing me to tell me about all of Hannes' evils, accusing him of stealing money from the site, saying that it was only because of Hannes that I waited so long to be admin, saying that I had to join him in his glorious fight against the horrible Hannes who had hijacked the site. DON'T BE HIS PUPPET GOBLINBOY I CHOSE YOU FOR THIS SO YOU COULD HELP ME USURP HANNES.
I didn't buy it and then Belgareth changed his mind and I was the worst admin ever and he would go on to cause a lot of drama while I was admin. Meanwhile, I had to finish the forum awards where Bel had left them. Ugh, I don't even like the forum awards.
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Any form of this is basically the worst idea I've ever heard. MTGS already takes its moderation about ten times too seriously and this compounds that by a whole lot.
I will give this weighty moderation issue the amount of attention it deserves by not posting in this thread again. Seeya!
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Basically a datestamp on my intellectual property.
Don't you know that if you declare something copyrighted on the internet then you automatically own it?
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It's like nether spirit except that it's a two-card combo and vulnerable to instant speed removal, so not that good really.
For this combo to be viable, they'd either need to print a really good outlet in llorwyn, or it needs to have something else to do with the researchers like Verdant Embrace. I do like the Bitter Ordeal secondary win, though. For now it's just a "noncompetitive but supercool combo that belongs to me."
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First off, I got permission from seds to make this thread so there ya go. Secondly, I used to be a giant socially impossible nerd who cared too much about the internet just like many of us here and I have been able to improve myself a lot in two years. I'm going to assume that is also the case with anybody I say negative things about here. This drama is ancient, and nobody should be getting worked up about it. I'm only posting it because it's a cool, and sometimes funny, story, and because most people never really got a chance to know what was going on behind the scenes.
:munch::munch::munch::munch::munch: :munch::munch::munch::munch::munch:
ANYWAY, this is a story about a little site called MTGSalvation.com and all of the crazy stuff that went on in the mod lounge. I'm going to cover September 2004 to December 2005 when I became admin, as that's when all the most interesting stuff happened. If you have any requests for stories that I didn't mention or stuff that happened while I was admin, make a request and address it to Unca' Gobberboy as I will not respond to any other name in this thread so there.
September 2004
There was a little bit of a scare at MTGNews and people thought that rancored_elf might leave due to the nutso admin Subterranean_Spirit. People were unsure whether the site would survive without him (answer: kinda, but not really), and so a few havens to congregate at just in case were made. MTGSalvation was made by founder Xenphire, then known as The Numenn, Kuberr. It was a crappy little phpBB board with white-font-on-black-background hosted on Woodwolf's (we'll get to him later) Magic humor site Urza's Bathroom. A few people such as myself joined and posted for like three days until the crisis cleared and we all went back to MTGNews.
January 1, 2005
There was a big scare at MTGNews and rancored_elf did leave due to the nutso admin Subterranean_Spirit. Xenphire saw his opportunity and led a spamming campaign to pepper advertisements for MTGSalvation anywhere and everywhere possible on MTGNews. This did the trick, and MTGSalvation became the post-News hangout. The first few days were incredibly hectic.
I was made a mod of the incredibly prestigious Forum Games forum due to the fact that 1) I modded 3CB, 2) I had joined in September, 3) I was gay and so was Xenphire and he figured us gays oughta stick together (this one was more implied). This was the first time I got a chance to peek at the Mod Lounge, and it was going nuts. All the moderators were new and only a few had any experience. Everyone was talking about what was best for the site and plans and what to do and everything. Feyd_Ruin joined up and began making a bunch of fixes to the site. After a day or two, rancored_elf joined up and made MTGS pretty much the official heir to the News throne. Soon after, Hannes made the offer to host the site (Urza's Bathroom couldn't possibly handle all the traffic) and we accepted. With Hannes came the mtgsalvation.com domain and a vB license thank GOD.
Everything was going great, and the whole site, especially the mod lounge, was running high on internet adrenaline. The admins were Wolfwood, Xenphire, and Sakabatou, a friend of Xenphire's I think. It was not long before things would start to get super entertaining!!
Turnover (Jan-Feb 2005)
MTGS was formed and populated in the wake of an overbearing administration at MTGNews and decided to be pretty much the opposite: a complete democracy. We were going to be a site "of the community, for the community" and make sure that we never did anything without considerable input from pretty much everybody. This is pretty much where all the problems started, since it's almost impossible to run a website like this. Not only that, but it gave all the mods a sense of entitlement towards how the site would run, and everybody started to picture themselves as crusaders for the community, watching out for overbearing administration and pretty much whining a lot. Every decision was second- (and third- and fourth-) guessed. This made things very difficult for the admins, especially Sakabatou, who liked being able to do his own thing.
A few mods (mostly led by ButteBlues and Qwerty, if I remember) decided to start unannounced, several-hour long meetings in AIM chatrooms. At these, they would discuss what they thought was wrong with the site and how to fix it.
Now I might have the following bits mixed up chronologically, but they all happened:
Sakabatou held a contest to make the new MTGS banner at the top of the page. The initial idea was to put the winner up to mod vote, but then suddenly, after the mod vote was half done, Sakabatou started a user vote. The mod lounge got angry. There were lots of arguments and the term "the community" was used approximately a million times. Extremestan won the user vote, but the mods wanted a different one (it was the one that just said "MTGSalvation" with a halo over one of the letters) and eventually that one was used. This pissed Sakabatou off pretty heavily, and he started talking to Xenphire over AIM about how he wanted to get rid of all the staff and start over.
Meanwhile, Xenphire had similar problems. He had started "The Room With the Moose" which was a place where suspended users would see it as the only forum. He was also giving special insulting custom titles to users he didn't like. Mods got mad that Xenphire was treating users with "disrespect."
Then, Xenphire appointed a new mod who nobody had heard of as a Global, Alex (now Alex+). The mod lounge felt a little cheated that a Global spot was given to someone nobody had heard of. It didn't help that he was really horrible at modding.
The mod AIM chatroom squad decided that something had to be done about all these horrible things (among others)! They had the grand idea of "confronting" Xenphire about things. They invited him to the chatroom and grilled him for a few hours, trying to get him to agree to change stuff. Xenphire was put off by all this, and MAY OR MAY NOT have talked about what Sakabatou MAY OR MAY NOT have said to him about getting rid of all the staff and starting over. That definitely wasn't popular with the mods.
So then the mods went over and "confronted" Sakabatou about getting rid of all the mods. Sakabatou got pissed at Xenphire for talking about his plan behind his back and got REALLY pissed that the mods had the "audacity" to talk to him, an admin who surely should not be subject to such horrible scrutiny. Sakabatou said that Xenphire had lied about what he'd said and that it was a very insulting and horrible thing to do.
The mod AIM chatroom squad decided that this was morally horrible and something had to be done! So, in our very cavalier shining-democracy mindset, the mod AIM chatroom squad shared what they had found out and convinced the rest of us to have elections for admins.
Sakabatou and Wolfwood were shoo-ins, but Xenphire didn't get a single nomination. Pissed about it, he posted in the voting thread saying something along the lines of "You will only be voting for two positions. I am in charge of this site and you will keep me on as admin and there is not going to be a vote about my position and I am sick and tired of being questioned all the time and people are lying about me and I am pissed off." which got everybody else to respond with something along the lines of "nope, sorry." So we went through with the elections. Wolfwood was in by a large margin, as was Sakabatou. Belgareth was the new third admin (I came in fourth :3).
Before the admin changes could be made, Xenphire got really pissed and demodded most of the staff, including Sakabatou and Wolfwood, and made an angry post in the mod lounge saying he was starting the site over again and **** you all. Hannes stepped in and de-admined Xenphire and remodded everybody. Xenphire then tried to pass it off as a joke, but it obviously wasn't. Xenphire, who had founded the site, was no longer in power. He was kept on as a moderator with no forum (I have no idea why) but went on to cause more drama and was eventually banned. Later he made some more accounts and those got banned.
Shortly thereafter, Sakabatou decided that Wolfwood and Belgareth were "teaming up against him" and left angry. I looked back through the Admin Lounge archives when I was an admin, and that wasn't really the case, but Sakabatou was never really the calmest guy anyway. The only admins were Wolfwood and Belgareth, then.
The Belgareth Era (Feb-Dec 2005)
The site had calmed down a lot by this point, and the "MTGNews Discussion" forum had been laid to rest. Similarly, the mod lounge had calmed down a lot. It was around this time that I was made a Global, and kept in close contact with Belgareth, talking about site policy and what to do in certain situations. I was also in close contact with Qwerty, Belgareth's right-hand-man-of-sorts.
Nothing too monumental was going on, but several months into Belgareth's being admin it became clear that Wolfwood wasn't really around anymore. He never posted and certainly never did any administration. It turned out later that he had left the site to get married. I'm glad for him, although I always found it confusing why Bel seemed to pretend that he was still around and that they were discussing decisions with eachother. When I got access to the Admin Lounge archives, I didn't find much discussion at all from when Bel was admin.
Around then Wolfwood was de-admined, and it was clear that not only was Belgareth the only admin, but he had been since something like the end of February. While the "the community" democracy cavalier vigor had died down a lot from when the site was formed, it was still there, and people were bugging Bel about when we were going to have new admins, preferably by vote.
Eventually, around August I think, Feyd_Ruin and I made a thread expressing that we would like to be admins. Obviously, asking to be an admin/mod is a huge no-no among internet administration, but in this case we were tired of waiting for the slots to be filled and figured that if we nominated ourselves it might speed things up. Nope. More delays. When asked about it, Bel would generally suggest that he was waiting on something from Hannes so that we could be admins. But it was just a few days away, wait a little longer!
Near the end of November, no new admins had been chosen. Then, Crazed_Mike and ButteBlues decided they were tired of it, and posted several threads saying some nasty stuff about Belgareth and Raia.
Raia was mod of the Artwork forum, and she and Belgareth had an online romance going. Bel ended up moving to Canada to be with her, I think. Anyway, Crazed_Mike said that Raia had been hired on as a mod only because of her connection to Bel (because letting your girlfriend be a mod is clearly unacceptable
He was apparently talking to Hannes like this too, as Hannes posted a chatlog between them that went something like
Belgareth: Oh man you have got to stop this this is unacceptable these people are out there to TARNISH MY GOOD REPUTATION and you have got to do something and this is unacceptable and I have to go out there and defend myself!
Hannes: well what do you want me to do? it seems like you're taking this really personally. maybe you should relax
Belgareth: Oh is that how it's going to be huh? Well maybe I should just be deadmined since I'm CLEARLY doing such a horrible job. Is that what you want, huh? To deadmin me?
Hannes: *sigh*
Hannes: If that's what you want, then yes, I am going to deadmin you.
Belgareth: UGH I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU ARE DOING THIS THIS IS PERSECUTION
Feyd wasn't all that interested in being an Admin by this point, so I was quickly chosen as the replacement admin, unaware that I was a "replacement" rather than an "addition." Belgareth was deadmined shortly thereafter and immediately started AIMing me to tell me about all of Hannes' evils, accusing him of stealing money from the site, saying that it was only because of Hannes that I waited so long to be admin, saying that I had to join him in his glorious fight against the horrible Hannes who had hijacked the site. DON'T BE HIS PUPPET GOBLINBOY I CHOSE YOU FOR THIS SO YOU COULD HELP ME USURP HANNES.
I didn't buy it and then Belgareth changed his mind and I was the worst admin ever and he would go on to cause a lot of drama while I was admin. Meanwhile, I had to finish the forum awards where Bel had left them. Ugh, I don't even like the forum awards.
The end
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Snejana was banned for linking to mal/porn.