@Jaunt said:
You suggested that it wasn't fair-minded that only members of games that are part of our "connections" can submit articles. I told you that anyone can submit an article if they want to, including folks from this site.
Not at all. In fact, it took me a couple of re-reads to find the spot that might have given you that idea. Was it this?
@il-volpe said:
OR appears to have this thing going in where it's partners/privileged advertisers write these articles, and that's one reason they're privileged
This says nothing about who is allowed to write articles, only comments on who does write them, and suggests that maybe writing one probably gets you shifted up the docket in terms of getting reviewed to see if you'll be allowed advertising space.
Your reaction, interpreting that to mean that I think I'm not allowed to submit an article and find this interesting enough to cry "unfair!" is the very thing that makes me conclude that you believe I would want to submit an article. I don't want to submit articles to a gaming community that pays only lip-service to the sorts of games I want to play and will deny me the perks of writing articles (if said perks exist) and further, it makes me suspect you of being a bit full of yourself to see you respond as if wanting to write an article is the motivation for my remark.
I think that you're being over-sensitive in continually assuming that we're out to look down on you. We're not.
Hmm.
@Jaunt said:
This idea that their submission is slave-work, but that your volunteerism towards your game isn't because you're passionate about your work is inconsistent ideology, and that's what I'm getting at. I hope that makes sense to you.
I wasn't talking about them. I was talking about me, and other MUSHers. Your OR community doesn't serve our specific interest as fully as it serves the specific interest of the writers of your articles. See? So while they get the various benefits of volunteerism from writing the articles, the membership here does not. Yet you appear to believe (see above) that we want to write articles for you. When someone attempts to convince you to do work for no or minimal benefit, they are indeed operating a scam. Does this make sense now?
I think that you're being over-sensitive in continually assuming that we're out to look down on you. We're not.
Hmm.
As @Thenomain suggested, there needs to be a consensus about our language re-branding before we implement an improved mission statement. It shouldn't be an arbitrary change, or a knee jerk reaction, or a change that satisfies one administrator's ideas and not others. Once we reach consensus, it'll be changed. Since OR's been doing well for itself for the few months that it's been around, I think it'll be okay to last a few more days until that consensus is reached.
I expect that you will find that until you change it, people will continue to criticize it. This should not surprise you; you have administrated a MU, have you not?
I'm suspicious, because I am a suspicious bastard (or at least, display the persona of one on MUSB, sometimes) and my suspicious bastard persona says that the reason the mission statement reads like it does is that you folks want to grow your community by attracting folks from outside the focused interest in RPI MUDs, but you don't want to do the work of maintaining and moderating a community that serves all MU* types. Yeah, you may attract a few members this way. But really, this is like calling the 'Ladies' Sewing Circle and Anarchist Society' the 'Community Fibre Arts Club', and telling any knitters who come along, oh, sorry, the club's about sewing and anarchy, but you're welcome to hang out. The club may not want to admit it, and hell, it may not even reach the front of their minds, but other people are going to figure, correctly, that really the name is about drawing people in so you can convert them from monarchist crochet to anarchist sewing. This is not cool.
By the way, if/when you get around to changing the OR site, a word of advice: Run about it and add alt text to any important images, including the infographicy things with your mission statement on. They need to be machine readable. MUs are among the few games accessible to blind people, and it's not difficult to make it so all the important shit on your game and site works with their screen-readers. Actually, if you want to do ten minutes of research and write about that, that'd be an article worth having out there.