Best posts made by Arkandel

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Knowing who will and won't escalate (i.e., me and Coin, respectively) is useful in this hobby.

What's also useful in the hobby though at least in this context is understanding there are other needs than our own. I do appreciate people being able to handle themselves and not being put off by personal or aimed negativity, but that's not a universal experience. There are those who can't do so, and there are also even more of those who won't.

So yes, we could move things around and we have. The problem then then becomes that the onus is exclusively on administration and there's no real consequence for violating the forum rules. General You can just attack people and the worst case scenario is that the post gets shoved under the Hog Pit carpet.

I'd like nothing more than to treat people like adults, but they need to behave like it, too. Since that's wishful thinking we need tangible policies on how to best handle it when, and not if, the opposite happens as well as to discourage it in the future.

I'm certainly open to suggestions - I just don't think moving the posts (which is what we've been doing, sort of, since nodebb doesn't facilitate it as much as we'd want) is a better approach than deleting them which at the very least sends a message.

@insomnia said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Are we supposed to stick u's in everything because @Arkandel is in Canada, and @Ganymede is from Canada, so 2/3 of the mod team dictates the rules of word usage?

Y'all will need to say "sorry" every time you call each other a fucktard and must stick an "eh?" at the end of each sentence (sample example: "you're such a fucktard, eh?") as part of our new anti-toxicity policies.

I am looking into the root causes but at some point last night - sadly before the daily backup hit - our redis database got corrupted.

I restored us to the last day's snapshot but some posts will have been lost. Until I know more I'll switch to a bi-daily backup schedule.

The only risk factor here is that eventually something will finally give. Today it took me 45 minutes to bring the forum up after the upgrade, and that was after the oom-killer led into a kernel panic and my attempt to turn virtual memory on for Redis (which should have worked, and might have even been efficient, since most threads don't need to be stored in memory).

Well, one of these days it won't come back up and the choice will be made for us.

The thing is I'm not a MU* player any more. Realistically I don't have stakes here. But I honestly like (some of) you folks and it'd really suck if there was no central place where people could come together, maintain identities outside of a single character or game and talk - sometimes rant - about their hobby without fear or reprisal.

I think this hobby deserves having such a mostly safe place. I just won't drive that effort any more.

@Lithium What puzzles me is that on a forum where people get personally flamed to hell and back in no uncertain terms anyone would care about a little number going up or down. It's not even in your face, you need to look pretty hard to see the totals.

It's weird.

@Three-Eyed-Crow Aside from the systemic benefits I just think we should have the (very minimal) courage of our own convictions. If I vote something you say down I should do it openly so that you at least have the option to go 'hey dude, which part of don't kick puppies did you disagree with?'.

Oh, I didn't care about names (which I probably wouldn't recognize any more anyway), just if it was staff or regular players, which you did answer.

My concern is that people who play on TR feel "WORA" in general has some beef with "them" rather than the way the game is being ran. Speaking for myself (and quite possibly for others, too) any antipathy shown in TR-related posts is because we love the game yet loathe seeing how it has turned out.

But if what's scraped from the bottom of a barrel to staff there had an issue with uncensored criticism, well, I can live with that.

@blackdahlia You don't have gcc++ installed.

Depending on your Linux distro you just need to install it.

Try apt-get install gcc gcc-c++ if you're on Ubuntu or similar.

@faraday said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Which honestly makes me sad, because I don't think the MUSH community is big enough to sustain two separate discussion forums

Unfortunately neither group seems to see this. Both are entrenched very much into the "we are right" argument, which is itself the problem. If there's a we there is also a they.

Community forums can't work like that. They mustn't. The only 'they' must be the true undesirables; predators, trolls, racists. That's it.

I guess it's likely the problem will fix itself. Either way, yeah, it's sad.

@streetwitch As a mild disclaimer - most of the users on this forum are probably used to roleplay-heavy environments, which typically entails more than puppeting an already present NPC in case a PC talks to them.

Some miscommunication is certainly possible here, which is why you may not be certain about the questions you're getting asked, but if you don't let that discourage you then you can find players and storytellers around these parts.

@Coin I want so badly to come up with some clever retort about yo momma right now. But I got nothing.

@nemesis, we have rules here and we're trying to enforce them across the board. Posts must be appropriate in presentation as well as 'sentiment' (which is very subjective) when they're outside of the Hog Pit.

Now let's not argue this point on this thread any longer.

@faraday What about the scenarios where the cost of failure isn't existential ("your character dies, RIP") but one of opportunity ("you don't get to be in the Important People group")?

One of the differences TT has over MU* is that as much as we want to consider PCs the protagonists, it's not necessarily the case. In a 5-man party the GM can ensure everyone gets their time in the spotlight but the model doesn't scale up well.

It seems to me the best case scenarios most games have managed after decades of evolving is either variations of musical chairs models so at least it's not always the same players who end up getting to play with the cool toys, or 'RP socialism' models where the Important Group {tm} isn't available for PCs at all ("the Prince is played by staff").

But to get back on point, failure in MU* leads directly to often avoidable consequences. For example non-consensual character death deprives players of a PC including identity death, loss of invested time, etc.

A question I could ask there is whether the associated stakes justify those costs; in the same example, does it actually cheapen risk sufficiently to take IC death off the table? Do (or how much) would it change the metagame if players knew going in that if they were willing to absorb some other, smaller cost their characters wouldn't die?

@HelloRaptor said:

@Tennyson said:

@Tennyson said:

Is it potentially a reserved port on Windows?

Sigh. I just checked my antivirus and yep. McAfee was saying NO YOU CAN'T DO THAT!

So I've been pounding on the knowledge base. They suggest that you add telnet/simplemu to the exceptions under the mail spam prevention.. only that didn't work. So if anyone has suggestions, I'm open to answers!

Right, so here's the fix. Go to the virus scan console. Select access protection. Select anti-virus standard protection. Select prevent irc communication. Add Simplemu.exe (or whatever program) to the exceptions list. Apply. Voila! Connecting.

Alternately, stop using McAfee, because goddamn.

Alternately, stop using Windows, because goddamn.

@surreality said in Transfer of MSB tonight: 7:30 EST:

Thank you, @Arkandel. I'm sure there's a lot of us who appreciate the return of that function.

Sorry about not transfering the ignore lists over. nodebb breaks if you look at it funny, so I didn't want to simply copy over the old directory to the new host.

By the way, automated backups seem to work properly. I have on- and off-site daily data and image (avatars, etc) .bz2 archives going back 21 days, which should be enough for now. I might need to reinstall the forum if something catastrophic happens to the Linode but at least we aren't likely to have a WORA-level loss again.

@skew Holy crap, that's powerful necromancy.

It's for a good cause, people, chip in!

@kk said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

I think that looking at importance as ic importance instead of ooc importance is a good first step. It is common on games to see ic rank as ooc rank on a game and also see ic rank as access to plot.
...
As players we could all help out a bit by showing attention/interest/giving rp to characters who don't hold important rank.

I of course agree.

However, and I touched on it in this thread's initial post, these are all social problems. While they can addressed through individual games' cultures, and individual problems can be curated or guided by staff, I don't think they can be solved per se. I'm not even sure they can be 'systemically addressed' either through mechanics, code or rule adjustments; it's not like you can require players to help each other out.

I was thinking of dipping my toes somewhere. Is there anything out there with an Arkandel-shaped hole in it?

(cue the memes)

@auspice ***=NSFW content***

@Auspice According to a random post: "Go into Settings -> Gaming -> Game Bar. Then turn off "record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar"."