Posts made by Arkandel

@saosmash said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@arkandel I dunno, if you have an established rule that says no character squatting I think it's a lot easier to go "Hi there, you are barely meeting this FC's activity requirements. Please review our policy on character squatting.

Tell me if this scenario looks plausible to you.

Staff are conflict-averse; they don't want to get into the unpleasantness of reaching out to tell someone they can't have a character any more, explain why, dealing with arguments, etc. To dodge that bullet they make a rule ("you need to post at least one log every three weeks") to reduce this overhead on them since after that look guys, it's not us firing you, it's the rule! Only, of course, rules are way easier to trick than people as it's been shown very clearly in this and similar threads lately.

At that point staff have replaced a small problem with a larger one, but they still pick the easiest road for themselves - by not having to argue with people, rather than spare harm done to their game. That specific bit, this particular part is what makes them bad at their jobs. Anything before it is a mistake, and everyone makes those... ask any game runner. But at that point it's on them.

Does that make sense?

@tempest said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

Why haven't @ghost and @The-Tree-of-Woe delivered our X-Men only MU yet?

It takes a special kind of crazy to read the comic book threads as of late and think "gee, what I really need in my life is to make a comic book MU".

@saosmash said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I mean ... why not just make a rule against squatting and then enforce it? No need to turn character retention into something to politic over. Yes, you do need competent player management staff but I think games need that anyways.

To some degree that's the same issue as firing bad staff.

It's far easier to hire someone (or to not hire them in the first place) than it is to fire them after the fact.

@social-diseases said in FCs on Comic MUs:

And I understand this should go without saying but it does apparently have to be said - if you do not have the temperament, if you do not have the organizational and narrative skills, you should not even make the attempt. If your goal is self-aggrandizement, you should not make the attempt; if your goal is to create a sandbox for yourself and for your friends and your attitude is that anyone outside of that group is so peripheral to your interests that they may be subject to any level of abuse, you should not make the attempt. When you begin toxic, you have no right to complain that the environment is poisonous. And when there is a problem on a comic game, 9 out of 10 times, it is because of this. All other problems flow from the source of malicious or inept staffers.

Self-awareness is the main roadblock there. How many of those people honestly, truly think to themselves "well, I lack the narrative skills", let alone "I am a toxic person" and reach the conclusion they ought to abort the project because of those reasons?

In a way it's like politics. Sure, some folks go into it for the right reasons, but many get in for the perks.

@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.

@tempest said in FCs on Comic MUs:

People camp characters like a mother fucker. If the rule is "one log posted a month", there are dozens of people who will take an alt, and regularly go 27 days with that alt offline, then log on, get in their 1 log, and disappear for another 25 days. And they're not breaking a rule....technically?

That's on staff. In fact I suspect that's on staff copying the rules of previous games, since it doesn't seem to be a single MU* that's the main culprit there... it sounds like every new one that opened just copied the last one's rules which allowed camping on characters - which is as stupid an idea as it can be. If FCs are offered to regular players, and they're allowed to be important, then they should go to active and involved players.

Hell, even if the activity rule allowed for this malfunction when the game started it should be the easiest thing to spot and change afterwards. That's 100% on staff, it's not like policies are written in stone.

I was shocked the one and only time I played on a comic-book MU* a long time ago ( @Vorpal was in my group, if he remembers) and I found out the same person had Superman, Flash and... I want to say a Green Lantern, too? Man, that's half the JLA right there. Let someone else have a toy too, didn't you learn that in kindergarten?

@thenomain Weird though, that's the same plugin we were using before. I had never used it myself, mind you, but I'd have expected the interface to be the same... maybe it's a newer version thing.

@thenomain You don't see an eyeball on the usernames' right side in every post?

Hm, it cost us a couple of minutes of downtime (nodebb is really fragile, and some of its errors neither well documented or clear) but we seem to have the ignore feature again.

Please let me know if something isn't working the way it should.

@tyche That thing is a McDonald's toy.

@bobotron Well, we know she has to die somehow in this series

@auspice Chiiiills.

Star Trek: Discovery is seriously winning me over.

The first double episode made it look like too much of an action-based series for me, and it doesn't always feel like Trek, but just judging it by its own merit it's actually pretty damn good. The serious $$ they're pouring into it doesn't hurt production values either, the SFX look good.

It's ... different than the Trek shows we know though, so far there's either no formula or when it starts to follow one ("Captain, we've received a distress call...") it takes us into a whole new direction than we have in the past. Even the Captain himself is nothing like the kindly, peace-loving Starfleet officers we've known from past series.

Thankfully The Orville is there to satisfy those cravings in the mean time while Discovery does its own thing.

(Oh, and if you're not watching this @surreality... you should. There's a character in it whose anti-hero's journey will remind you of a certain pirate captain.)

This classic cover for Tolkien's Return of the King.

Wtf, hahah.

I really liked Bladerunner 2049.

While I completely understand not wanting any spoilers about major upcoming movies, especially in a trailer...

... but seriously people? You think they are going to put out a freakin' Justice League live-action movie and not put Superman in it? That's not a spoiler, that's the most obvious thing ever.

@sunny How does the ignore function work? I'll need to figure out if it's a plugin that didn't make the transfer and where the data for it is.

@misadventure Hm, interesting. I'll ask @Glitch when I have some cycles about how it was implemented.

Propagation of the DNS changes might take a while for everyone to catch up. Some of you will probably still be hitting the old site during that time, which will redirect you over to the new one using a (temporary) different domain name.

Otherwise we seem to be doing okay. I apologize for some extended downtime, the data dump I had tested it with - taken only a month ago - worked fine, but the one from today didn't care to update to the newest nodebb version, and it took a few to whip it into shape.

Please let me know if anything's on fire.

@Thenomain I haven't tested it but I have every intention for it to move along. I'm at work now (and unlikely to do much until after tonight's test), but I've already untar'ed the muxify archive into nodebb's dir, so the relative paths should work once I tweak the apache config a little.

My guess is "yes, even if not right away", but as for the source code that's up to Glitch. I have no idea who owns what, all I can promise to do is make a reasonable effort to keep it working after the move.

Does that answer your question?