Help Request Site status as of 2018

This was mentioned back when we moved away from vbulletin. PM backups is a paid plugin, so it won't happen.

I recall making a userscript to auto dump PMs but it's been a while.

 

Slightly different take here:

All this forum drama is really dragging the user experience down for me.

I come to this site to post about obscure video game stuff and to see other people's posts. Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but all this administrative strife is completely bewildering to me. I can't discern what the core issue is that all the hand wringing is over.

As someone who's not at all invested in the big personalities, power struggles, and other drama, the forum has been perfectly functional and fine aside from two issues:

1. All the spam bots the mods have been deliberately letting flood the forums
2. The growing cruft of "I quit", "Kevin, do your job", and "State of the forum" posts that show up seemingly on a weekly or sometimes daily basis

What's the core issue here? Kevin isn't around enough but there's certain issues that need root administrative permissions to address? Kevin, stop being weird about it and just pick someone who's been reliable and give them root admin access.

Bit of a rant here, I know, but this all seems frankly ridiculous. It's a forum. You delete spam, you kick out bad eggs, you patch security threats--that's about it. And yet every day people are acting like this place is falling apart at the seams and something huge is actually at stake here. But from my perspective, the only nuisance is all the dramatics and toxic attitudes.

[/rant]

 

The admin of a forum needs to be active. They need to update the software, and such. He is not doing it. The admins had very little true admin powers it seems, another issue.

 

As far as I am able to tell, you are the only person on this forum with this opinion. And you blame the poison you introduced on the mods.

Everything that has come about has been in direct response to your behavior and actions and responses.

At my company youd have been fired for being able to cause nearly your entire department to quit. That is a sure sign of incapable management.

Edit Reasons: Grammar, all mods quit.

 

Perhaps you could consider doing something about the things that make people start the drama, instead of just deleting the drama. Obviously there is something wrong, that people are voicing, and putting your head in the sand won't make the problem go away.

 

No, the lack of leadership is what poisoned the site.

We were losing a battle with moderation as we couldn't really do anything to fix the problem. It's like running an army without a leader.

 

Seriously? You really can't see what's wrong with the site? I'm struggling to understand how you can't see that a forum with a singular admin who is away 99% of the time isn't a problem. When things happen to the forum, you aren't around. If anything, you're the one who's poisoning the site, it's not fair of you at all to lay the blame on others in this situation.

"Oh but everything's fine, you're all being drama queens."

That's clearly not the case. The forum is stagnating, like a scungy pond with a 2 inch layer of film on the top that will never be pierced because the pond's owner refuses to touch it for whatever bizarre reason. And whenever somebody asks why he doesn't clean up the pond, he simply responds with "the pond has been like that for 15 years and I haven't had any trouble with it, why should I change it now?", or something to that effect. And he somehow can't see that the number of visitors to the pond every day has dwindled to a fraction of a fraction of what it used to be.

There used to be a museum here, there used to be a wiki, there used to be so many amazing avenues to explore and learn about obscure gaming. Now all we have is a forum.

The site needs to change. You need to implement new features, you need to learn how to lead moderators properly, and on top of that, you need to learn how to better interact with people. You strike me as the kind of person who can hear what other people are saying but can't actually listen to what they're saying. There's a big line between hearing and listening, and from the way you've behaved over the past year, you're not great at one of those things.

 

Which is what we did, after you went ban-hammer crazy on everyone.

"K Kev"

30 DAY BAN!

Which is odd, because you always told us:

The only solution was pretty much to let people get on with it, whilst telling them we understood their frustration, we didn't necessarily agree with your bans or making them public in a thread, but it's your site and your way. At the same time, we needed to let people know that we weren't going to take their shit. Oh yeah... thanks to there not being Alter Ego Detector on the forums, we had no way of telling if a user had made a dupe account after being banned.... so banning users was pretty pointless without an admin to tell us what the ACP said!

I'm sorry you feel that way, and can't take responsibility yourself. You brought it all on yourself long before we posted anything. YOU poisoned the users months ago.

https://assemblergames.com/threads/ban-notice-reason-and-penalty.67236

Not saying some of them didn't deserve it, but not all of them did... and it didn't go down well with the users. You went all RAAAAGH with the ban hammer, then abandoned ship.

You also forget that you didn't tell us you were going to be gone working for months... you said two weeks at the beginning of December. Oops, sorry... confidential information. Bad retro.

I've heard that before.... oh yeah:

Here. On 20 October. Right before you left.

Funny that.. you seem to forget you said we need more staff (even before the site went down over a year ago) and only got round to asking in October, after coming back online... what, June? And you quit 5 minutes later. Are we supposed to believe from 20 October 2017 until 13 March 2018, you were working in an place without Internet, with no breaks? That's 144 days without stopping. Your dedication is exemplary. If only you were 1% as dedicated to the site, you might have taken an hour out of those 3,456 hours to choose a couple more mods.

So why don't you? There's nothing stopping you. Or is it better punishment to continue ignoring my resignation?

In the time when I've been "disrupting the site" and "opinionating the users", folks, I was also posting in the mod forum... replying to Kev's requests for bugs, fixes and suggestions to make the site better. I was also very careful, in any of my posts, to end it with a "but, that aside... I'm pleased that Kev is taking steps to make things better. I wish the site all the best and hope you can all pull together to make it great again" type ending.

And that's true. I really do want to see the site go back to its heyday. And it needs all the users pulling together to get there. When Kev keeps playing the blame game, though, it's really hard to settle for a mic drop GIF as your closing statement in your resignation rather than choosing something far more insulting aimed in his direction.

As for cleaning up shit and general dogsbody duties, though... as I said before....

 

We should all meet IRL around a beer or something and discuss this face to face. I feel the discussion is leading nowhere, with all sides being both right and wrong at the same time.

I like this place. I really hope it survives this hardship.

All I can think of right now is @Bad_Ad84's profile picture.

 

If you are a former moderator and you're upset with the forum - please leave and don't post again. If you find this difficult, do what you're supposed to do and take it to private messages. Enough of the insults.

If you are a regular user and you side with the former moderators - please leave or don't post about these issues again. If you find this difficult, do what you're supposed to do and take it to private messages.

We ALL get the message - we got it the first time, we got it the second time, we got it the third time... enough.

 

Hey! This guy found a way to fix it all!

Let's be serious. Things would have settled if we didn't get thrown at us ridiculous accusations and blame.

Read Kev's last post, again accusing us all and going again in "it's everybody's fault beside mine" mode.

It's was us keeping things calm and peaceful trying to make users settle down after ban waves, and during his absence.

We also had to lie a lot to keep the forum calm while the owner was not to be seen for ages, or dropped wrote a life and was gone.

We had to figure out what lied otbhalf truth we could say to fix the mess. Remember that thread back then when we came back online?

People's memory is short.

 

You're an idiot.

 

I'm not sure, but I think posting things in bold text doesn't make it official. People can post whatever they want, as long as it doesn't violate any rules. Why would anyone think they have to do what you tell them? Also, I'm pretty sure you and maybe a couple other people who haven't been paying attention are the only users who feel this way.

I think that's a pretty good analogy (simile?) for what's happening currently.

One other thing:
Kevin, how can you possibly blame the mods and their recent public posts about the forum for the downward trend in site traffic? You posted that little graph with only 3 data points. Do you have a similar graph for the site traffic before the long downtime - versus after the downtime, and the months following that? Because I'm fairly certain such a graph would show a huge downward trend that started long before the "state of the site" thread. I think you already know this.

 

Kevin doesn't get it.

When he says it is "100% his fault" he is only referring to the fact it was him who promoted those mods to mod status in the first place and THAT was his only mistake and not anything else.

Some advice for him is he better pick every person wanting to be a mod right now because anyone wanting to be a mod after all this stuff isn't going to question him or anything he does or doesn't do. Just be a loyal subject that doesn't think for themselves. Like a pet.

 

Sounds like you should leave.

 

Kevin sorry to hear about the forum drama affecting your personal life, I would really not appreciate unwanted attention or harassment outside of assemblergames.com myself.

I see this forum as a community, and my personal opinion is that if more people get involved with more trust it would be for the betterment of all involved and the site. I can see that being difficult with how much you have committed to assemblergames over the years and sunk into it.

I can also see and understand people who have contributed and spent lots of time committing information to this site. It seems they purely want it looked after the best it can be.

Personally, I would prefer passionate and engaged community members working on the site, not paid staff. It is just unfortunate that both sides want to better the site, but cannot as they are at odds with each other. The aforementioned meet up and discussion over beverages sounds in order to see if things can be ironed out.

Either way that things go, thanks for starting this community and having the site up for us. (when it was up anyway... I did appreciate the funky assemblergames will be back soon page when it was down though it was cool to watch haha)


I will be here for the glory, or till the end to go down with the sinking ship.

 

good way to solve all issues, just ignore them!!!!!

 

This is admin material; someone promote this guy already!
PS: I side with the former mods, but don't plan to leave.

 

What you seem to fail to grasp is that we stood down, then Kev started blaming us for stuff. I take 100% responsibility for all the issues... except the staff killed the site, not me.

Oh yeah, and I resigned 2 days ago. I'm still a moderator. Which means I still get e-mails when someone reports something, PMs asking me to move this, rename this, fix this.... :\