Community Poll Topic (New Poll!)

[Danny]

So I would greatly recommend moving to another network such as Esper or freenode, something more reliable than Stardust where the network operators can actually prevent spammers such as michel from getting through. I don't know why Joey is so against a move that would greatly benefit the IRC, and I don't know how he can say it won't benefit it when it clearly will. I don't understand why he's being so obtuse about this when clearly a lot of people are not liking the direction of the community.

If people don't like the direction of the community, Joey should listen to their suggestions to make it better instead of shoving them away with his lame excuses. If he wants to see the community succeed and not be shit, he should stop telling people "then leave lol" when they say it is shit, because quite frankly it is right now if he doesn't do anything productive.

If your staff even agree that the community is going to shit then you really need to fix something here. Listen to your users, Joey, take their ideas into consideration, and don't do it lightly. If you continue to disregard everyone's suggestions then you'll soon find this community falling apart again just as it did in the past. Don't say I don't know what I'm talking about, I do know what I'm talking about, and quite a lot of people have agreed with me thus far. I mean this with all offense because even when being assertive you refuse to listen, you're being kind of a dumbass right now, and shutting me out of the discussion by banning me on IRC doesn't really do any good.

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that since you want to make this community more mature you should be a perfect example of the maturity you want the community to be. If somebody, lets take me as an example, asks if you have an answer to a legitimate question, you don't go and do this:

<Joey> no :))))))))))))

And then proceed to ban me from IRC when I call you a dumbass, which you are quite frankly being if you won't answer my questions legitimately. You are quite honestly one of the bigger pessimists I have come across in this community, because you always see the worst outcome whenever we (mostly when I) suggest something to you that might do the community good.

[reghrhre]

Well, I came up with my answer way faster than I thought I would, though I'm not surprised too. The community is still shit, the userbase needs to grow up a bit though I kinda understand why they're being so damn annoying.

You really do gotta listen to the users a bit more Joey, a staff (leader)/user relationship is super important and if you ignore them or don't listen to them they'll definitely bite back. It's always understandable if you don't agree/support with a users thoughts or whatever sometimes, but when you have A LOT of users bitching at you for your traits then you outta do something about it. Even if you feel you shouldn't change yourself (y'know, that "don't be someone you aren't") then you can at least pretend you've changed for the better at least.

Things seem to literally, be the same from when I was still here which is bad.

[FanofSMBX]

Joey acts way more in charge than other admins. The way it used to be, admins facilitated user activity rather than regulate it, I think. Joey seems to regulate more than outright spam (or defines it more stringently). For example, nobody minded much (other than "most people don't speak Spanish") in the nsmbx days if someone posted in Spanish, but now Joey would tell them to flat out "not do it". Not in the old friendly way, but a commanding way. It almost seems like Joey allocates being friendly at specific times, instead of always acting like it. You know those "you are your child's parent first and friend second" advice? Joey acts like that, and no one but him really did. He comes off like a no guy rather than a yes or why not? guy.

[MistakesWereMade]

to be fair the entirety of the administration staff consists of joey

yes the shots have been fired

[underFlo]

Joey acts way more in charge than other admins. The way it used to be, admins facilitated user activity rather than regulate it, I think. Joey seems to regulate more than outright spam (or defines it more stringently). For example, nobody minded much (other than "most people don't speak Spanish") in the nsmbx days if someone posted in Spanish, but now Joey would tell them to flat out "not do it". Not in the old friendly way, but a commanding way. It almost seems like Joey allocates being friendly at specific times, instead of always acting like it. You know those "you are your child's parent first and friend second" advice? Joey acts like that, and no one but him really did. He comes off like a no guy rather than a yes or why not? guy.

Spanish seems like a bad example for your point, the way he handles Spanish (or any other foraign language) is the right way to do so. What use in having a Spanish post that only a minority understand? Like, at the very least you can use Google Translate (even though it totally butchers everything).

[Danny]

The main problem is that he wants to see the community prosper and become more mature and see more activity/more users yet he doesn't actually fix the current problems we have that many people have already addressed, and whenever they're brought up or changes are suggested, he either shoves them away or declines them in an immature manner.

<Joey> no :))))))))))))

Prime example above.

to be fair the entirety of the administration staff consists of joey

yes the shots have been fired

I agree with you on that. From what I've seen/heard, a lot of the current staff members, being moderators as the only active admin is Joey at this moment, have disagreed or not liked how he is running things, yet he won't do anything about it. I would give Joey a lot of helpful advice but he keeps brushing it away and saying I don't know much of anything when I really do, probably more than him currently.

What he needs to do first, if he actually listens, is to demote all of the currently inactive staff (which is most of them currently) and replace them with more active staff members that could help contribute to the forums. After that, an IRC network move needs to be in order, probably to Espernet, freenode, or IndieIRC, at least to somewhere where the network is dead. Every single network we have been on has been dead if you haven't noticed, and the remaining active network operators have given Joey founder, which he doesn't really need to run #smbx yet I have the odd feeling that he thinks he does need it.

[MistakesWereMade]

My main issue with the administrators is that quill got repromoted because that bird looked pretty (don't get me wrong, i fucking love quill). And all valtteri does is sticky his own contest threads, and making useless posts to tell people to stop making useless posts. even before he went into that millitary shit.

before you bring up the argument "but they lock topics, warn people and move posts and shit", thats not something more than a normal moderator already does.

[Danny]

xXm4st3rbr0sXx is an admin again, don't forget! Why? Who the fuck knows.

Also how come Kley is still a moderator if he doesn't actually do anything?

[Shadow Yoshi]

Tone it down with the attitude, please.

However, there are a few topics that we won't allow (list subject to change):
- Anything that pertains to a specific user (this user should be promoted, this one should be banned, etc.)

[Danny]

Tone it down with the attitude, please.

You should say the same for yourself.

Also, why shouldn't we be able to talk about the privileges of the staff? I have given you plenty a reason as to why you should demote Kley. You have already said you want this community to be as best as it can be, yet what do you think, from that perspective, would a newcomers first impression would be on a forum with inactive staff?

[MistakesWereMade]

Tone it down with the attitude, please.

However, there are a few topics that we won't allow (list subject to change):
- Anything that pertains to a specific user (this user should be promoted, this one should be banned, etc.)

I mean the selection of the staff is very relevant to the way the community is headed, if you don't want to talk about it then i'm not sure of what's your plan going to be to listen to suggestions.

[aero]

However, there are a few topics that we won't allow (list subject to change):
- Anything that pertains to a specific user (this user should be promoted, this one should be banned, etc.)

Then you might as well say every admin except for you, to an extent. Valtteri is gone, m4sterbr0s doesn't administrate anymore, Quill isn't active at all really, and as Nien mentioned nothing has been done by any of the admins that a moderator can't do and admin specific problems seem to always get delayed. I can't tell you the last time I've seen Kley do anything except sign on for a minute and his last contributing post was in November. I have nothing against anyone I mentioned here but the staff team shouldn't be largely inactive and progressively so towards higher rankings.

[DarkMatt]

Alright. Throwing my hat into the ring.

First off, let me ask a simple question to those saying no: have you even been paying attention to this community recently?

8bit aside, our community has significantly improved over the course of last summer and autumn. We have cut down on whining and senseless arguments substantially, and as a result, we've gotten much more relaxed as a community. Unless you people have been doing this behind my back, we've opened the door for discussion on SMBX and all things Nintendo in a friendlier way than we've ever had.

If you are going to say something that proves my thoughts after I have left to tend to real life matters (and Zelda matters) wrong, then I ask that you show me concrete proof that the community is still a warzone. If you are only disgruntled with the community and cannot back up your opinion, then I don't want to hear it from you. I'd rather you just pack up and go, because if you are just going to whine, then we don't need you here. This may sound inconsiderate, but as a matter of fact, this has been the stance our staff takes with criticism since last summer. You might've groaned about it, but here we are now; our community's better and you don't find error in how we've done it. We've made a step forward.

It's alright for you to wonder over the nature of our actions, and we do respect your curiosity, but you have to understand that, while we do take our administration seriously, we are just like you. We're not grown-ups, nor are we big people, we either just busy ourselves with real life or our job here. That's our only difference. That said, we are under no obligation to give you a serious mature answer when asking a real question about how we do things. Why should we anyway? We know and you know that anything we say is the truth. The only time you should be concerned about our demeanor is if we are outright lying about what we're doing, and we've never done that.

Now that I've given my opening on this matter, let me go over some issues the community has brought up:

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Subpar moderation: Let me ask you this, have you been having problems? If no, then what do the mods need to do? If you have been having problems and the mods aren't on the scene, then you have ways to bring them there. Some of us might be inactive, but you have the bat signal, nigga, just plug that thing in and shine it in the night sky. One of us will roll around.

Slow pacing: I have felt the burn of this as well. Hell, this usually crops up as one of the reasons why I take vacations from the community. This is one of our tantamount problems and you'll have to excuse us that we'll probably save it for last, but time makes fools of us all, especially the administrative team. No one really has the free time, much less the respect and experience we desire from our admins, to take over from us. We are not going to hand the keys to someone just because we're hard-pressed to make progress. We, after all, have a standard to not betray after so much work has been put into it.

>I voted the "no opinion" option as I don't know enough on the subject to be able to make a bold claim on my views of the situation.: Then why'd you vote No? No is the option you choose when you have the MOST bite to your bark. If this is seriously why you voted No, then you should've abstained.DISREGARD THIS I SUCK COCKS

>Bots are not people: I have an automaton fairy that will prove otherwise.

Immature userbase: This is asking for gold out of coal. Our userbase has cut down on general whining and flaming (outside of CC but that's always a clusterfuck) and, though it might not be immediately visible, our community has become more friendly to conversation, even from the children on this forum. I'd really like to hear how we didn't accomplish this?

Inactive staff: This is basically explained off-hand, but I do feel this should get its own thing. Most of us have lives to tend to and that unfortunately means we can't watch over this community 24/7. Take me, for example: I cut time out of college to help with this community during autumn. I could've been getting good grades but I willingly slacked off from my studies to make sure I can get this community up and running. Would I do it again? Hell no, I need to get my life built. Do I still look out for this community? You bet your ass I do. Funny thing is, the sliding scale of power to activity is not a coincidence, and most of the staff tends to be very mature people who have very mature lives. We could use some shuffling of positions, sure, but that won't make the slow pacing go away. It is how we are and, as mentioned previously, this will probably be one of the last problems we'll tackle down. I know that sounds disheartening, but at least we're still moving forward.

[aero]

Subpar moderation: Let me ask you this, have you been having problems? If no, then what do the mods need to do? If you have been having problems and the mods aren't on the scene, then you have ways to bring them there. Some of us might be inactive, but you have the bat signal, nigga, just plug that thing in and shine it in the night sky. One of us will roll around.

If there's nothing for those mods to do, then why are they there? Having inactive mods just bloats the team without good reason. It reflects poorly on the general staff because a larger part is inactive when they don't need to be staff in the first place.

Slow pacing: I have felt the burn of this as well. Hell, this usually crops up as one of the reasons why I take vacations from the community. This is one of our tantamount problems and you'll have to excuse us that we'll probably save it for last, but time makes fools of us all, especially the administrative team. No one really has the free time, much less the respect and experience we desire from our admins, to take over from us. We are not going to hand the keys to someone just because we're hard-pressed to make progress. We, after all, have a standard to not betray after so much work has been put into it.

Slow pacing should be expected with a largely inactive staff and administration. Take the medals for example. Kley and RY were put in charge of designing them. Kley is inactive as I explained in my previous post and RY is nowhere to be found afaik. Instead of just having the community pitch in to design medals, everyone has been waiting since summer and mocking staff members when they say they're coming "soon." If things were done my way, we would probably have had medals done a long time ago.

Immature userbase: This is asking for gold out of coal. Our userbase has cut down on general whining and flaming (outside of CC but that's always a clusterfuck) and, though it might not be immediately visible, our community has become more friendly to conversation, even from the children on this forum. I'd really like to hear how we didn't accomplish this?

You need to hang around on IRC and the forums more. Everything is an injustice to some frequent whiners and taking actual actions has been needed to be done. Take for example the ranks topic. There was non-stop bitching about ranks that would kill imaginary epileptic people who happen to become a victim when they browse these forums. After multiple ways to prevent this imaginary threat have been given such as blocking the images in question, people persisted so I locked the topic for a long while. Also, there was a need for the sandbox sticky because of so many immature and low quality posts. It curbed some of them but people still can't get it through their heads to read and follow rules and abide by what the staff says.

Inactive staff: This is basically explained off-hand, but I do feel this should get its own thing. Most of us have lives to tend to and that unfortunately means we can't watch over this community 24/7. Take me, for example: I cut time out of college to help with this community during autumn. I could've been getting good grades but I willingly slacked off from my studies to make sure I can get this community up and running. Would I do it again? Hell no, I need to get my life built. Do I still look out for this community? You bet your ass I do. Funny thing is, the sliding scale of power to activity is not a coincidence, and most of the staff tends to be very mature people who have very mature lives. We could use some shuffling of positions, sure, but that won't make the slow pacing go away. It is how we are and, as mentioned previously, this will probably be one of the last problems we'll tackle down. I know that sounds disheartening, but at least we're still moving forward.

The staff's personal lives are irrelevant. What matters is that the ones who can get things going are nowhere to be found and leaves everyone who is around waiting. I'm not asking for 24/7 monitoring but I would appreciate if anything got done. A lot of what has been discussed doesn't even require high activity: moving networks, adding a captcha, changing staff, removing downreps, adding a LunaDLL subofrum, etc.

[JupiHornet]

When I said subpar moderaion, I meant that a few poor decisions were made by the staff. Perhaps I could have worded this better. I mean:
1. illias3000
I already mentioned this on Knux's forums, but illias3000 was a user that was banned because his English was bad. Really? Bad English really does not make the community look bad, because there are some very respected users here whose English isn't the best. Why judge someone by their English? It is very inconsiderate for those who speak another language, and this is why we should have sections of the forums dedicated to other languages.

2. Inactivity
Like GhostHawk said earlier, admins really haven't done very many things that moderators can't do. One of our mods is very inactive and two of our admins are. This problem is being fixed, I will admit, by the addition of two new moderators to the community.

So uhh, that is basically it. With these things said, I'm not unhappy with how the community is turning out, but it could be a bit better, so I voted "no opinion" as a kind of so-so.

[DarkMatt]

I might've sounded like I was paying attention to this community recently, but I really haven't. Indeed, I don't hang out on the IRC and forum often enough anymore to get an accurate idea of where the community's at now, but still, I could've sworn it was better than a while back, right? And why would we chop down on mods just because we're in peace? It's not like they're a standing army that we have to pay for.

The thing is that, given our community and who would naturally be a part of it, it's better for your psyche to not wish for perfect maturity. Of course, we should still frown at people not doing simple things like reading the rules, but there'll always be the users who blunder into the forum, realized their blunder, and then run away. It's just how they are and it's not like we can change that. What we CAN do is improve who stays in this community. Who goes in and gets thrown straight out is something we can't fix.

As I've mentioned, a shuffling of positions and a clearing of skeletons in the closet would not hurt. After all, I can name a couple of promotions that could be handed out and a couple of people who could be thrown into our "can see staff forums and post in it" group. I suppose it'd do well for morale, but I think the reason why it's not happening is because there's no harm no foul. Then again, I'm not saying we should keep the skeletons in the closet.

And lastly, the staff's personal lives is actually the leading reason why there's not a lot of activity going on. I wouldn't write it off just because it doesn't directly conflict with moving this forum forward. Personal expenses still take up time and energy.

Again, I've been down this crisis you're in right now. I definitely didn't grow to be the problem, but I know that kicking the mule doesn't make it go faster. We just need to remember to keep this forum up and going which, so long as the staff keeps active with eachother, (Notice I'm not including the community in this.) it shouldn't be too hard to get the ball rolling faster.

Oh and

2. illias3000
I already mentioned this on Knux's forums, but illias3000 was a user that was banned because his English was bad. Really? Bad English really does not make the community look bad, because there are some very respected users here whose English isn't the best. Why judge someone by their English? It is very inconsiderate for those who speak another language, and this is why we should have sections of the forums dedicated to other languages.

What do you think constitutes acceptable English? You're lumping different tiers of illiteracy into a single definition instead of understanding we actually do let less than stellar English slide.

[Shadow Yoshi]

I've implemented a few suggested ideas:

- The graphics and episodes pages are now in working order. There's more I'd like to add to them, but they're good for now.
- StarNet now offers cloaks for users. Simply type "/hs take StarNet/user/$account" after logging in, and you will receive "StarNet/user/<YourAccountName>" as a hostmask.
- The captcha has been changed to a generic image.

[aero]

I've implemented a few suggested ideas:

- The graphics and episodes pages are now in working order. There's more I'd like to add to them, but they're good for now.
- StarNet now offers cloaks for users. Simply type "/hs take StarNet/user/$account" after logging in, and you will receive "StarNet/user/<YourAccountName>" as a hostmask.
- The captcha has been changed to a generic image.

Not bad, thanks for this!

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http://nsmbxforums.prophpbb.com/post92273.html#p92273

[Quill]

However, there are a few topics that we won't allow (list subject to change):
- Anything that pertains to a specific user (this user should be promoted, this one should be banned, etc.)

Then you might as well say every admin except for you, to an extent. Valtteri is gone, m4sterbr0s doesn't administrate anymore, Quill isn't active at all really, and as Nien mentioned nothing has been done by any of the admins that a moderator can't do and admin specific problems seem to always get delayed. I can't tell you the last time I've seen Kley do anything except sign on for a minute and his last contributing post was in November. I have nothing against anyone I mentioned here but the staff team shouldn't be largely inactive and progressively so towards higher rankings.

"Not active at all really"

?

[FanofSMBX]

"I already mentioned this on Knux's forums, but illias3000 was a user that was banned because his English was bad. Really? Bad English really does not make the community look bad, because there are some very respected users here whose English isn't the best. Why judge someone by their English? It is very inconsiderate for those who speak another language, and this is why we should have sections of the forums dedicated to other languages."

That's it. That's all he was banned for. He was an enthusiastic user who didn't "break" anything else but apparently not enough for Joey.