It annoys me a bit that I don't feel administration don't really value what they have here. Anyone can have a crappy looking vbulletin forum. That's worth nothing. What's worth something here is us, the active community which keeps this place alive and filled with interesting content. I feel like administration never did anything to nurture our community or show any respect for that fact. So modding some random person without informing even the moderators team well beforehand seems just their style. :rolleyes:

1 - I wasn't here when that happened.
2 - If you're being literal, then Yac hadn't posted at all. Which means he hadn't posted 53 times in a manner people found obnoxious, ill-informed and overly aggressive and so we had no reason to think badly of him. When someone's first impression has been terrible, and then they're modded for no discernible reason a week after, and the existing mods don't even know why, then thats a very different thing to someone showing up as a blank slate with a job description and the mods being told they exist and are the new admin. Sure, trepidation in the latter instance is wise, but there's no reason to believe a negative in that situation, before a word has been said. I'm sure if Yac had shown up and been an admin in the style of The Virgin or Captain Caveman, there would have been complaints.

It does, but it's probably a mathematical certainty that something outrageous is going to happen near April Fool's and not actually be an April Fool's joke. Don't get me wrong, I f*cking hope it is a joke, but it just doesn't seem like the kind of thing the administration would do... and like Tore said, not putting any thought into the kind of person they send over DOES. So to me, the evidence leans more toward the obvious.

I was just addressing the fact that a stranger can be chosen for a position without regard to how we end up feeling about that person, particularly if the administration behind it is really only concerned with their own motives.

yo jayshreddz, bring back flash games and a new XXX section brah ;)

I think this site should refocus on monster trucks & fake tits

So when exactly did Yac ever piss anyone off?

Seems like you're getting angry about something that doesn't even really matter.

I do hope the same, though regardless, if it's a joke or not, I still think it shows a positive view in regards of quality over quantity which has been stated. I also think since Yac posted the thread, it makes it very difficult to see what it is other than him needing some administration help. And if that's the case, we may as well strap ourselves into our safety belts and see what happens.

meh, He'd just be another member that happens to have a job to do, If he had a tendency to abuse his power the management wouldn't have put him here in the first place. If true, this is all a big kerfuffle over nothing.

Um...that was exactly my point. Yac didn't have 53 posts of him pissing people off. In fact, here is his first searchable interaction with anyone on the forums:

http://www.musicbanter.com/announcem...tml#post359937

As you can see, he was polite, straight to the point, professional would be a good way to describe it.



And then there's Jay's first interaction with the people of this forum:

http://www.musicbanter.com/introduct...hi-im-jay.html

The first two posts are fairly generic, the kind of stuff we'd expect from a lot of people who aren't particularly memorable.

the third post is "so you're saying that most people here have bad taste? because i can agree with this based on some of the threads i have seen so far. "

Which is a direct attack on the forum as a whole. He also said something similar in the shoutbox to a member directly, regards the threads they had made. And his subsequent 50 posts have consisted of gems like "its probably because country sucks. you have to listen to it to truly understand how much it sucks."



Also, you've quoted my post before I finished editing it. I think its clearer what I meant now, if you go back to that one.

I just hope he concerns himself more with the administrative stuff like banning IPs and not posting or handing out infractions...
(not trying to sound like an ass, but we really do need the help with the IP bannings)

Possibly, getting rid of bots is a tremendously hard task, but I was able to do so quite easily on my own forum by having questions that have to be answered correctly in the registration form.

It's a Canterbury forum so I just used some simple Canterbury-related questions. I figure it should be easy enough to get the same for this forum - just some questions that any musically interested person can answer but which a bot can't. That security function is integrated in phpbb3 (free forum software) so I'm sure it can be added to vbulletin if the functionality is not already there. Perhaps even questions like "what is eleven plus six?" or "what are the 7 first letters of the alphabet?" would be good enough to keep bots from registering.

Well. This seems a little...wrong to me. Why they didn't simply give higher status to an existing and established moderator...huh.

Well.

gotcha

To add to this, anything that requires an answer / typing is better than nothing, correct me if i'm wrong but even a captcha at register would work well.

The captcha we have seems like first-generation or something. I'm pretty sure it isn't a hurdle for bots. Well... obviously it's not.
Really, the only approach we have currently is IP banning, and we're sorting out the ranges they're coming from, but there are A LOT. And it's an all-day affair, every day, 24/7. So eventually, when all of China is IP banned, then we'll have some peace. ;)

The majority of modern bots can be programmed to read captchas now. If they fail once they'll usually just try again until their parsing software gets one right. Of course, having one is still better than nothing, as the majority of truly prevalent spambots are old software left running for years or months on end. No reason to upgrade your spambot unless you stop getting hits, right? Just keep it running until you need a new one, and by then getting hold of a new one will be easy.

As far as questions, they need to be more unique than mathematical answers or "type the word in this box" questions, because, again, bots can be programmed to answer those.

If the question was something like "What is the name of our first subsection?" then that would be much better, since the bots don't, to my knowledge, reference across multiple pages. Or even "Which letters are Capitalised in THis Sentence?", since the bots likely don't parse that either.

I think the last thing I want to add here is this:
I personally really love this forum, I love the members and I love their contributions. However, at the end of the day it is only an internet forum, the discussions here are meaningful to the people at the time who read them, and that is what ultimately matters.
If Jayshreddz decides to absolutely trash this place up and drag it down into the doldrums, the best thing to do is to close the tab, go downstairs and open the front door.

I'll also say that I've tried to get people to join here and stay around, and what makes people do that is the fact that what this place offers is of high quality. If this is compromised by jayshreddz, this will have an effect on people staying around, and subsequently alerting the owners that the effect is a bad one.
What we ought to do is to realise that one member cannot ultimately ruin our lives here, we have made many friends and had years of interesting discussions.

The captcha that we used on one of the sites I made worked pretty well. It worked as both a typing captcha and one where you had to listen to what was said and type it out. Spam emails would come through but it lessened by like 99% because of an up to date captcha. Though IP banning could be effective, there are still millions of proxy IP's.

Wait, wait, wait... You can get paid... to moderate a forum on the internet? In real money? How can I find jobs like that (anywhere)? I had no idea that was a thing.

If all else fails, there's nothing stopping one of the members here from setting up shop at a new board. I used to post on the Modojo forums.

That forum is now a ghost town because after 11 years of being screwed over by the admins who didn't care, multiple ownership changes, and some terrible website decisions, we upped sticks and moved, wholesale, every member, to www.cloudchaser.us

Its a risk, because offshoot forums tend to rely on a lot of people shifting quickly (we had a previous attempt which died), but it worked.

True, I guess one should also avoid question phrases where a simple google search will give the answer in a web page title hit. Stuff like "what instrument did Slash play in Guns N Roses?" would probably work. Should you not know, it's easy to look up the answer if you're human, but probably not if you're a bot.

Maybe people don't feel like staying around because of the immediate bias they get for liking bands like Pearl Jam? Seriously, I've been a member of this forum for three years now and a mod for over two and the reception this individual has received has been appalling.

Our imminent problem is not proxy in nature. It's very specific to a few ISPs in China. These guys get paid to do what they're doing, so we have no shortage of new ranges to find and ban on a daily basis.
It's just tedious because we can't ban the entire IP range owned by a particular ISP, because the IPs are spread to other locations geographically. So it's a matter of getting spammed enough to figure out a network pattern and take care of it, doing the same whenever another pattern emerges.
They're still contained within a few particular ISPs, though, so there isn't a lack of hope that this particular infestation will end.

I'd happily leave this site for a forum where administration shows it cares about the community. So if the day comes, count me in.

Ohhh I getcha. And I know of that issue pretty well. Some emails would come in with some of the same email addresses with very bizarre names attached. And would send some obnoxious emails through. Luckily its a bit easier to block emails than it is to ban IP's, but I understand to an extent.

I don't think anyone here cares about pearl jam. I know I like them just fine, and would never have a problem with anyones favourite band being PJ. In fact, there are a few huge PJ fans on some other boards I go to.

I think people care about the blanket dismissal of entire genres because of a preconcieved bias, coupled with statements about having diverse tastes, while listing as examples several multiplatinum bands who are some of the most visible in any genre, let alone their own.

It just somewhat smacks of a view of the musical world that isn't exactly all encompassing, you know?

Wow, well I hope that we all at least make sure the ship is sinking before we go and jump off it. We've been doing fine with the absence of invested administration. Who knows, maybe this whole recent gagglef*ck is the start of something good, like a change in the way this place is run?

Might be worth it to stick around and see.

Sure, I'm not putting a ship-jumping scheme in motion, but I don't exactly feel like I owe the administration anything. Me and many others like yourself have added real worth to this site by working here for free, banning spammers, by writing guides and making content. You know it's a lot of work. Never once have I seen any appreciation from administration. All I feel like I've seen from them is a fair share of rejection and a lack of interest and respect.

I care about the community. Not the design of this forum or the domain name. If this community moved to a different place, perhaps that would be better for all of us .. except administration who would have a dead site on their hands, but do we really owe them anything?

I'm not going to go out and register a domain for us to jump to right now, I know that.

But on the other hand, the aforementioned modojo forums...well.

First off, they were segadojo in the late 90s, then they were cloudchaser.com until they had a big server crash in 2001, they ran into money troubles, sold the forums, became xengamers in 2002, then that was sold off to paragon entertainment and became xengen in 2003, which went under and was bought back by patrick, who renamed it Modojo in 2005. We suffered under that name with a lack of interest for the period 2005-2011, then made our mass exodus to cloudchaser just as the modojo site was being sold AGAIN to eurogamer. Right now their website says they're part of industrygamers inc.

And their forum is actually so very dead they've removed all links to it from the main website. 11 years worth of posts and the only people who can read them are spambots with the old forum URL in their lists, because none of the people who made those posts go there anymore.

Congratulations! :)

Well, you kinda say it all right here. We care about the community. It's why we're here. We're not here for the appreciation and respect of the administration. What's more, we can survive pretty well without it... as we have thus far.
I think the important thing that separates us from any other place on the web is this exact value in all of us and how we're still able to carve out a great place on the internet with so little to work with.

I don't feel like we owe anything to MB as a company either, but I do think we're all in a position to extend our finer qualities to a wider audience here at MB. We get new users every day, some good, some bad, because of what this website is and where it stands on the internet. We can choose to abandon that for more control of our site that we don't need in order to maintain what we are, or we can choose to stay with what little that we do have and capitalize on the success of a website that is already in a position to keep our community alive and breathing.

I love this. 11 pages in and this is literally the first sincere-sounding congratulations in the entire thread.

And I'm still not COMPLETELY sure its even sincere :laughing:

It's not. :)

You're a good actor.

I think the lack of control we have over MB is stifling and unfair. We're the ones who use this site, yet we have so little control over it. I know it's irked me for a long time now.

Had it ever seemed possible to do it in a way that keeps the community intact, I would've organized a mass exodus to a new forum a long time ago. I would've asked members to move their journals, reviews or other beloved threads to the new site and delete them here to quickly get content at the new site and hopefully climb the google ranks quicker .. or to move to a forum which has already been around a while so that it's not a no-man's land and an influx of members could be expected in the future.

As a note, Jayshreddz is online and has made 2 posts that aren't in his post history. I'm guessing that means he's in the mod cave talking about...the things that have happened today.

With the greatest respect, my experience was that after what I considered a perfectly reasonable conversation starter in his intro thread ended up with him blanketly dismissing one of my favourite genres as "just awful" and that I "haven't listened to it enough to understand", I felt he was the one who was being objectionable, to treat one of my favourite parts of music with such contempt - dismissing something that means so much to me so coarsely was pretty horrible.

I tried to be polite and reasonable, but it was clearly worth nothing.

I still don't think it would be worth risking everything we've built here on the chance that a second site would be just as successful. I think we do a lot here to really open the minds and broaden the horizons of a lot of people and bring them into the fold here because of the exposure this place gets, and this place grows because of it. I don't really have any illusions that an en-mass exodus would gain enough traction at a new site to rival the benefit this one has in the search engines, at least not quick enough for all but a core membership to populate the new one long-term, and it might just get dull enough in that scenario that some core members would become weary from the slowness.

Modojo did it, and we only had a core population of a hundred or so members. We were so dead that we had half the number of forums open that MB does, and still weren't as busy, but we had to go somewhere, and we migrated just fine.

THe issue isn't the result, its getting enough people onboard to go elsewhere, so that the rest follow.

^ This.

We accept the guy's a a bit of a hole, everyone gets on with their lives.

Job's a gud un.

Now, all the other discussions are of merit, but regarding this individual... could we please act like grown adults?

I've said this in the chatroom already but i'll say it here as well. There's not a lot of reason or evidence as to why any of us really need to get so worked up over this. First of all, it's the first day anything significant has happened to the mod team, but nothing significant has actually happened to the forum that is evident to anybody, maybe the mods, but only mods will know that. Also, I understand Urban's frustration, but that is also nothing to get worked up about, mostly for the fact that we should all wait it out and see what happens in the next couple days, or even the next week or two. We're getting stressed and overworked because this is all overwhelming and not a lot of information has been passed onto us to really make a big deal out of it. I'm keeping a mutual side of this, and i'm not blaming anybody for any anger or being upset just yet until something is given to us to be upset about. We're getting upset over our own assumptions, that's it.