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Administrator Title Change
Zeupar:
I guess the main question now is why SonicAD refuses to give up his position as site owner when he hasn't done anything for TSC in years. It's ridiculous, to be honest.
Thorn:
Okay, this post won't go on the front page, so I can be a bit more direct here.
I should note one caveat to my resignation. Just in case an emergency happens, I have admin powers in a secondary usergroup. I just don't plan to use them for anything super meaningful.
--- Quote from: Parax on April 30, 2015, 12:08:25 am ---You guys may as well remove me from admin status too. I haven't really been a part of TSC since dropping out of IRC which isn't really fair to the community, and honestly I feel like I've gotten to the point of moving on from this site.
--- End quote ---
Note sure why you didn't just remove yourself, but okay, it's done.
--- Quote from: Flim_flam_bsdetector on April 29, 2015, 11:46:37 pm ---I think I speak for everyone when I say we dont want you to go though? can we at least vote on it?
--- End quote ---
I basically let that happen last year when all of the silent people suddenly spoke up about it, so I returned. Unfortunately, not much changed upon my return. If anything, I can't pull the same "leave, then return" stunt twice or it starts losing meaning.
--- Quote from: Zeupar on April 30, 2015, 02:57:31 am ---I guess the main question now is why SonicAD refuses to give up his position as site owner when he hasn't done anything for TSC in years. It's ridiculous, to be honest.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Zeupar on April 30, 2015, 03:28:57 am ---We were planning to post the "Best of March" on the front page today. Would posting it in a few hours make you feel bad?
--- End quote ---
That second one is a PM, which I guess means I'm a bad person for sharing, but I had to put those two quotes together to say "wow, that's just plain dickish; fuck you." I don't expect anybody to feel forced to say goodbye or to weep at this turn of events, but to immediately question if you can strip somebody else of a title too and then ask if you can bury this topic's announcement to post things about March at the end of April? I hope you step on a Lego barefoot for those sentiments. It was nice working with you too.
--- Quote from: HyperSonic7701 on April 30, 2015, 10:23:54 am ---Thorn leaving changes the shift of TSC entirely. Now, whenever a dispute has to be decided, it's Gerbil making the calls, and he's probably not around often enough and/or at the "right times" to do just that (not his fault, ofc, but it's the truth).
--- End quote ---
Giving GerbilSoft the title was more symbolic than anything. The fact of the matter is that the things people have wanted fixed lately have only been accessible by GerbilSoft, so the title went to the person who has that power. Honestly, I expect that he'll notice this topic within a few days and immediately throw the title at Zeupar. It won't mean Zeupar has any more power, though.
--- Quote from: HyperSonic7701 on April 30, 2015, 10:23:54 am ---As far as I see it, this might begin the (slow) final decline of TSC, once and for all.
--- End quote ---
No, the final decline began when the community became toxic enough to push me away, not when I took the actual step. If A leads to B and shit happens after B, blame A. I know that I made most of my points in my resignation post about how I felt out of touch, but I wasn't going to call people out on the front page. I left my position because I was sick of watching people use this website to be assholes to each other or to reward immature behavior.
BS calls have become witch hunts. The supersonic917 BS call is the quintessential example, with a few people barging into the topic without permission and a large swath of the community discussing spurious evidence in Skype groups. They may have been right in the end, but that doesn't justify the methods used. For another example, I also had people saying that the best times for the Big Foot boss in Sonic Adventure 2 must be false because they scoured the web and couldn't find anybody else that good. When I pointed out both that one of the people at the top was well respected with no reason to lie and nobody had hard evidence, I started getting yelled at and told I was "corrupt" and making "excuses". Of course, the very next day, I was messaged saying there was a non-TAS video of the top time all along. Hell, I'll give a third example: I currently have a long text file from a member regarding possible cheating in Sonic 1, but half of the arguments within are "the player didn't do this thing how other speedrunners do it" while the other half are "the player used the strategy other speedrunners use this time" but with an angry tone. How do you work with such logic? We're at a point where faking proof is too easy and making BS calls based on hard evidence is nearly impossible, but that doesn't make it okay for people to make BS calls without that evidence.
Dickish behavior is being tolerated and even applauded for some reason. When The Kid throws a tantrum and further destroys broken charts, the correct response is not to glorify the act in YouTube videos and give him lots of Twitter attention. When there's drama between notable site members that threatens to draw everybody in, calling the head admin of said site part of the peanut gallery and saying he'd better not get involved is not the right course of action either. When I do get asked to be involved in drama but I need to do something in the real world such as go to work, I don't care to hear that the timing of my real world obligations is "convenient" for dodging the drama (that we just said some people didn't want me in anyway); I couldn't imagine telling my students that their teacher couldn't make it to class because he had to solve problems for a Sonic the Hedgehog site. Coming home to drama like this after work was never fun.
Everybody seems to want to be a special snowflake lately, and if that special snowflakeness isn't shown to everybody on the site, it's not good enough. It's also the case that people are holding other people to standards that don't actually affect anything on the site. For instance, The Kid destroyed those charts even though everybody who knew him was aware of his zero-point championship just because the site wasn't giving him the title. Zeupar just asked for SonicAD to relinquish the "site owner" title as if somebody else having the words "site owner" in his/her profile would make the person more special or powerful. The two former TSC Race Night moderators started snapping at each other because they each believed the other wasn't upholding the ideals associated with the title, and one of the two even said that without the title, he/she would not do any more work for Race Nights because he/she wouldn't feel special. Even being a moderator on Twitch channels with 10 viewers is considered important to some people around here. These are all just arbitrary titles and aren't worth drama!
Speaking of drama, I found an amusing Twitter exchange that talked about two people claiming they'd stop dealing with recent TSC social drama but that had a screenshot of what looked to be such drama. How exactly does bringing it up again help? Pretend it doesn't exist and use your block button liberally if it gets overwhelming (note: admins don't have the luxury of burying their heads in the sand like that). Poking around Twitter right now, I see a few TSC-related profiles that are mentioning recent drama even now because everybody's so helpful!
* "what the hell is drama i don't even know :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^) :^)"
* "Getting a little tired of seeing stupid shit spread with a friend of mine. Leave him be. I don't want to hear a single fucking word about this whole drama situation anymore."
* "…what I saw was a person that I had respect for has been washed away and I am so sick of people doing this shit. Stabbing others in the back and talking shit behind others, starting drama."Twitter, Skype, Twitch, etc. have block buttons for a reason. Use the damn button instead of acting like kindergartners and then having everything traced back to TSC. Similarly, if you want to minimize drama, don't give people moderator powers in your Twitch channels and Skype groups unless they can use the power responsibly; friendship does not equal responsibility.
My two cents to many of you guys would be to start managing your online friendships better while putting less attention on being some special, recognized person, as your missteps drag in everybody around you. Don't throw around accusations you can't prove, don't shit talk as much (and certainly not publicly), don't award assholery, and branch out of your closest circles of friends once in a while. I have a special Skype group for my closest friends from another website, but I also speak in the site's many IRC channels and touch base with every friendly site member there. Perhaps you could do the same with #soniccenter to stir up a friendlier community? I shouldn't have had to look at a group of my friends who identify as furries—the stereotypical Internet drama group—and think "Wow, if only I had such open, friendly, and accepting people on my website!" Of course, I don't have to think that anymore, because it's no longer my website. :)
FUCK do I hate having to organize these sorts of rants. On a lighter note, does anybody feel like actually having a good time doing anything online? I'm free tomorrow night and I know 200cc Mario Kart 8's been a blast. :P I've been interested in D&D and Pathfinder lately too. Also, as always, I'm looking to polish my waning Puyo Puyo (Mean Bean Machine) skills if anybody wants to puzzle like it's 1993.~
Parax:
For me, it's been a while since I really did anything on TSC so I can't totally remember. But this community was fantastic to me for the first few years after I joined. Since then the site's been in decline and everyone knows it. As an admin what I really wanted to do was bring back the community feeling we had years ago, but it became plainly apparent over time that that wasn't going to happen. Far as I'm concerned, the site is past its prime. TSC is ostensibly about competition, but the site's biggest pieces of functionality are being replaced by ingame leaderboards and YouTube videos. Speedrunning is getting more and more competitive and video-based (between YouTube and Twitch), but TSC still operates purely on the honor system using a system that was implemented in 2003 (twelve years ago) and nobody is willing to change it. It is easier than it's ever been to cheat and falsify proof, yet nobody wants to strengthen proof requirements. TSC is never going to be a competitive hub as long as it sticks its head in the sand and ignores what the world of competition actually looks like in 2015. Site updates are direly needed but the only person with knowledge of the existing codebase and the skills to make it happen is GerbilSoft, and I really don't blame him for not taking on such a gargantuan task by himself in service of a dying community.
In any case, the good I can do personally as an admin is limited. I proposed a lot of ideas, but I don't have the means to make them happen. I can't make this site into what it needs to be, and as of late I've lost interest in trying. I started appearing in IRC less frequently last year because things were getting busy for me, in between other major personal projects I was working on and moving several states away. My nick on IRC ended up expiring and was snatched up by someone from pokemon-lake. SurrealChat staff did not want to help me get it back and decided to freeze the nick so no one could use it instead. At this point it barely seemed worth being on IRC, because outside of TSC, a community I was losing interest in and not visiting very often anymore anyway, I had other ways of contacting everyone I knew on SurrealChat. I let everyone in the IRC channel know I wouldn't be coming by IRC anymore - which limits a lot of what I can do as an admin because a lot of site functionality is not accessible through the site itself and can only be used through CodeGirl - but that people could contact me if I was needed for anything on the site. And nobody ever did. I had flying fox poke me on Skype to ask questions or ask for advice a few times, but that's it. I kind of figured people would at least be upset with me for up and disappearing on TSC, which I did feel a bit bad about, but nobody ever expressed anything like that to me. So I ended up with the impression that no one really cared that I wasn't doing anything as an admin.
At this point I don't think there is much good I can do for TSC. I've lost interest in the community. I'm much more focused on modding and development, something I find more rewarding and interesting than speedrunning, and something I see more of a future for myself in than this. I'm less and less a part of the speedrunning community and of TSC as time goes on, and I've been out of the loop long enough that I don't really know what's going on anymore. I have no idea what the community issues Thorn is talking about are.
For anyone interested in taking up the torch and trying to reform TSC into a competitive site suitable for competition in 2015, here is my advice: don't. TSC has too much baggage accumulated over the years for any meaningful change to happen. It needs a full redesign from scratch and a relaunch, to the point that I feel like that time would be better spent designing a new site entirely from the ground up rather than trying to shape TSC into what it needs to be.
Anyway, those are my two cents. Like I said I'm out of the loop, so apologies if any of what I said is incorrect or outdated.
Thorn:
^ I think what you said is fine. I see that side of things too. However, I can handle a broken system if people can all trudge through it nicely. The community decline is what killed it for me.
Which reminds me, if you're reading any of this and thinking it doesn't apply to you, maybe it doesn't! This isn't the majority I'm addressing; it's the active minority. I'm sorry that the minority set the tone for the whole community.
Zeupar:
--- Quote from: Thorn on April 30, 2015, 02:05:35 pm ---That second one is a PM, which I guess means I'm a bad person for sharing, but I had to put those two quotes together to say "wow, that's just plain dickish; fuck you." I don't expect anybody to feel forced to say goodbye or to weep at this turn of events, but to immediately question if you can strip somebody else of a title too and then ask if you can bury this topic's announcement to post things about March at the end of April? I hope you step on a Lego barefoot for those sentiments. It was nice working with you too.
--- End quote ---
Huh? I guess you were too busy thinking I was mindlessly shitting on you to actually reason out what drove me to post that, which was the fact that two people stepping down seemed like the perfect scenario to bring up the old issue of having a site owner that doesn't do anything for the site he owns.
The end of April is definitely much better than the beginning of May to post March-related content, yes. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings with that private message. I guess we are even after your extremely salty overreaction?
--- Quote from: Thorn on April 30, 2015, 02:05:35 pm ---Everybody seems to want to be a special snowflake lately, and if that special snowflakeness isn't shown to everybody on the site, it's not good enough.(...)Zeupar just asked for SonicAD to relinquish the "site owner" title as if somebody else having the words "site owner" in his/her profile would make the person more special or powerful.(...)These are all just arbitrary titles and aren't worth drama!
--- End quote ---
That's you misinterpreting things again (maybe because of an angry state of mind?). The reason I asked him that is because having someone who hasn't posted in almost three years as the site owner does give a very bad impression of TSC. That wasn't about e-penis or TSC fame (even the thought of the concept makes me chuckle lol).
In any case, I find really sad the way you decided to go about this.
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