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Wrexasaur wrote:
That may be correct, and it may be entirely false. What you see on the site is not evidence supporting the claims of mods and crew; it supports the admin. Again dropping the team was stupid and immature, but I don't see any evidence of those accusations being true. Maybe the admin just didn't get along with his team, I dunno, never lurked there often and it would be hard to tell either way. This reeks of politics...

Well, he elected to change the passwords and email addresses of all of his senior moderators and demod everyone else, so the "crew" hasn't really done anything over there. Some of the members just ran amok. There was nothing the moderation team could do to stop them.

It wasn't a question of getting along with him. He literally never did any work. He hardly ever communicated with us in any form whatsoever. He would just come in from time to time and add a few codes related to his advertising. Our other admin was the only one keeping things running, and the moderators and librarians handled everything else. Our other admin was the one who had to restore from his own backups when things went wrong. Which is all we are doing now. We didn't "steal" anything. Skylight wiped out the Terms of Service a while ago. He has no more right to the databases than anyone else who can access them. He had no contract with the other admin defining ownership. He has thus far been unwilling to remove posts he has no copyright over, and we are more than willing to remove posts if a member would not like them to be transferred to an identical forum under a different name.

We know what it took to run the site in terms of expenses. He wasn't just adding a few applets here and there to pay his expenses. Why else is someone going to buy a forum and web site that they never post on? The goodness of their heart? He was a leech, pure and simple. His advertising was far in excess of what we needed to pay our hosting expenses.

We quit because we were tired of putting in hours of time and effort just so that someone could sell his advertising. He never once thanked any of us for the effort we put in. He acted like he was doing us a favor.

So don't take your owners for granted. We are paying the price for losing control of the forums and choosing to hang around anyway. Don't take my word for it, but don't make assertions in ignorance, either. Go see for yourself what an active member of our community Skylight was. It is actually pretty easy to tell.

I went there this morning and I'll probably never go back.

Cannot unsee what I saw there. Seriously WTF!

Snikkyd wrote:I went there this morning and I'll probably never go back.

Cannot unsee what I saw there. Seriously WTF!

It happens. Our response time to attack flood posting was generally on the order of 20-30 minutes, tops. Shorter during peak hours. I am not sure if Dakka has had similar problems or if your user authentication can keep them out. But in this case there was nothing the staff could do. He removed any ability we had to prevent it, he couldn't handle it himself, and he didn't take the forums down. The members got mad and ran amok. It is a tight community. I am just sorry it is ending like this.

khanaris wrote:

Wrexasaur wrote:
That may be correct, and it may be entirely false. What you see on the site is not evidence supporting the claims of mods and crew; it supports the admin. Again dropping the team was stupid and immature, but I don't see any evidence of those accusations being true. Maybe the admin just didn't get along with his team, I dunno, never lurked there often and it would be hard to tell either way. This reeks of politics...

Well, he elected to change the passwords and email addresses of all of his senior moderators and demod everyone else, so the "crew" hasn't really done anything over there. Some of the members just ran amok. There was nothing the moderation team could do to stop them.

It wasn't a question of getting along with him. He literally never did any work. He hardly ever communicated with us in any form whatsoever. He would just come in from time to time and add a few codes related to his advertising. Our other admin was the only one keeping things running, and the moderators and librarians handled everything else. Our other admin was the one who had to restore from his own backups when things went wrong. Which is all we are doing now. We didn't "steal" anything. Skylight wiped out the Terms of Service a while ago. He has no more right to the databases than anyone else who can access them. He had no contract with the other admin defining ownership. He has thus far been unwilling to remove posts he has no copyright over, and we are more than willing to remove posts if a member would not like them to be transferred to an identical forum under a different name.

We know what it took to run the site in terms of expenses. He wasn't just adding a few applets here and there to pay his expenses. Why else is someone going to buy a forum and web site that they never post on? The goodness of their heart? He was a leech, pure and simple. His advertising was far in excess of what we needed to pay our hosting expenses.

We quit because we were tired of putting in hours of time and effort just so that someone could sell his advertising. He never once thanked any of us for the effort we put in. He acted like he was doing us a favor.

Sounds like a bad captain... just like cappin' Bligh. A MUTINY!

Captain Bligh was blinded by aspiration as skylight appears to be blinded by stupidity. In some ways they are the same thing altogether.

....

I can't believe you ruined my joke on the next page. (rofl)

So don't take your owners for granted. We are paying the price for losing control of the forums and choosing to hang around anyway. Don't take my word for it, but don't make assertions in ignorance, either. Go see for yourself what an active member of our community Skylight was. It is actually pretty easy to tell.

Something I also noticed about TauOnline is how hard it is to tell what any given members history is. I could go through thread after thread, putting together an opinion (or lack thereof) of an individual together. I chose not to, but I will take your word that what you say is true.

Try and remember that you are in the OT, within a topic with less than a thousand views. It would be even less if the links within didn't lead to drama and dirty pictures/words. The site seems to have been cleaned up a bit now, and I wish you luck in your own Warhams forum.

FOR HONOR!

Wrexasaur wrote:
Sounds like a bad captain... just like cappin' Bligh. A MUTINY!

It probably would have become a mutiny anyway. I can't fault him for treating it like one. But he wasn't really prepared for it. It is all well and good to hang your officers, but it still leaves you with no means of controlling the crew. We don't exactly have Chiefs. I don't think he is stupid. He just doesn't have the right sort of experience. For the most part he runs car forums. They practically run themselves, and he isn't dealing with over-the-top gamer personalities all the time. I think he picked TO because we had a good pagerank, and he wanted to invest in something new. But he never bothered to learn much about how it worked.

Wrexasaur wrote:
Something I also noticed about TauOnline is how hard it is to tell what any given members history is. I could go through thread after thread, putting together an opinion (or lack thereof) of an individual together. I chose not to, but I will take your word that what you say is true.

I am not sure what Dakka has enabled. TO was using SimpleMachines, so the format here is familiar to me. Which is good, because I will probably be spending more time here. Orks are my main army anyway. But the profile of individual members should contain a breakdown of activity by percentage for their top ten sub-forums. With Skylight it is easier since he has only posted about 37 times in the months since he bought the site. It is not something I would ask anyone to take my word for, since obviously I am biased.

He went for the brute-force approach of deleting the account that was posting the image flood. Which was the correct decision, but also probably what that particular member wanted. I would like the ability to remove my own posts, but I can only ask that they be removed. But at any rate, hopefully that got rid of the image bombs. I don't like what Skylight did, but I still feel responsibility to our member base. I would hate for anyone to run into that stuff at work, but even on your own it is pretty disturbing.

WarOne wrote:Darn shame. I guess that the Greater Good did not succeed in the end after all when the puppet master behind the Ethereals decided to rear its ugly head.

EDIT: I love the third reply to their new moderator search thread:

http://forums.tauonline.org/index.php/topic,97962.0.html

Not safe for children who don't know about the third finger from the right on either hand.

Thank you for your kind words, WarOne That poster was me, and unfortunantly it has been deleted ):

Ordzmek wrote:

WarOne wrote:Darn shame. I guess that the Greater Good did not succeed in the end after all when the puppet master behind the Ethereals decided to rear its ugly head.

EDIT: I love the third reply to their new moderator search thread:

http://forums.tauonline.org/index.php/topic,97962.0.html

Not safe for children who don't know about the third finger from the right on either hand.

Thank you for your kind words, WarOne That poster was me, and unfortunantly it has been deleted ):

Well, I hope the Tau players find a new homeworld that they can trust.

khanaris wrote:

Snikkyd wrote:I went there this morning and I'll probably never go back.

Cannot unsee what I saw there. Seriously WTF!

It happens. Our response time to attack flood posting was generally on the order of 20-30 minutes, tops. Shorter during peak hours. I am not sure if Dakka has had similar problems or if your user authentication can keep them out. But in this case there was nothing the staff could do. He removed any ability we had to prevent it, he couldn't handle it himself, and he didn't take the forums down. The members got mad and ran amok. It is a tight community. I am just sorry it is ending like this.

Yeah, me too. I went to TO, not too frequently, but sometimes. I rather liked it, not sure why, but there were some things on there that weren't posted anywhere else that I enjoyed.

What I meant was, I saw some really, really undescribable, and disgusting pictures there, and didn't really feel like taking any chances.

Tau Online always seemed very friendly, and was mostly flame free, so this was all so sudden, it was rather shocking.

Warning! That site is now probably infested by malware! This is not a joke!

god, it feels like its fallout 3 in forum form....

also the thread "yo skyloight im real proud..." has an interesting meat sculpture ( with cherries and bacon!)