Empire of the Iguanadons

For the official version: http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topic&t=595

The last few days have pretty much convinced me that calling it a "mud community" is an error. That ceased being a valid term for it a long time ago. Now all it is is a few of the same small group of people, spread out across multiple different forums and other sites. As evidenced by the general tone of places like TMC, many of these people desire a community made up of a roving band of anarchists. The trolling, flaming, personal attacks, and general hatred toward anyone in an authority figure is self-evident. It has become a malignant cancer upon the community, killing off large segments of it. Most of the time these same people take pride and joy in bringing down a site, or tearing down those who run them.

Personally I find it very sad that people hold the opinion that TMC is a haven for trolls and hatemongers, but Andrew's inaction in dealing with them has created the hostile atmosphere which exists there.

Ironically, when Davion, Asylumius, and myself sat down to bring MudBytes to the community, it was done in response to the administrative style of Kyndig. Last year around March or so you'll probably remember that he banned a number of people, myself included, in an effort to quell a troll infestation. I will admit, my role in that whole affair was less than noble. I made some mistakes and did some things I shouldn't have. But Kyndig's wide sweeping generalistic reaction greatly overshadowed the real issue and the "usual suspects" in the MUD community trotted themselves out as the champions of freedom and equality and fairness. The only thing they were really doing was attempting to impose their will on a privately run organization because they disliked the policy of moderation which existed.

For awhile, MudBytes grew and had become a community site where we thought people could come in, have a discussion, and not fear being able to speak their minds. It was grand. There were few rules governing content, and what rules did exist were thought to have been adequate enough to deal with most anything. Until recently.

I won't rehash the details of what led up to this, that's been done already: http://www.iguanadons.net/Internet-Trolls-127.html

There are no longer enough people left in the community to sustain it. It's reached a point much like a species gene pool with insufficient variety left to assure its survival. Code thieves run rampant. Copyright violators are everywhere. There's been no innovation or new development done in the last *FIFTEEN* years. People snipe at each other left and right over the dumbest little things. Flamewars are the norm. Intelligent discussion is rare. Is it any wonder that no new blood is coming in to replace those of us that are being picked off one by one while everyone blissfully ignores the fact that there's fewer and fewer targets left?

As I sit here thinking about this, I can only name two places where the hatred and vitriol commonplace everywhere else has not infested the site. The SmaugFUSS Project, and Nick Gammon's support forums. Both places have reasonably healthy, active, helpful memberships where it's not necessary to create draconian policies to regulate things. Yes, they have fights, disagreements, and even ugly moments, but even healthy sites suffer from being run and frequented by human beings. The truly sad part is, both sites are tailored toward relatively niche markets, and have little influence outside their own memberships. The AFKMud site isn't really large enough or active enough to mean anything anymore.

MudBytes no longer holds any personal enjoyment for me anymore. Bitterness and hatred has all but ruined it. There is a significant effort of time and attention needed to run a site like that and the motivation for doing so largely comes from seeing that others enjoy the efforts as well. But when all you see is anger, resentment, hatred, and bitterness from the people you're providing service to, it becomes pointless to continue being involved in providing it. As Asylumius so greatly put it, "These people suck all the fun out of it."

Cratylus, Aidil, Hades Kane, Mechaterro, KaVir, Raukodacil, and Molly,

Thank you all ever so much for taking such a delight in poking the stick into my side and for taking such delight in watching another community site's reputation damaged for no other reason than your own amusements. You are all perfect examples of why there is no longer a community left to run. If you all would focus your energies on developing useful things and being generally helpful a lot of the problems we face today would vanish. But instead you're all just in it to see other people fail. Sad.

Lobotomy, Macademus, Drizzt, Nihilum, Tyche, Kastagaar, Scandum, David Haley, and Sarapis,

Thanks for at least trying to look at this from an objective viewpoint and for trying to offer real solutions. Even if we may disagree personally from time to time.

Davion, Asylumius, Kiasyn, I'm truly sorry you guys will be finding out about this the hard way. I'm also truly sorry that there exists enough of an air of distrust that certain issues could not be brought before me without fear of reprisal in some way.

To Conner, Kayle, and other members who have given me their support over the last few days, I thank you for that. It means a lot.

To everyone else, I've enjoyed being there for you all on MudBytes. I'll still be around, but I hope everyone can understand that I no longer hold the enjoyment that being a part of the staff had brought me and that my decision was not taken lightly.
.........................
"It is pointless to resist, my son." -- Darth Vader
"Resistance is futile." -- The Borg
"Mother's coming for me in the dragon ships. I don't like these itchy clothes, but I have to wear them or it frightens the fish." -- Thurindil

Well. I guess that's that then.

Wow.. I'm not often at a loss for a response, but.. just.. wow.

I saw your resignation announcement on mudbytes and wasn't sure if I should reply to it or how exactly would be best to reply to it, but this.. I mean, you're naming names and even going so far as to point out that you feel only Gammon's and The FUSS Project are still free of these problems. Personally, I think you're omitting a few places in that short list, but maybe I'm a bit more optimistic than you or maybe I'm just considering some smaller sites than you were willing to cite.

I'm glad that MudBytes won't be losing you for participation, but I do hope that it can somehow still thrive even without you as one of its admins. I know that I've been pretty impressed recently by Kiasyn, he's come a long way, and Davion's been a pretty good guy as long as I've known him. I really don't know Asylumius, but I do know that you were the leader the three of them took direction from.

In any event, I suppose there's always a positive side to anything, in this case you'll now have a little more time available to be able to get back to some of your own projects and I wish you the best on them. I'll still be around if you need/want me for stuff.

Someone has to start naming names. Otherwise nothing gets solved in the end. The guilty parties need to know who they are as much as the helpful ones. You might notice the irony in some of the mentioned names on both sides.

As far as my relatively small circle of MUD sites go, yes. Gammon's and FUSS are more or less the only things I see that are free from the "politics of personal destruction" for lack of something better to call it. You might be visiting some smaller pockets of civility I'm not familiar with. But then again that just goes to prove my point that the only places you can even find civility are the smaller pockets where the "usual suspects" don't hang out. It creates an island affect where people in one place don't even know the others exist. I'd be curious to know where you've been hiding out

The really stupid thing about it is that a lot of the agitators and such do just fine as long as they're on their own doing their own thing. Find them on their own sites, they tend to be generally helpful and friendly. Get them together in a cesspool like TMC, and mob mentality kicks in. Then they go to other sites like TMS, MudMagic, MudBytes, and Godwars.net, they don't grasp why people don't want them around and cause trouble when they're asked to behave.

This whole problem will only get worse, not better.

I guess I was thinking of the smaller sites like AFKMud's forums, QSFP's home forums, Sandbox's forums, my own forums, MW's forums, etc.. in fact, even the Area Archives Dace erected have been nicely peaceful, albeit fairly dead as well... in fact, lately MudDomain's been pretty friendly too.

Well yeah, I suppose if you want to get down to individual game sites you'll probably find reasonably non-trolly type people.

The QSFP site and the Sandbox site aren't really what I'd consider MUD related. Even if the software has so far only been largely adopted by mudders.

And true, Mud Domain and Dace's archive site certainly seem to be free of trolls so far. But that's probably because the usual suspects haven't actually registered at either place yet.

I try to be optimistic where I can find something to be optimistic about, if it means I have to resort to taking into account individual game sites so be it, but AFKMud's forums aren't an individual game site.

Well, I could say the same thing about this blog, but if it's primarily mudders who are using the site, why not link it to the mud community?

Hmm, I was thinking that one or two of them had made it to Paradigm's place already, and Dace's mainly has the excuse that there's really just little or no actually discussions happening. *shrug*

With the recent activities on MudBytes and things said last night on IMC, I don't believe I'll even be continuing to support MudBytes.

As if it couldn't get any worse, Cratylus has finally revealed that he's been given inside information about data he shouldn't have had access too, which means someone on the remaining team gave it to him. I can eliminate Kiasyn as a suspect in that, leaving two others.

Obviously my trust was badly misplaced if we've come to conspiring with the trolls to bring down a former admin. In the process Cratylus has become far more aggressive about it and has gone so far as to stuff his head up Icculus' ass, praising him for operating a lawless anarchy laden forum. It amazes me to no end that in situations like this it's the trolls who have high praise for uninvolved admins and people who just want to have a decent discussion about anything are completely drowned out by assholes who like being seen as the victim of something, as Sarapis so neatly pointed out.

Cratylus is what Larry Elder calls a "victicrat" which is basically a liberal who plays himself as a constant victim of one thing or another. Their entire participation in any issue with an authority figure is to become the oppressed innocent victim. Cratylus is no innocent victim here though. He's beautifully orchestrated a rather elaborate scenario where he's even managed to trick the other admins into playing along with him. Cratylus has demonstrated on many occasions that he's more than capable of fabricating images, yet nobody seems to buy the possibility that he'd fake one of a simple forum screenshot. Depending on when the others fed him the information he was after, he could easily have generated the already worthless apache log snippet to match up with what he had to make things look that much worse. There's also no way to discount an inside job on the part of the remaining MudBytes team since they seemed all too eager to side with Cratylus with no logical reason.

And of course all of the other minor players who think they're so important are now chiming in because I left them off the list of major players who want nothing more than to see the huge flamewar continue.

So in order to keep from shitting on Icculus' carpet any more than has already been done by all sides, I've blindly changed my password to the site. I hardly think that what few people still read the forums have enough influence anywhere outside of Troll City to do any real damage.

Rampant speculation on TMC persists over why I resigned. Since the admins at MudBytes have locked the official thread, I'll do this here:



I was not, and have not, been banned. Scandum was not punished until AFTER I left. At which point he was put in the trolls group.



There's no mystery. Here's the deal in as simple a set of terms as I can make it:

1. Cratylus falsely accused me of an edit and was trolled - then later banned.
2. Several people believed admins should shut their mouths and not participate in their creations.
3. Ignorant jackasses who can't tell the difference between statistical fact and racism marked me as a racist, along with the site as a whole.
4. The remaining administrators grew suspicious of my activities and no longer trusted me.

I have no idea if they planned to fire me or not. It never got that far, and they're still consulting with me regarding site development. That doesn't seem like the activities of people who harbor any ill will.

It came to light during Cratylus' ridiculous mess of a thread that either Davion or Asylumius gave him information from the site's logs which he should not have been given. This reinforces my belief that there was no trust left between us.

I am not racist, have never been racist, and don't plan to become racist. Any assertions that I stepped down because I am are categorically false. The administration had no plans to hand down punishments against me for anything of the sort. Anyone engaging in speculation of this nature is a liar.

Since my resignation, Asylumius has asked once if I'd ever consider coming back, and Kiasyn has asked me several times if I would come back. Right now I can't bring myself to do that until someone there admits their involvement in what I now believe was an attempt to frame me for making a database edit I did not make. I've explained already what it was I did there, and now hindsight tells me that information was probably manipulated to use as evidence against me.

If that's not enough for people to accept, then I don't know what is.

Wow! I had no idea of a lot of the undertow and behind-the-scenes stuff that was going on. There have been new lows reached in the mud community, one of them earlier today, though I won't get into that here. I feel myself being more and more ostracized from the community I once loved. I can see where you are coming from, Samson. I hate that things went as far as they did, but that seems to be as-per-normal with mud-related forums.

Victicrat huh? Had no idea it had a name.

Best wishes. I'll check in from time to time.

>> Cratylus, Aidil, Hades Kane, Mechaterro, KaVir, Raukodacil, and Molly,

Thank you all ever so much for taking such a delight in poking the stick into my side and for taking such delight in watching another community site's reputation damaged for no other reason than your own amusements. You are all perfect examples of why there is no longer a community left to run. If you all would focus your energies on developing useful things and being generally helpful a lot of the problems we face today would vanish. But instead you're all just in it to see other people fail. Sad. >> endquote

You're welcome.

<3 Ben

Yes. There's a lot more to this than Cratylus and company are ever going to admit to. It appears as though they are more interested in seeing me utterly torn down. I find my self ultimately not caring since it has pretty much zero impact on me elsewhere.

Yeah. Until I started listening to Larry Elder, I had no idea the state of mind had a name either.

I am a bit surprised at seeing my name on your 'hate list'.

As far as I know, I've taken extremely little part in this discussion, and I certainly haven't been bashing you.
On two occasions I have offered an alternative theory about what might have happened. There was no ill will behind this, especially not against you. In fact my suggestion was made to point out that IF someone did in fact edit the URL, (which evidence after all seems to point at), it need not necessarily have been you, and it need not necessarily have been done in ill will.

If a comment like that in a 10 page long discussion is enough for you to bunch me up as 'the usual suspects' -- oh well, all I can say is that you must have lost all sense of proportions along the way.

On second thought, I am even more confused about seeing two other names on you 'good guy' - 'bad guy' lists: KaVir and Sarapis.

I have browsed through the thread again and only found one post from KaVir. It said this:

"The real question in my mind, Cratylus, is that now you've managed to get yourself banned from MudMagic, TMS and MudBytes, what comes next? Will you train yourself up a bit more on a few of the smaller mud forums, or go straight for the final challenge (TMC)?"

Which, try as I might, I cannot really interpret as an attempt at "poking the stick" into your side; isn't it rather directed at Cratylus?

Sarapis on the other hand made two comments. The first one - (in connection with someone suggesting that a direct communication with the site admin might have been a better way to deal with things) - first said this:

"Of course that would have been the most productive way to handle things, but some people are intent on playing the public victim. Some people thrive on attention, negative or otherwise."

And then this:

"Directed at this entire thread:
Someone involved in local politics once opined to me that in politics, there appears to be no relationship between how petty an issue is and how long and forcefully people are willing to engage with it, thus ensuring that nothing important ever gets done."


Although he may have a point, albeit a condescending one, I cannot really interpret what he said as "trying to look at this from an objective viewpoint" and "trying to offer real solutions".

Or am I missing out on something here?

It's not a hate list. It's a list of people I saw as aggravating the situation at the time. If I had the list to do over now, you'd be the one who more or less pegged what all the evidence now points to, given that Davion or Asylumius gave Cratylus information he never should have had. I'm sure as a forum admin yourself you can appreciate that one NEVER gives private log information to third parties.

KaVir is on that list because he's making light of a situation knowing full well that he applies rules on places he runs or moderates that would make MudBytes look like saints. In my view Cratylus saw that as legitimizing his behavior. KaVir should have stayed out of it.

Sarapis nailed it dead on by calling Cratylus a victicrat, even though he's probably not familiar with the term. Though it may not seem like it was an offer of a solution, it WAS an honest assessment of what was going on at the time. Cratylus does this everywhere he goes when someone applies a rule to him.

I think that sums it up right there. He did all this just to get a laugh. That's certainly not the act of a rational person, nor is it the act of someone who "just wants the truth" as he's claimed. It would not surprise me in the least to find out this whole affair was an inside job with his help. Though I can't really imagine why Cratylus would have so much aggression toward me.

Yeah. So. This video here? Explains Cratylus as best as anyone.

*shrug*
It seems that your interpretation of the posts differs from my own, which might be because it is harder to keep an objective and detached view, when you are too deeply and personally involved in an incident.

Looking at it strictly as an outside observer, is seems to me that KaVir and Sarapis basically said the same thing about Cratylus, although KaVir did it in a humorous way and Sarapis in a condescending.

As for my own post, I didn't mean to be flippant - it was an honest attempt to of being constructive, since both of you seemed to have bogged yourselves down too deep in the trenches. I was only pointing out that there was an alternative explanation, which could mean that you both were telling the truth. And to me that explanation also seemed a lot more probable than the rather wild theories about some anonymous malicious hacker trying to take down Mudbytes, which were being launched at the time.
And it still does.

I'm in the 'good guys' list? Shock.

Woo! Didn't make any list!

It was stuff (and people) like this that made me pretty much give up posting on mud sites at the turn of the millenium..... and guess what.... it will happen again .... and again ..... and again ....

Rise above it all mate... keep out of it and just let them get on with it.

xalt

No. You were labeled a troll because you decided to up the ante when we shut down your attempt to antagonize us. By posting a false accusation about me, you made it clear that you had no intention other than to incite a flamewar over it. THAT is why I call you a troll, THAT is why you ARE a troll. You were then, and still are now, taking the position that you were censored purely for the benefit of keeping the now 230+ post monstrosity you've created alive and kicking. It serves absolutely no purpose other than to piss people off and try to turn them against me. Just like you tried to turn people against Lasher and his moderators on TMS, and just like you tried to turn people against Kyndig on Mudmagic - even though Kyndig actually deserved this at the time.

It is done. I have withdrawn my resignation after discussing it with the admin team. Read all about it here: http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topic&t=613

Yay! About time y'all came to your senses.