The official server flamewar topic

[GARRETTtheGREAT]

{snip}

Now, for some humor that may get me killed

/me gets some popcorn waits for all combatants to converge on mistergrey.

[Len]

Just imagine if the game was half as entertaining as this thread.. a power struggle between an exiled official and a Council (that usurped said official), might make for a decent storyline. We could allow people to pick sides and battle one another... (That's similar to what I wanted WOA to be come to think of it)

[mistergrey]

What's creepy, is I had been planning a side project/fork for fun, with a similar idea last year heh.

[blackrazor]

All comedy aside ...

I'm still waiting to see a link to some written signed proof that Platyna was just a host and that TMW Project actually exists as a legal entity to legally own its own server files, instead of those server files belonging to Platyna.

A hosting contract, a certificate of incorporation, an organisational constitution, any of these documents would be helpful.

Failing that, based on the fact that neither the admins at .net or .org adequately secured our data, and instead it was cloned and spread about without authorization.

And further that neither the admins at .net or .org ever undertook to write up and pass an organizational constitution that would have protected us in the event of unauthorized behavior.

And further that Platyna of .net seems to have every senior developer over the years of the project against her and trying to settle accounts with her, even at the cost of endangering the project.

And further TMWC has been opaque at various times about everything from its current membership, to the real reasons for the server move, to the actual host of the project, to the actual process of making new rules, rendering decisions, and succession of officers.

I hearby ask, on behalf of the game's community, that the admins of BOTH .net and .org can agree that they both failed the community in their actions and failed to safeguard the safety and integrity of the game and its data, and thus that we begin a community driven nomination process for NEW admins, nominated and then voted upon from the community. The new admins will undertake to unite the community, heal the rifts, to not start more crap-storms, manage the game and its data, and to write up a constitution legally defining the project and its ownership of the data files and the formal rules governing succession of officers (admins). Admins should continue to be subject to a community vote and term limits, to forever keep the community united and with a voice and to prevent the concentration of power in isolated groups. Nothing would change with developers and moderators, this is solely a proposition to change the way this community handles the game's actual administration.

[Freeyorp101]

There are [many] [old] [threads] about organisation of things which could be locked and make publically visible so people can review for themselves. I suggest they're opened up soon, as the lack of accessible information is stifling.

I'm not sure why the first is in the parking lot, as it never seems to have devolved. It's quite useful, as it contains some information+screenshot about the state of the project from before I joined it that a few people keep referring to.

The latter two are very useful, as they come from late 2009 and are the closest I've found to a complete and reasonably recent description of organisational structure. They take the manasource split and departures into account, and the then whole team agreed to that structure.
To my knowledge from then: Elven never ceded sovereignty. Jaxad passed on eathena service management to me, then later I to Frost. Rotonen appointed Wombat as content leader for tmwAthena, which was passed on to Pjotr, then to Jenalya. No one was brave enough to lead tmwAthena source before o11c, so it spontaneously came into existence with the blessing of everyone that wanted to see the codeblob that was tmwAthena made into something sane.


When things cool down a bit, perhaps we could all construct an objective (and free from insults like "egomaniacal dictator" or "power hungry abusers") timeline of events, and sort through things without being scorched by the flames?


---Freeyorp

[Platyna]

All comedy aside ...

I'm still waiting to see a link to some written signed proof that Platyna was just a host and that TMW Project actually exists as a legal entity to legally own its own server files, instead of those server files belonging to Platyna.

A hosting contract, a certificate of incorporation, an organisational constitution, any of these documents would be helpful.

Failing that, based on the fact that neither the admins at .net or .org adequately secured our data, and instead it was cloned and spread about without authorization.

And further that neither the admins at .net or .org ever undertook to write up and pass an organizational constitution that would have protected us in the event of unauthorized behavior.

And further that Platyna of .net seems to have every senior developer over the years of the project against her and trying to settle accounts with her, even at the cost of endangering the project.

And further TMWC has been opaque at various times about everything from its current membership, to the real reasons for the server move, to the actual host of the project, to the actual process of making new rules, rendering decisions, and succession of officers.

I hearby ask, on behalf of the game's community, that the admins of BOTH .net and .org can agree that they both failed the community in their actions and failed to safeguard the safety and integrity of the game and its data, and thus that we begin a community driven nomination process for NEW admins, nominated and then voted upon from the community. The new admins will undertake to unite the community, heal the rifts, to not start more crap-storms, manage the game and its data, and to write up a constitution legally defining the project and its ownership of the data files and the formal rules governing succession of officers (admins). Admins should continue to be subject to a community vote and term limits, to forever keep the community united and with a voice and to prevent the concentration of power in isolated groups. Nothing would change with developers and moderators, this is solely a proposition to change the way this community handles the game's actual administration.

Blackrazor, I have choose people who seemed to be trustworthy. If you hire and employe and grant him necessary access and he will abuse it, no court will tell you it was your fault. All decisions I have been making were in good of TMW in mind.

How on earth you imagine to elect sysadmins? Under what criteria? o11c, Jenalya, Frost, Crush, Jaxad and so on were people who I knew for several years and they seemed to be reliable, honest and trustworthy.

You act like a mother of a woman, who was abused by her husband and then left after 25 years of marriage telling "it is all your fault, you should know who you were chosing for a husband."

Not true - people can fake reliability, honesty and trustworthness very well. They have managed to fool me, despite the fact I am very carefull person.

Regards.

[Platyna]

There are [many] [old] [threads] about organisation of things which could be locked and make publically visible so people can review for themselves. I suggest they're opened up soon, as the lack of accessible information is stifling.

I'm not sure why the first is in the parking lot, as it never seems to have devolved. It's quite useful, as it contains some information+screenshot about the state of the project from before I joined it that a few people keep referring to.

The latter two are very useful, as they come from late 2009 and are the closest I've found to a complete and reasonably recent description of organisational structure. They take the manasource split and departures into account, and the then whole team agreed to that structure.
To my knowledge from then: Elven never ceded sovereignty. Jaxad passed on eathena service management to me, then later I to Frost. Rotonen appointed Wombat as content leader for tmwAthena, which was passed on to Pjotr, then to Jenalya. No one was brave enough to lead tmwAthena source before o11c, so it spontaneously came into existence with the blessing of everyone that wanted to see the codeblob that was tmwAthena made into something sane.


When things cool down a bit, perhaps we could all construct an objective (and free from insults like "egomaniacal dictator" or "power hungry abusers") timeline of events, and sort through things without being scorched by the flames?


---Freeyorp

Oh sure, after all these years I kept arguing with Bjorn that eA server and client is worth developing, now I read that o11c is the one. So after many years of being an admin and a host of an abandoned server, now I hear it never happened!

It is crossing the line badly.

Regards.

[o11c]

Failing that, based on the fact that neither the admins at .net or .org adequately secured our data, and instead it was cloned and spread about without authorization.

There was nothing we could do to ensure that when leaving Platinum - Platyna kept at least some backups beyond our control.

We had hoped that Platyna would react maturely when she realized she wasn't needed anymore.

[Freeyorp101]

Oh sure, after all these years I kept arguing with Bjorn that eA server and client is worth developing, now I read that o11c is the one. So after many years of being an admin and a host of an abandoned server, now I hear it never happened!

You were responsible for tmwAthena source development? I'm not familiar with how things were in the old days, but I must say I find that rather surprising.

Lots of people were saying that there are all these things that would be nice to have in tmwAthena, but at from when I got involved in server development (at least as far back as 2010, though probably late 2009 also) I don't think there was ever any clear direction for tmwAthena source development aside from remoitnane+MadCamel's robusting and o11c's massive rewrite project.

Github has [nice graphs], though it'll only show commits with linked emails. o11c both set a clear direction and has done a few orders of magnitude more than anyone else in the codebase (look at the line counts in his graph!). Whatever else might be said, it doesn't seem reasonable to deny that tmwAthena source development, as it is now, wouldn't have happened without him.


---Freeyorp

[mistergrey]

blackrazor: I think it's clear that the move didn't happen ideally, and that even after the fact, it won't end in a nice amicable agreement. That, is not enough to justify a total revamp of the existing admins in my opinion, for various reasons (call me biased if you wish, but this is practicality to me):

1- As much as Platyna did for the community over the years, the existing admins have been working behind the scenes and otherwise to make this game better for everyone. I understand the angry feelings all around, but none of that justifies getting rid of the people who know the project best, for the sake of appeasing.. hell, not even a majority of players.

2- No matter what the situation, someone will ALWAYS be unhappy with the administration of any project. The only difference from 6 months ago, is that rather than a team of alienated GMs, admins, and devs wishing for a host who actually respects their input... now, it's just everyone picking sides, or standing back and blaming everybody. This is not how issues get solved, it is how new issues get made, as well as leaving the project a disorganized mess.

3- This project has gone through a LOT of changes, both administrative, constant developer changes, new project directions... The move happened because most of the people contributing to and moderating this game, wanted to work together to make it better, and kept coming up against a brick wall. I can surely understand why the players want more transparency in administration... but, please keep in mind, that the situation was tricky all around. It's easy to say what you might have done differently.. but in reality, all of the "nicer" solutions would have ended pretty badly. Making a new fork would have resulted in this game having a huge loss in people working on it, and most would have just stayed because their player data and work was all here. Being fully transparent about the planned move, surely would have resulted in Platyna taking steps to ensure she remain in power... which, wouldn't have even been a problem, had she been willing to compromise with the people carrying the project forward, and the ones moderating it for her. I say that sincerely, even as I wish it had never come to this boiling point. It really hurts the sense of nostalgia I had playing this, to see Platyna removed from (this version of) the project. The silver lining though, is all the older contributors and players coming back recently.

Overall... yes we all have made mistakes. You would not likely do better in that situation, so please don't make it so black and white and point the finger at the lot of us. Many of us have avoided these topics to avoid furthering the drama... but that just lets people make an "evil group" out of the TMWC, which I can't see as being much better. I just want to see this project continue, preferably without constant accusations and demands... but this cycle is getting out of hand, and if nobody will take the first step and say "this is all stupid", it will never end. So let me just say... this is stupid.

[blackrazor]

Blackrazor, I have choose people who seemed to be trustworthy. If you hire and employe and grant him necessary access and he will abuse it, no court will tell you it was your fault. All decisions I have been making were in good of TMW in mind.

How on earth you imagine to elect sysadmins? Under what criteria? o11c, Jenalya, Frost, Crush, Jaxad and so on were people who I knew for several years and they seemed to be reliable, honest and trustworthy.

You act like a mother of a woman, who was abused by her husband and then left after 25 years of marriage telling "it is all your fault, you should know who you were chosing for a husband."

Not true - people can fake reliability, honesty and trustworthness very well. They have managed to fool me, despite the fact I am very carefull person.

Regards.

One thing you could have done is to have each person that you chose to have file access to first sign a contract, agreeing to never move or copy the data or to do anything unauthorized with it, and to acknowledge you as the owner and final arbitor of that data. If indeed you were in that position, then you had an obligation to protect the data in that manner. It is standard for employees with access to sensitive data to sign such contracts.

The second thing you could have done is to write up an organisational constitution that clearly defined the ownership of the data files, the project, and the process to add or remove officers (admins) instead of leaving it as an ad hoc thing just begging for eventual abuse.

What I am trying to do here is to get both sides in this to acknowledge major culpability, and then to agree to an organized, public, and community-driven administrative reset, so that we can have transparent responsible governance going forward. Set term lengths and voting would help ensure that it stays that way.

The vote is for the final arbiter, the top admin position. Everything else, from development, moderation, and sysadmin would remain the same. But everyone needs to answer to someone. All senior staff would answer to the top admin / arbiter (sort of like your old role Platyna), and that top admin would have to answer to the community, as there would be community votes, maybe even the possibility of community recalls, and set term lengths.

I'm trying to suggest the concept of democracy to this OSS project, after seeing were the alternative had brought us.

[o11c]

The second thing you could have done is to write up an organisational constitution that clearly defined the ownership of the data files, the project, and the process to add or remove officers (admins) instead of leaving it as an ad hoc thing just begging for eventual abuse.

The vote is for the final arbiter, the top admin position. Everything else, from development, moderation, and sysadmin would remain the same. But everyone needs to answer to someone. All senior staff would answer to the top admin / arbiter (sort of like your old role Platyna), and that top admin would have to answer to the community, as there would be community votes, maybe even the possibility of community recalls, and set term lengths.

Here's the thing: everyone already agreed that there was someone in that position: ElvenProgrammer. And "everyone" includes Platyna, up til the point that she realized that Elven had turned against her.

The procedure for legitimately moving moving the datafiles again in the future is exactly the same as it was this time: first get a consensus among the active admins, developers, and GMs; then get Elven's agreement. The fact that Elven is no longer active as a developer does not mean he no longer cares about or looks out for TMW (however, he is certainly sick of this drama). He still maintains http://themanaworld.it semi-regularly, and some of us suspect he still plays under a pseudonym (I have not checked the database, and will not because I respect him too much).

[blackrazor]

blackrazor: I think it's clear that the move didn't happen ideally, and that even after the fact, it won't end in a nice amicable agreement. That, is not enough to justify a total revamp of the existing admins in my opinion, for various reasons (call me biased if you wish, but this is practicality to me):

1- As much as Platyna did for the community over the years, the existing admins have been working behind the scenes and otherwise to make this game better for everyone. I understand the angry feelings all around, but none of that justifies getting rid of the people who know the project best, for the sake of appeasing.. hell, not even a majority of players.

2- No matter what the situation, someone will ALWAYS be unhappy with the administration of any project. The only difference from 6 months ago, is that rather than a team of alienated GMs, admins, and devs wishing for a host who actually respects their input... now, it's just everyone picking sides, or standing back and blaming everybody. This is not how issues get solved, it is how new issues get made, as well as leaving the project a disorganized mess.

3- This project has gone through a LOT of changes, both administrative, constant developer changes, new project directions... The move happened because most of the people contributing to and moderating this game, wanted to work together to make it better, and kept coming up against a brick wall. I can surely understand why the players want more transparency in administration... but, please keep in mind, that the situation was tricky all around. It's easy to say what you might have done differently.. but in reality, all of the "nicer" solutions would have ended pretty badly. Making a new fork would have resulted in this game having a huge loss in people working on it, and most would have just stayed because their player data and work was all here. Being fully transparent about the planned move, surely would have resulted in Platyna taking steps to ensure she remain in power... which, wouldn't have even been a problem, had she been willing to compromise with the people carrying the project forward, and the ones moderating it for her. I say that sincerely, even as I wish it had never come to this boiling point. It really hurts the sense of nostalgia I had playing this, to see Platyna removed from (this version of) the project. The silver lining though, is all the older contributors and players coming back recently.

Overall... yes we all have made mistakes. You would not likely do better in that situation, so please don't make it so black and white and point the finger at the lot of us. Many of us have avoided these topics to avoid furthering the drama... but that just lets people make an "evil group" out of the TMWC, which I can't see as being much better. I just want to see this project continue, preferably without constant accusations and demands... but this cycle is getting out of hand, and if nobody will take the first step and say "this is all stupid", it will never end. So let me just say... this is stupid.

I will be clear so I do not get misunderstood. I am talking about voting for only one position, a top-admin / final-arbiter, similar to the role Platyna once held, but with community nomination and voting, set term lengths, and even a recall mechanism for that single role, only.

That person would be an administrator responsible to maintain the organisation's legal status, its constitution, its rules of governance, its contracts. That person would be tasked with uniting the community, healing the wounds, and moving forward.

All other roles of moderators / GMs, developers, sysadmins would not change. There is no reason to get rid of everybody. This is not a doomsday suggestion, merely the notion of adding a democratic community-driven element to the top administrative position of this project.

[Rill]

I hearby ask, on behalf of the game's community...

What members of the game’s community have given you the authority to speak on their behalf? I certainly have not.

[Len]

I will be clear so I do not get misunderstood. I am talking about voting for only one position, a top-admin / final-arbiter, similar to the role Platyna once held, but with community nomination and voting, set term lengths, and even a recall mechanism for that single role, only.

That person would be an administrator responsible to maintain the organisation's legal status, its constitution, its rules of governance, its contracts. That person would be tasked with uniting the community, healing the wounds, and moving forward.

All other roles of moderators / GMs, developers, sysadmins would not change. There is no reason to get rid of everybody. This is not a doomsday suggestion, merely the notion of adding a democratic community-driven element to the top administrative position of this project.

I disagree, for me the fewer people we need to go through to get things done the better.
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence" -Dr. Laurence J. Peter