Firstly, an aside on moderation.
blackrazor wrote:Yes, and o11c put a "nuke Nard" link not even clearly identified as such in his signature, and was not sanctioned.
blackrazor wrote:Plenty of people do plenty of wrong, but let's face it, if you're in the TMWC, you're basically immune, unless you do something totally outrageous and long-term. But someone like Nard will get sanctioned, even while 011c got away with instigating him with that "nuke Nard" at the same time.
It was a post, not a signature, and I missed it precisely because it wasn't clearly identified. I've apologised for this, but it really does help to report a post if you notice something off. When a post is reported, both the post and the thread in the thread list are highlighted in bright red for all moderators that see it, in addition to showing up in other places. Neither the post nor the thread were hilighted in bright red in any of the times that I saw it.
Now, onto the main point - differing understandings and perspectives.
EJlol wrote:Great summary of what happened.
Indeed. It's nice to at last have a complete and well defined position to compare and contrast. I'll do my best to summarise the opposing perspective, with the supporting evidence I've gathered so far.
blackrazor wrote:The only two red names, here since at least 2005, and here consistently, who I would trust for a firsthand account of events, would be Platyna and Crush.
I admit haven't been around for as long as they have. But when I joined in mid 2008, Elven was still regularly around in IRC, and he would drop by from time to time for years to come. I still have logs of discussions with him in #themanaworld in at least May 2010 (I have a lot of logs to sift through). But I do have mostly complete logs, and I hope that such evidence is enough to get an idea of what's going on without having to lean heavily on my word and the foggy memories behind it.
That said:
Platyna wrote:5. And now to deny the biggest lie ever: after I agreed to not interfere with development and Bjorn and Elven agreed not to interfere with community and administration (that was in 2007 AFAIR). NO developer EVER had to ask me to make ANY change in game, they even changed the server files as they see fit. So I had NO WAY to keep development of TMW in stagnation.
I would love to see a transcript of the exact agreement between bjorn and Platyna that I keep seeing referenced. The impression I got of the agreement, and what I told my successors in 2012, was that bjorn agreed to leave moderation to Platyna, and Platyna agreed to leave development to bjorn. I have never heard anything about administration, and I would be very surprised if it did.
If it did take place in 2007, things had apparently changed substantially before I arrived. From a discussion where Platyna asks for Global Moderator forum permissions in 2009:
#themanaworld.chat/2009-07-06.175125+1200NZST.txt wrote:(01:11:39) Platyna: I have resigned from being eathena admin, and resigned from development, all I Duck wanted to do here was maintaining the forums.
(01:12:01) thorbjorn: I doubt the attackers know me at all.
(01:12:04) Platyna: Since I bloody doesn't give a Chocolate Cupcake about all tht ass kissing and fights for power that are around the powers on the server.
(01:12:26) Platyna: turmfalke: When katze became GM it was gross.
(01:12:50) Platyna: But when bjorn removed my privileges on the forums I have basicaly kept alive since almot 4 years.
(01:12:53) Platyna: This is what made me mad.
(01:13:16) Platyna: And I have no motivation of doing anything for him anymore.
(01:13:33) thorbjorn: I don't need anybody to do anything for me.
(01:13:34) Hellow_ left the room (quit: Connection timed out).
(01:13:50) thorbjorn: Any contributions people make here are for TMW. Never for me.
(01:13:57) Platyna: O'rly?
(01:14:01) turmfalke: aside from hosting tmw
(01:14:31) Platyna: thorbjorn: Then get the Duck out my powers on forum, since me having them ws good for TMW, and you making some randm dipshits GMs no.
(01:15:02) turmfalke:
http://server.themanaworld.org/gm/gm.log.2009-07
(01:15:22) turmfalke: something that might interest you
(01:15:24) Platyna: LOL.
(01:15:30) Rotonen: Platyna: actually the bot catching rate has gone up significantly
(01:15:33) Platyna: ;D
(01:15:34) Platyna: WTF is #hugo?
(01:15:37) thorbjorn: Platyna: If you get general agreement that you should be a global moderator on the forums, sure.
(01:15:49) thorbjorn: Platyna: I am not the only one deciding such things.
(01:16:09) Platyna: O'rly, so you are no ^?w hiding behind institution?
(01:16:10) turmfalke: hugo is used to warp through the online players
(01:16:19) Platyna: Intitution that consists idiots who I was keeping awy from power since years?
(01:16:22) Freeyorp: @hugo warps a GM to the next player, I believe
(01:16:23) Platyna: Tricky you.
(01:16:38) Freeyorp: @linus takes them to the previous player
(01:16:52) Platyna: Well, very nice GM log, shows what the GMs really does (nothing).
(01:16:53) Platyna:
(01:17:08) thorbjorn: Platyna: You're not making a nice start to become a moderator, I think, but that's just my humble opinion.
(01:17:45) Platyna: Nice start huh?
(01:17:47) Platyna: WTF.
(01:17:48) Platyna:
(01:18:06) turmfalke: better a gm who does nothing then one who does to much
(01:18:15) Platyna: WTF start you are talking about? This is 2009 not 2005.
(01:18:16) Platyna:
(01:18:56) thorbjorn: I am talking about calling people idiots and saying that GMs are doing nothing.
(01:19:11) thorbjorn: There's something to be said for criticism, but this isn't the road to friendship.
(01:19:13) Platyna: thorbjorn: I agreed to give up eathena and all I wanted is continue maintaining the forus, and we had an agreement.
(01:19:29) Rotonen: thorbjorn: i approve her as a global moderator, at the moment we don't really have an active global moderator
Apparently the agreement involved of all things giving up eathena? Were there many different agreements? Are there any that are more recent than the [
organisation decided post-manasource split]?
I would also like to apologise for a mistake I made in one of my earlier statements. Previously, I had stated that when bjorn gave Platyna full founder permissions on the forum (which he eventually did later on in the discussion, which went on for an absurd amount of time) he wondered aloud afterwards whether it had been a good idea (as she had only been asking for global moderator permissions). I had confused the event with another, where full ownership (as opposed to the much needed push access or even administrative rights, which would have been overkill) of a repository was transferred from him to the +tmw-developers group on gitorious. The argument here ended when bjorn left the room to focus on discussion in #tmw-dev, after the arguing continued even after bjorn gave Platyna full founder rights to the forum. I sincerely apologise if this caused anyone to take the wrong impression, as bjorn then trusted Platyna enough to give her full founder permissions.
Months later, with forum powers reinstated (and then some) and not long before the manasource split, roles don't seem to have changed much after:
#themanaworld.chat/2009-09-27.122758+1300NZDT.txt wrote:(08:18:12) Kage_Jittai: MrDudle: we add buildings for people to use for meetings
(08:18:49) Platyna: MrDudle: Your opinion has been tossed to trashcan, thank you.
(08:18:50) Platyna: ;]
(08:18:59) Platyna: Kage_Jittai: It sounds like that.
(08:19:45) Kage_Jittai: Platyna: you wanna be a GM again?
(08:20:37) Kage_Jittai: not that I want you to be, just wanna keep our options open
(08:22:43) Platyna: I want to be a server admin, but only for community stuff. But rather because thorbjorn doesn't seem to want to do the job, and Jaxad0127 is ok as for technical person but he has no idea about the community side of the job.
(08:23:13) Platyna:
(08:23:13) Platyna: Anyway I will be now updating the hosting machine.
(08:23:13) Platyna: And a about 00:00 services will be restarted.
(08:23:39) Jaxad0127: ......
(08:25:34) Platyna: Like encouraging people to break the rules.
(08:25:35) Platyna: ;]
(08:25:43) ***Platyna pats Jaxad.
(08:26:04) Jaxad0127: wasn't me
I don't think it's too unreasonable to take this as evidence supporting my original impressions. Platyna acted as host and as lead moderator (community stuff), and bjorn as lead developer and, by "because thorbjorn doesn't seem to want the job" overall in charge of things after Elven (with the exception carved out for Platyna to be in charge of moderation).
blackrazor wrote:But this OSSMMO, TheManaWorld, was different. All the code and art assets are GPL-licensed; anyone can make a server. When this project started, the development team had no primary interest in maintaining a community or a specific running server. They were satisfied to develop the software and content, which any administration team could later download and run. In fact, eAthenaTMW was supposed to be just a temporary thing, only to jumpstart the project and have a place to deploy and test the art assets, storyline, quests, and other content. In parallel with that was supposed to be ManaServ, their custom designed server software, that was supposed to replace eAthena, as soon as it was ready, or at least stable and useful.
I can't speak for the original intent of the project back in 2004 when the project started. I suspect only Elven could. But when I joined in 2008, the project was very much about running the game. Manasource split this out, creating a generic project that could be run by anyone. Manasource is certainly not a fork; rather, it was a continuation of the software side of the project where coders could work without having to deal with the distraction of seemingly endless arguments. The TMW project continued to operate, using its own content, running using the generic software created by Manasource. I missed the holistic project deeply, and still do. I've heard people say that they worked on the client for the community, and manasource didn't give them that. In a way, I suspect this is largely why manaplus has been so successful.
I suggest rereading the thread laying out the [
organisation of the project] immediately following the manasource split, when people were organising in light of the departure or lessening of many people from their previous roles. It's the closest that TMW seems to have a complete description of the project post-manasource that everyone visibly agrees to, and it's the closest you'll find to your constitution.
Rotonen made more recent versions of [
his TMW organisational chart] after discussion on IRC, but I haven't been able to find them yet. I have a lot of logs to sift through.
blackrazor wrote:After a while, it became clear that ManaServ was not moving forward fast enough for people's liking. Deploying the content to eAthena had become a two-edged sword, because players had become comfortable with it there, and it became clear that to translate all that content work into a form compatible with ManaServ would not be trivial, and to transfer the datafiles with the player-saves could well be intractable in any meaningful way. Elvenprogrammer and Bjorn saw the writing on the wall, that ManaServ was not going to be developed, at least not for TheManaWorld, and since that was the thing that interested them, they abandoned the project, leaving it to Platyna.
The Manasource split was made so bjorn could get away from the arguments with Platyna. As he tactfully put it in the [
proposal for the manasource split] on 2009-10-22:
bjorn wrote:Developers get dragged into community politics, even though they really don't want to. It could be much better if developers were separated from this, or could choose their preferred player community independent of having to choose a development team.
As far as I can recall, the tmwAthena side of the project was indeed going to be handed over entirely to Platyna once everything had moved to tmwserv, later known as manaserv. The manasource split didn't trigger this; many developers, including Jaxad and myself, stayed with TMW and were still actively working on tmwAthena, not just tmwserv/manaserv. When the manasource split happened, bjorn left project administration to Jaxad.
Jaxad had been acting as deputy well before the split, since Jaxad began managing things from 2009-07-25, when bjorn had briefly been absent on vacation. The manasource split was proposed on 2009-10-22, and happened on 2009-10-24 (not 2006, as the [
themanaworld.net 2013-06-02 news post] states). See the inaugural news post at the bottom of the [
manasource news page]. Bjorn was still around for a while, then fully passed on project administration to Jaxad on 2010-04-16:
#mana/2010-04-16.log wrote:08:29 < thorbjorn> Jaxad0127: Are you interested in taking over administration of The Mana World or do you know about anybody else who would be suitable and willing?
12:08 < Jaxad0127> thorbjorn: I could
12:27 < thorbjorn> Jaxad0127: Ok, so you are now owner of the TMW team on Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/~tmw-team
12:28 < thorbjorn> Jaxad0127: And maintainer of the TMW project:
https://launchpad.net/tmw
12:28 < Jaxad0127> ok
12:30 < thorbjorn> Jaxad0127: I also think you should get access to the 'tmw' account on platinum then, which is where the home page, wiki and mantis are hosted.
Jaxad also brought me in as deputy on the same day. When Jaxad left, I took over, and brought Frost in as my deputy in turn on 2012-03-30. The provider for my shell I ran my IRC client on, which had become increasingly unstable, died entirely. I sought to find replacements, but eventually had to concede that I could no longer keep up with development. On 2012-11-22, I announced that I had to move on, and sought to hand everything over to Frost. This didn't proceed as expected, as Frost had gone on vacation, and despite him giving notice, Platyna had removed his keys for some reason. So instead, I passed things on to o11c, with instructions to pass things on to Jenalya and Frost. This has unfortunately complicated the situation quite a bit, but it seems to have reached equilibrium for now.
.:WildX:. wrote:After all, if Platyna was the community leader, and you keep saying that Elven and Bjorn were still relevant at the time of the move, you should have asked their permission for every content update or anything else related to development, just as you asked Platyna's permission for anything that is related to the community (like rules). I bet it would have taken them much more than 3 weeks to reply to your questions.
As a tangent regarding responsiveness, there's no need to be rude. In 2010-10-23 when we had DDoS on the nameserver, Elven responded to me in three and a half hours. Last week, on 2013-06-18, when I asked about adding the manavis.themanaworld.org domain, he responded in under a minute and the DNS was updated 11 minutes later. He's always been around and extremely fast to respond when needed, even if he isn't involved as much in day to day management anymore. Bjorn was around even more, online in at least #tmw-dev and #mana 24-7, and generally responsive within the next day. Time zones make real time communication awkward most of the time, but that couldn't be helped anyway.
In 2008 and 2009, until Jaxad was brought in as deputy, the needing to ask about everything was pretty much what happened. There was then a lengthy chain of succession as outlined above. For something as major as the move, though, they contacted everyone for advice. Finally, as founder, [
Elven does own the trademark], so it is his right to decide what he wants TMW to be, both technically through the domain and legally through the trademark. Even those maligned and upset by the move seem to acknowledge his position:
Platyna wrote:[...]ElvenProgrammer started this project, so he may now destroy it, it is his immanent right.
blackrazor wrote:[...]I honestly in my heart believe that they had the right to do all of that, except not to clone the data files without Platyna's affirmative permission, which they did not have.[...]
To put it bluntly, I don't believe Frost and o11c had the necessary legal or moral framework to clone that data without Platyna's permission. They could have chosen to make a new server without that data, but with their other quite substantial development assets, but they chose to do it this way, instead. Pulling Bjorn and Elven in, just to rubberstamp the relocation, in an attempt to give it historical validity, is not an alternative for the proper legal documentation to clearly show that they had the right to relocate the data. They keep telling us, trust us, we had the legal right, and it's best for the game, and necessary for its survival to have done this move. There is no proof of any of that. And you don't do something this drastic, without proof.
Firstly,
Bjørn wrote:Platyna wrote:I was a content developer myself, so you are wrong that I never did any work. Yet still this was my account where tmwserver ran, and rules of Platinum says clearly - a user is the owner of account and all the files he generates. So the owner of LoF is Pihro as it is his account.
No point in spreading false information. The Mana World was running under a shared 'eathena' account and nobody ever gave you sole ownership of the data stored or generated under that account. The forums and wiki were similarly running from a shared 'tmw' account.
If you are truly convinced you owned this data, then this move could not have been performed early enough. It even means it was a wrong decision to move hosting to platinum in the first place. We should be glad TMW managed to move on regardless and hope it will be more careful to choose its hosting services in the future.
Secondly, it's worth pointing out that the discussion was more than just a rubber stamping, and virtually everyone was contacted, including me, not just Elven and bjorn. As much of the team was brought in as possible, too, not just the admins; developers and GMs were there too. They also claimed to have sent out an email to Platyna about the move, which Platyna has denied while other people have confirmed by virtue of being on the CC list. I was not one of those CC'd, so I cannot attest either way.
The primary complaints I observed, at least as well as I remember them, were as follows:
The project admins were concerned that Platinum wasn't suitable as a host anymore.
The pool of available libraries kept shrinking, even libraries that were in use (See: registration scripts, utilities such as the ip checker). Their keys kept being revoked (I noticed mine had also been revoked at some point. While that at least is understandable, I would have hoped that if I had been recognised as leaving then my successors would be left in peace). They observed complaints about network problems, and when the host machine crashed, partial writes would almost always mangle the database files, necessitating a rollback (I can confirm this was the case when I was around, and also that the tmwAthena flatfiles on the new host have always been left in a consistent state after the host crashed, so it's seems unlikely to have been a problem with tmwAthena as I had previously thought). As the backup volume was available less often than not, some of the rollbacks were quite extensive.
The GMs were concerned that Platyna wasn't suitable as a lead moderator anymore.
They felt they had neither the independence to perform their duties (I think someone complained that following instructions of using common sense led to remarks about cutting off hands?) nor the clear direction needed to follow through with cases. The canonical example that seems to be presented as evidence for the latter appears to be the [
request for a ruling thread], where Platyna posted after three weeks, to ask a question that was answerable by the first post.
Everyone, even if they did not directly support the move, at the very least abstained and conceded that, as the new project leaders, they indeed had the right to do so.
Via email:
TheFreeYorp at google's mail wrote:Hi,
Generally, Platyna responds reasonably quickly via IRC and email,
especially email.
Has anyone tried contacting her via such means? Normally I would have
done so, but I've fallen out of touch and off IRC as of late and
wouldn't want to add unneeded duplicity for her.
As far as moving TMW goes, I guess it's up to you. I'd try getting in
touch with Platyna via other channels, especially email, if you
haven't already. Platinum is far more robust than most people think,
especially considering the load tmwAthena places it under with a large
playerset.
I don't really see how such a move could be done without some degree
of affront. After all, such a move would be essentially telling
Platyna that Platinum's support isn't good enough.
If you do decide to go ahead with this, you'll need to contact TMW's
founder, Elven. As far as I am aware, he still funds and maintains the
domain. He also may have advice on the matter, or other ways to
contact Platyna if email fails.
Regards,
---Freeyorp
Later, on IRC, 2013-03-03:
(15:27:29) < Freeyorp> Well, I can't really speak for the team anymore. It's your decision to make, here, and if there's anything I can do to help whatever everyone ends up deciding, just let me know.
Finally, having at last being able to read the raw messages between Elven and the now TMWc leading up to the move, I can attest that there was at no point anything that could be construed as blackmail, deception or threats involved. Discourse proceeded amicably, and Elven thanked everyone for keeping it up with his beloved project.
To conclude, between her statements about being the only admin after bjorn and Elven left, and her referring to the project leaders as developers, rather than the project leads, I would conjecture that Platyna was not aware of, or did not recognise, the then current project leadership. From blackrazor's summary, if representative of Platyna's position, there does seem to be a world of difference between Platyna's perspective and the perspective of the rest of the team.
I do balk at the thought of any one person having exclusive control of the tmwAthena flatfiles, as evidently does bjorn, especially given the shared ownership of the tmwAthena account. The thought that a supermajority of everyone that had ever held some position of authority together, the GMs to senior developers to every leader from the active young current leaders all the way to our venerable founder, would not be able to initiate a move when the one person with exclusive claim to the data appears unreachable, seems absurd. It was never considered a remote possibility; it was never brought up or even thought of.
While I wish that matters had been resolved amicably, and I hold no grudge against Platyna or anyone else, I find it unreasonable that everyone could not move the data under the shared eAthena account, especially when the last known agreement, which took into account the manasource split, still put Elven at the top. I don't think anyone acted in bad faith. Lastly, while I would still like to see the details of historical agreements, I seriously doubt things are going to change from the status quo.
---Freeyorp