[quote="GobO_Admin"]Please use this new forum as an opportunity to show the community your ideas that may have been lost in the traffic of an overly cluttered, overly busy forum with ultimately not as much to say in the past. We want to make this community about creativity and art as much as competition and fun.[/quote]
I'm not shy. I don't think anyone is "shy". Unfortunately, what I am is wary that my time and effort put into something so straightforward as a properly formatted decklist may be a total waste.

[i]Two weeks ago[/i], there was a surge of people trying to get [i]anywhere[/i] that was still a community and still a constructive place to talk about games. [i]Two weeks ago[/i], I was one of those people. Especially so considering that [i]the[/i] first major tournament of the new Standard season is the Star City Open taking place in my backyard of Worcester on the 29th. So, a week and a half ago, when the link to woodenmarble.org was "spoiled" and tossed about the community like a ragdoll of a life-raft, I was again amongst the surge that took shelter.

However, instead of being greeted with a haven, the Magic: The Gathering forums and all other recreational discussion were completely shut down without provocation despite the protests of multiple PMs. What was the reasoning? "The forums weren't ready". But you still wanted our help, right? Oh, yes, totally, our input was critical and invaluable. And our input was without directive since every request for "what are we waiting for" was met with "we'll let you know when the forums were ready".

This forum is a shambling cesspit on par with something that Wizards could have spit out. What exactly were we "planning" all this time for? To have the mods be named "GobOs" in some macabre parody of Wizards? To have an even more worthless moderation system than Wizards? Hell, even after the precious days of planning the forums are just phpbb. On top of that, despite having enough admins and moderators to drown a shark, not one of the monkeys can manage to operate said forums that are as easy to customize and "optimize" (ceiling being phpbb being awful) as pushing a children's wooden puzzle together.

For example, on the publicized list of things to do there are "Forum Banner" and "Forum Skins". Of all the things to disclose, these are seriously the two items you want to advertise? Really? Neither of these are exceptionally difficult. The latter of the two is literally built into the forums. The former is admittedly a bit more difficult to fine-tune, but not having one is sheer sloth. It's like making a list of things to do and writing "tie shoes". I know I dropped the half-hearted ball in terms of throwing out a concept, but currently we have a 262x192 Ib Halfheart (eh, eh?) gif in the corner of the screen. http://i.imgur.com/RhfBCM3.jpg This literally took less than five minutes and, while lazy and poor, is still [i]a[/i] banner.

Petty criticisms being said, these forums are dead. No Goblins Allowed may be flogged like a RealMTG horse, but the forums are a stillbirth. In the interim, the Gleemax forums have been fixed to passable functionality. As consequence, any hope for an en masse Gleemax migration has been missed both due to the passage of time and unveiling of the haven as a shanty-town. Please, do not say things are in the works or smugly ask me to take the wheel since it's apparently so easy. I would like to believe that a few of the people in charge have managed forums before, but the current situation suggests otherwise. Good intentions do not sail a ship, and I have ceased being patient.

you are probably going to get moderated heavily for this post and tony will tell you "no one is forcing you to post here".

but yeah, for a launch of a forum that was supposed to have a mass exodus of traffic from wotc (which several people said before was very unlikely) the launch has basically been a flop

I don't think this forum needs to be a big to be successful, but moderating away youtube videos for harsh language and censoring !$@% (the output of the forums already-functioning word filter), is at or beyond gleemax-level moderation. If everyone just relaxed and maybe didn't get mad about people saying "the f-word" then it would be a nice place to post. Everyone here is an adult, we don't need a PG forum. Forget that kind of moderation until someone who is 12 actually starts posting on the forums.

at this point I think you are the only person who still doesn't understand what the original forum was for

Regardless of intentions, the only functional difference between this forum and the last was that you weren't supposed to post in the last one.

Well, I see your point. But the thing is, if people just complain instead of help build the community, it won't go anywhere. Give it a shot, or find something else that you want, but complaining for complaining's sake isn't very productive. I appreciate the work that went into this, and I'd love to see it grow. Give it a chance. This has been active for less then one day, at least, less then one day ago was when I got notice it was up. A day isn't a long time for things to happen. If you want, check back in a week, maybe it'll be better. Maybe it will be dead. Who knows.

~SE++

no one is complaining for the sake of wanting to complain. Also there was more to this forum than its launch today. I think http://woodenmarble.freeforums.org is going to be up for a few more days if you want to take a look

The forum as has been public for one day and has 59 registered users, so immediate proclamations of doom seem premature. Judging the forum based on the meta-discussion test forum sounds like a joke, rather than plausibly honest.

Is the OP someone who's know to have been willfully difficult and unpleasant in the past?

Our goal was never to just be the place to go when the WotC boards were broken, it was for those of us who were fed up with the instability and lack of communication from WotC in the long term. No one was relying on, or expecting, a mass exodus from the WotC boards, except for some small groups of posters from F&S and YMtC. Like, those would be valid criticisms if that is what we were trying to do, but it isn't.

I don't think being moderated for profanity is really a big deal either, tbh, and it certainly doesn't approach ORC levels of awfulness.

Willfully difficult, but not wholely unpleasant and not at all without reason.

I was constructive. I'm not entirely sure how much you read of Gleemax or the test forums, but not all of it was the Kher Keep goofing off as worthless nerds are expected and tend to do. I gave it a shot, I contributed, I waited, and we were rewarded after the necessary due-date with a FreeForum that has a different URL.

a youtube video in which the video maker says "the f-word" in the last less-than-half-a-second was removed. $#@! was manually edited to "[Profanity Removed]". that is orc-level to me

If this post is truth, then the whole operation suffers from a severe case of conflicting opinions and/or a lack of notification on the update of the MO.I'm going to try to avoid using PMs and Emails and chats and other private methods of communication as they are indeed private, but I did to share this. It's one of the earliest recorded ideologies for the new forums, and it has been alluded to since by various posters and various sources of various ranks. Regardless of how things may have progressed, this is how things should go. Unfortunately, without a mass exodus, the odds are extraordinarily slim.

In all fairness, Ko, when you sign up here there is a message about how we are required to follow the CoC and that it may change at any time. You were given a chance to decide that if you wanted a place like /b/ that was nearly Mod free, you could choose not to sign up. Okay, so a link got taken down and profanity edited. That was just people doing their job, and we requested it during the test forum. But now that they are doing it, now it's a problem?

~SE++

Jelly, I appreciate your comments. I really do. But this forum is hardly free, and there is a lot that is planned. But I didn't see the point of having nothing really available, which was your major complaint, and one that I agree with. Which is part of the reason that I decided to open the forums now. I wasn't willing to put off opening the forums any more just to finish putting on a coat of paint.

I'm the first person to admit that I'm frustrated by the issues my schedule has caused over the last two weeks. I've gotten no more than three hours of sleep any night since I decided to start this. It's been hectic. But making sure the coc and other important aspects of the framework of this site are in place has been worth it. Those are, in the long run, the only things that matter. We've done very little tweaking to the physical appearance to the site because that is a cosmetic and ultimately unimportant feature. I'm sorry you think that makes the site stillborn. And I'm sorry you took my invitation to post in an empty forum, an invitation to be creative, as an invitation to mock the site. This is supposed to be a hub for creativity. I'm not trying to be dismissive of your comments. I'm just asking that you take a look at this place without cynicism, and really think about whether there is anything for you here. I think there is. And, while I support criticism of the arts as much as I appreciate the arts, im not sure why you posted this thread. Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, and if I am, I'd appreciate your feedback.

"We" is a very broad term that I would not like applied to myself. Certain members of the community advocated for such moderation, and certain members of the community were vehemently against such.

Also, Ko's post was automatically by the boards. It was not an escape artist.

*shrugs* To me, two weeks seems like a pretty decent timeline for getting together a group of people who've never actually met in person and who all have busy lives outside of the internet to concept, create, and administer what's intended (eventually) to be a full-fledged site from a cold start, with no advance warning.

Could it have been done more quickly? Sure. But given that there was potentially a decent amount of money on the line, we didn't want to misstep and make hasty decisions that couldn't later be remedied without spending even more. And then life threw some nice little wrenches in the works to gum things up. Maybe we made the wrong decision. But it was what happened, and there's no use casting blame around like we've completely failed already and there's no hope at all and woe is us the sky is falling we must go and tell the king.

Yes, we're on phpBB; the platform we might have wanted (Discourse) just isn't robust enough to allow us to run the site, and given the mostly cosmetic differences between php and vB and the fact that we still have hopes of shifting to Discourse, we didn't think shelling out money for a vB license was prudent.

Yes, right now we're just on a plain default phpBB skin and have a terrible "banner", but we didn't want to waste even more time before the site went live agonizing over purely cosmetic decisions.

None of the staff here (to my knowledge) has ever been involved in the administration side of a forum larger than a homebrew just-us-friends board. None of us have worked together before. We're still in the process of sorting out a proper hierarchy and everyone's half-afraid of doing anything major on their own initiative because they don't want to overstep their bounds and don't know where their bounds are because we haven't finished writing the job handbooks yet.

We took too long? I think if anything we might not have taken long enough. It would have been fantastic if we could have ridden the wave of discontent with WotC's forums and gotten off to a running start, but if it didn't happen I'm hardly surprised. And besides, the goal was always to build something that could survive without subsisting on a diet of disillusionment and dissatisfaction.

Let's keep that discussion to its own thread, please.

I'm confused about the intent of your purpose with this thread, I guess. I don't expect the entire wizards boards to come here, and I know many posters who do come here will still go to Wotc. But I stand by my original message I sent you. We do need a large group initially to get this place going. And we do need a community to contribute to make that happen. This isn't about me starting a forum and trying to get people to come to it. This is trying to create a place for the creative community who already exist at Wotc and other places to have a place they can truly call home.

The two major points that were roughly outlined are...

1) What is "the plan" and can we have a detailed analysis of such? The masses are indeed asses, but if you do appreciate the feedback so much, may the members of the community be in on whatever is in store for us?

2) Why do there continue to be eleven admins/mods despite a complete lack of necessity and a complete lack of experience? It was well established that the moderation conducted at the time was flat out poor, but it was never established why it was poised to happen in the first place. Only that the actual occurrence of such incidents were accidents.

As I am posting this, I see zammm's post which I may or may not respond to in turn, but I feel this post still holds some bearing.

hahaha what.



yeah I said "#$%&" was edited. Not an actual word, the output from the word filter that is part of the boards. They c"ensored their own censorship. I don't see how asking that a funny video directly related to the topic of the thread in which a dude says "the f-word" once should be taken down. The coc should be a guideline for posting, the mods shouldn't be a slave to it. They should be relatable human beings (rather than the stupid dual-account system which basically everyone voted against on the feedback forum so why does that even exist) rather than fun-hating robots that are just like "beep boop more oil for my hinges".

The video I posted had profanity basically every sentence so whatever I can live with that being taken down. I don't see how anything like that makes you think I want this place to be like 4chan.

The message I got when I hit Register was:


Way I see it, you were cool with the rules since you hit "I Agree." I mean, you had to if you made a name and posted, right?

~SE++