Re: enough is enough, and it's time for a change.
Okay, it's time to talk about Stirlock's claim, and the email, and that sort of thing.
Put bluntly, Aaron is the least on board with our proposed crackdown. He's afraid it will cause harm and doesn't want it being too strict or out of hand, but he -is on board with it. I'm sure he'd say the same thing. He used to be against restriction, but I think now he understands that it might be necessary. When I said the other day that the whole team was on board, I already knew Aaron wasn't crazy about the idea. At best, his was a tentative yes.
His email to Stirlock came about because of both a misunderstanding between himself and me, and because he'd asked for clarification and was impatient that he hadn't gotten it yet (about user mods). Instead of coming to me about said misunderstanding, or pressing the team about the issue he wanted clarified, he chose to reach out to someone outside the staff panel. We have, to the best of my knowledge, fixed both situations as of last night. My stance, at least, on user mods has clarified, and I apologized to Aaron. I misconstrued something he said and replied too sharply for the situation at hand. There are reasons, but no excuses. My apology to him was unconditional.
I have always tried to foster openness within the staff team. I know what happens when people go behind one another's back, keep secrets, harbour grudges or otherwise try to undermine each other. I've seen it. I hate it, unequivocally. I can't fix what I don't see, so when I logged on yesterday to see that an email had apparently surfaced, undermining my faith in the staff team and one member of the community both - seriously, Stirlock, you couldn't have, I dunno, maybe reached out to me privately somehow to give me a heads-up instead of brandishing a smoking gun? - I was as angry as I have ever been since joining staff. I have put in literally hundreds of hours of my time trying to help this forum, and I don't appreciate being backshot this way, even if it ultimately didn't explode in the way that perhaps Stirlock's post implied that it would.
So why am I telling you folks this? Simple, really. I wanted to put the record straight, as one of the involved parties and as someone who bears some responsibility for upsetting Aaron, though I didn't realize it at the time. I also wanted to reassure you that at this point, I am just as committed to working with this team as I ever have been, and to the best of my knowledge, we've got our differences and grievances settled and are still on mostly the same page when it comes to this issue.
Because my sleep schedule is fucked to the sky, I'm probably going to sleep a few hours this afternoon, but once I'm awake again, I will draft both a new rule and a version of the sticky thread we're planning to use for the official vetting process for the staff team. When we're happy with it as a team, I think it's only fair that you get to see it and at least comment on it before it goes fully into effect.
Speaking of which, this is an excellent time to point something out.
I believe that earlier talk about sound assets and community support also mentioned banning discussion of games that had been blacklisted. That won't be happening now. If a game loses its community support, you won't be able to link it in forum posts, and we won't have a database entry for it. Other than that, you're still free to discuss the game, strategy, whatever else. For things likd MUDs, what we will probably do is just modify their database entry to remove direct links to sound packs, if they exist, and make a disclaimer that we don't specifically endorse sound packs which are known to contain copyrighted assets.
That's it. that's all.
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