Posts by wild1145

Just a very quick note around mental health and all that good stuff.

While I could write something a lot more long-winded, I wanted to make a very short post just to highlight that everyone has dips in their mental health, that's just a part of being human, and when we do have those dips sometimes it can be valuable to take some time and "Reset" your brain, and get yourself in a better position.

I want to make it clear especially to admins whom may be concerned taking time away to focus on their own wellbeing might be detrimental to the server or be worried about play time that I would absolutely rather you take days or weeks away to get yourself in a better position mentally and come back happy and healthy, than to burn yourself out and for what should be a game to spill into your "Real life".

I unfortunately feel that I have to make this reminder because earlier this week, I advised the admins that I needed to take a couple of days away because my mental health was dipping and I was struggling to cope with the masses of shit that was being pilled on me by this server. I had hoped and expected support, but found myself being guilted into needing to take time for myself, followed by a significant incident yesterday that needed my involvement to resolve.

TLDR - If you need to take time, take it. If you know someone who needs to take some time, be supportive and not a dick.

That's about it folks.

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@Miwojedk#4033 I don’t seem to understand this sentiment. If you’re against Master Builder as a rank, not just a title, then certainly you are also going to remove the MB world, when that is one of the main features of the rank? I also subscribe to the notion that if MB’s (or Admins for that matter) have access to certain creative tools, then of course the rest of the server should also have this toolset. I was merely pointing out that, historically, we tend to give full WE access to Admins, whilst Ops (and Mbs) get restricted access. If we were to continue this route for the time-being, then at least switch it around, so that the ones who actually need the tools the most (MB’s) also get full access to them.
Thus, if Admins have to suffer the same Ops do in terms of limitations for plugins such as WorldEdit, Voxel Sniper etc, then perhaps they’ll realize why this is a brainless route to follow. Our Admins tend to have a hard time looking further than their own interests to the overall interests of the server.

I'm not sure that I really see the value in creating a rank on the freedom server which will just incentivise players to join, when the bar of entry to such rank is variable at best. In terms of the freedom server longer term, I think MB's should be nothing more than a title, in the same way the Developers are for example.

In the longer term the master builder world I intend to move again out of the freedom server and into either it's own server, or find an appropriate other solution, but either way I don't see it being fair to grant additional access on the FreeOP server when if we can grant that access to "random" people, we should surely be able to give that access to OP's as well?

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@Miwojedk#4033 It’s certainly quite hard not to see Total Freedom as a creative server, when the “all-op”-aspect entails unlimited freedom. Before beta 1.8, creative mode didn’t exist, and thus we used /item to get blocks. (used to be unlimited) World Edit, a staple feature of the server. Of course Total Freedom is not purely a creative server, but its hard to neglect the fact that the vast majority of our playerbase has treated it as such for its entire existence, which is why I repeatedly say that when this core aspect of the server is shit, the server falters as a hollistic unit.

I was more highlighting the fact different people will have different perceptions of the server, especially for a server running so long. The server ultimately has gone in a range of directions over it's existence and I just wanted to explain what my own perspective was and that which may be shared with others.

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@Miwojedk#4033 Sure there is, but we should always view it from a liberty/freedom standpoint – the less restrictions the merrier, even if it requires additional development work or more moderation. The user experience should always be in the forefront.

I agree, but again there is a balance. We can enable all the shit on the server but if it creates a worse player experience because the server crashes more / lags the clients out more... I'm still catching up on everything that needs to be done, so change can be made, but I want to make sure we're doing it sustainably and without destroying the experience.

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@Miwojedk#4033 This way of looking at things is what brought us to this point in the firstplace. Instead, you should look to freedom, and make sure that who wish to abuse this liberty are dealt with via Adminstration or coding

That's a lot easier said than done, but there are other concerns beyond just "administrating" as we've discovered more recently. Also, to "just code it" is a lot easier said than done...

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@Miwojedk#4033 ust because we have a few bad apples – should not – impact or degrade the user experience of the rest of the bunch.

The difference is when the majority of the server will often take the piss and try to break these things and then we just end up getting more people joining because they tell their friends, and we end up in an utter shit show... I've unfortunately seen that more than once on here and other servers.

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@Miwojedk#4033 As Wilee has mentioned countless of times prior: why the fuk don’t we have some sort of quality assurance in this bitch?

The honest answer is because this has been run as a hobby for a number of years, and the QA is done on a best endeavours basis for the most part... We're working to improve the code quality and ensuring more testing goes into things, which is why we end up using a clone of the freedom server we currently run where we can test plugins.

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@Miwojedk#4033 Or we could make the player able to toggle gravity in a certain region. I’m sure this would be feasible. Blocks affected by gravity are a mixed back, in that they are a perfect way to terraform with tools such as WorldEdit and VoxelSniper, or as components in a redstone contraption (e.g. traps), but can also certainly be used to lag the server. But again, we shouldn’t err on the side of caution – give the player the option of somehow switching between gravity/non-gravity instead of solely fixating it on one setting.

You refer to regions, but that's not something we really have. There is WorldGuard but it's for admins only, and certainly is not something we want to be opening up to everyone because it just ends up in a massive mess. Unfortunately I can't see a viable way at the moment of setting this other than at the server level on the main FreeOP Server and potentially plot based, but that'll depend on the plot server and how that ends up implemented.

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@Miwojedk#4033 This is such a cheap cop out. I highly doubt that it’s impossible to resize plots without retaining the builds whilst doing so.

It's the honest answer from what I've found when I tried to do this myself on a test server previously with this same plugin. It's either wipe everything or leave it as it is...

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@Miwojedk#4033 Or simply notifying players a month prior that their builds will be deleted, and that a save file will be uploaded for them to download.

Which would be great but the last time I suggested wiping anything people rioted... You can't have it both ways here.

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@Miwojedk#4033 The fact of the matter is that the current plot sizes completely twist the point of the plot world in the first place. Not everybody has the option of increasing render distance, and even so: there you can’t see a detailed build from 1,000 blocks away properly.

I guess it depends on what you're looking to achieve... Plots were always setup to allow large areas of building in a safe and secure environment... I appreciate it's not ideal, but I'm not sure it's a bad way to do things..?

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@Miwojedk#4033 Sorry, but even if we have to delete the plot world entirely (which sounds ridiculous considering we have a dedicated dev team)

It's not about having a development team, it's about being realistic. How do you shrink those plots down? What happens if we shrink to 30 x 30 and someone has a 31x30 build? Just delete it? It's just not a viable thing to do at all... I can't see why anyone thinks it's technically viable from the get go..

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@Miwojedk#4033 this would be a more than nessecary sacrifice to at least have a world which isn’t utterly pointless. Community is just as important to TF as the all-op feature, and the plot world currently fosters a single-player experience.

Given most people I've spoken to want to do big builds anyway you'd just end up merging those plots... I'm not sure there ends up being a real net benefit either way.

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@Miwojedk#4033 You want me to believe that I shouldn’t be afraid to leave my build unattended for a month in flatlands / overworld, because we don’t do map resets anymore and have CoreProtect? My dude, you know this is ridiculous.

I agree it's a silly idea, but it's what the community have told me they want, and I've had to work out ways to try to make that happen... I'd much rather go back to wiping everything multiple times a day and the server being more like a sandbox but that's not what our players want.

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@Miwojedk#4033 This was exactly the argument for plots, so even if I grant you that you don’t need to save your builds as schematics, you then lose the point of having a plotworld entirely.

Not sure I get your point? Well, I sort of do but I'm not sure having a permanent world and a plot server are mutually exclusive?

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@Miwojedk#4033 I’ve been notified by another MB that this issue has persisted before Seth rage quit. This is unacceptable and screams unprofessionalism. Of course, if you haven’t been aware of this issue until now, there’s not much you could’ve done.

You telling me was the first I knew about it... As I've said I have raised it with the dev team because I honestly don't know enough about how MBW works to actually diagnose the fault myself at 3AM...

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@Miwojedk#4033 Sure, but if you won’t do this, then I can tell you that I won’t actively build on this pile of shit creative server.

Your attitude throughout this hasn't been super useful, and to be honest it's getting really quite frustrating. I'm doing my best to juggle things, and just calling the server shit / whatever else because you're not loving things isn't productive in the least.

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@Miwojedk#4033 I literally don’t have permission to use //count on my own plot in the plotworld. And no, ops don’t have access to either as far as I’m aware.

That doesn't sound intentional... I'll check that with the development team as I don't know why count is blocked either way...

@fssp#4031 There are a few ways of doing it, and I'm not in a position to design the solution right here right now, but I have thought of a few ways of doing it, and once we come to actually looking at how we want to be re-designing the system then I'm sure the developers and myself will be able to explain the proposed solution in some sane way for community peer review.

There will likely be two separate aspects to how we tackle this, one around how we're publishing the artefacts we care about, and one around how users can feed in data to the server(s) going forward.

@fssp#4034 TFM at no point implemented the feature in order to second guess Mojang security, it was implemented because TFM was written before UUID's originally for one thing and when the server was running in offline mode rather than online mode.

While I appreciate that Mojang's account security isn't perfect, it's also not our responsibility to second guess their security, and if you can't secure your Mojang account, then you're more fucked than someone imposing as you on here let's be fair...

I think right now we seem to be a mix of UUID and IP based in TFM, which is really really frustrating.

TFM doesn't as far as I'm aware actually work well in offline mode anymore due to how much is tied to UUID's already.

Unless anyone can give me a major reason this shouldn't go ahead, I'm quite keen that we look to make this change.

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@videogamesm12#4015 Allow ops to drop items - This was disabled in fear that it could cause lag issues and be used for exploits. Is there not a better way to mitigate this issue (like moving all items into stacks or using some sort of plugin that allows admins to clear ops' NBT)?

Just because this was one that stood out and has been discussed before. Op's should be able to drop items, but there is an overall cap across the server. So if someone does spam it, it'll spoil it for the reset. Might need to be a better solution, and it might also need some tuning to make it work better than it currently does.

So I think for me, your first line here really sorta summed it up for me

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Total Freedom is a terrible creative server with lack of building tools

And I think it does highlight a rather interesting point from my perspective because I has never seen TF as a creative server until I took over as owner, I had always been attracted to TF because fo the all-op and more anarchy side of the server rather than the creative side. But I think your right, there is a large creative community, and the server as you say is not a great experience for those who are interested purely in the creative side of things.

Some of this has been covered directly / indirectly in my other thread here - https://forum.totalfreedom.me/d/458-an-update-plans-for-2021

Lack Of Build Tools: This is an area I will admit I know very little about generally. If we can enable tools that bring a better experience to the general players on the server, and have it enabled for everyone, that's a win in my books. There is a balance to be had between enabling these tools, and working on other aspects for the server.

Grief Protection: Work is being done to resolve this. Part of the issue has been identified with people killing the server, and stopping blocks being logged. We've been able to prove that CoreProtect does log pretty much everything we care about, but when people kill the server it breaks things. We need to work out a good way to fix that because no matter what plugin we use that's a problem. I'll also say that we are looking at alternative plugins in the hopes we can find something that runs quicker at the scale we're talking (We've got around 50-60GB of CoreProtect block data stored in the dB at the moment) and that hopefully is able to write block changes to the dB at the same time as it is running rollbacks so this issue is minimised.

Limited WorldEdit Access: I appreciate the detail here (And may re-touch on this point) but ultimately my view is that we should be unlocking as much access is viable, without enabling those who want to destroy things with tools that can't be tracked back. I think there have been some other suggestions as well, but at least at the moment I'm aware that the dev team are looking at viability to disable gravity (Something we did have before but I think the community felt they'd rather have gravity over the blocks) and once that's in place, we can look to start enabling more of these commands and the extra WorldEdit functionality.

Crashing: We're currently working as a matter of priority to get to the bottom of why we're having instability on the servers, we know part of this is down to the quantity of plugins and some of them being less than ideal for running a server at scale with along with the massive map sizes. As part of the work we're doing with ATLAS there is infrastructure improvements being worked through at the moment which I'm hoping will help with some of this, but the developers have been tasked with investigating the crash reports we've been getting to see if it's issues with plugins that we can fix. It's being worked on as I say as a high priority action.

PlotWorld: The current intent for this I've covered off elsewhere, however unfortunately if we remove it entirely or shrink them, it's the same result. Everyone's builds would be lost. You can't (At least from what I've seen) re-size the plots without having to regenerate the world entirely, which would be less than ideal. My hope is once we've moved it to it's own server it'll be better known (As it'll have an easy way to be signposted to new players) and we can make other quality of life improvements such as increasing the render distance and other things like I mentioned on that thread.

Build Battles / Similar: Something I'm a firm supporter of, we have historically seemed to have a lack of engagement from the community in terms of interest, I'm hoping as we start to be able to run additional game modes and mini-games even potentially, we can have other ways to engage in the community and hopefully they'll have a better turn out in the future.

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@Miwojedk#3956 they are not aware that they are supposed to save their builds as schematics whilst in flatlands/overworld (again, because it is not mentioned anywhere).

On this specific point, that's because (As I understand) they're not supposed to need to anymore... The entire point of not doing map resets and having CoreProtect and such was to stop players needing to save their stuff in schematics.

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@Miwojedk#3956 but for the past three days World Edit has been blocked for me in the MBW. I’ve notified nearly all executives (incl. Wild) of this issue, and still nothing has happened.

It's been flagged with the development team, I'll chase it up and work out what's going on with this...

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@Miwojedk#3956 (even for Master Builders)

I'm heavily against creating Master Builder as a weird inter-rank between Op's and admins. If it's usable by an Mb I'd like it to be issued to Op's as well unless there is a really good reason that can't be the case...

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@Miwojedk#3956 I recently saw a message on the Discord server which prompted me to create this thread. It read something akin to:
“Congratulations to Lykhant for being the first ECD in TF history to actually complete a build (TF HUB) that ends up being used”
Now, the following is not to throw shade at @Lykhant, I think they are a great ECD, and I am very pleased with the hub: especially the christmas theme. But I have two overarching issues with the above quote:
1) It’s a falsehood to say that Lykhant is the only ECD in TF history to complete a build that ends up being used. (Literally ask anyone before 17’ of any builds/spawns I supplied.)
2) That it completely glosses over the fact that I, alongside the MB team, made – three – different spawns to be used for the server. Two got ruined in two different MBW griefs, and the last is basically stood finished in MBW, but was interupted by a (nonsensical) ECD voteoff to remove me from the position. These are the images I have in my screenshots folder from different time periods (unsorted). Keep in mind, these are far from the finished versions which were present in the MBW prior to the grief:

The island spawn:
https://imgur.com/a/oyl9uT5

The forest spawn:
https://imgur.com/a/D72eg7g

The Mansion:
https://imgur.com/a/Tsmsy7c

The Valley spawn can be seen in the MBW at present date.

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So I think that entire comment was made in jest after some of the recent issues and the rush that was required to get the hub up and running.

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@Miwojedk#3956 The MBW has been griefed at least on three different occassions. A world that is given to Master Builders to have a permanent place to hold their builds. We did not even have a recent backup of the world. This is an utter tragedy in my eyes. Many hours lost because of poor server management.

I will say there are complexities in getting the server backed up, when you have a server that's growing as large as this is, the standard backups that I've got for example means the server freezes for quite a while during the backup process. That's less of a concern now we have 2 Freedom servers, but with the size of the worlds and all that, I will say there is some decent complexity involved and why it's not a clear cut thing all the time.

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@Miwojedk#3956 (As I am writing this: I just went on the server to count the size of the plots in the Plotworld. But as I enter the command //count I am once again met with “You are not permitted to do that”. This is a joke. )

Was it on your plot? If not then that would be why I'm guessing.

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@Miwojedk#3956 his is actually an increase since Seth managed the server as far as I am aware.

FWIW it's not, it's exactly the same world and config.

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@Miwojedk#3956 shitty plots scattered about.

I am working on cleaning the plots up, it's a slow process and other big issues have come up and threads like this felt like they needed a reply more than me going through working on that.

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@Miwojedk#3956 I have suggested this before: Make a grand spawn with MB plots located near the spawn in order to inspire and entice the average player to build.

That's one of the things I'm already looking into. I think Fionn currently own's the "Centre" plot which is empty, my intent is to steal that from him and that will become a large scale build project, it's just not something I've been able to prioritise or really get further than going "Wouldn't it be a good idea" in my head.

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@Miwojedk#3956 Commands such as //count, //brush should be avaliable to the average player (certainly in the plotworld, and perhaps in an almost unlimited manner in other worlds).

Think they should already work most of the time?

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@Miwojedk#3956 Fix the ludicrous time it takes to perform a single edit with World Edit.

I agree, I think I've said somewhere else (Maybe here maybe not) that I want to re-review that configuration and look to try and get that tuned slightly more effectively based on the hardware we run on.

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@Miwojedk#3956 All banned blocks should be reviewed, every blocked command should be reviewed, every restriction should be discussed.

In slower time that's viable, I'd suggest if people have blocks they want reviewed in the shorter term then we can review those separately.

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@Miwojedk#3956 Systems such as the schematic repository, wherein players can download their own schematic from the server and also upload an outside schematic to the server, however, once again this is too limited. The average player should be able to upload their own schematic to the server without an Admin’s help. If the schematic is crude, too big, or used to crash the server, then this should be handled – ingame – not by blocking the function entirely. (is the schematic repository even avaliable anymore?)

It's certainly something to look into, I want to re-jig schematics in general along with the HTTPD setup for the server. Upload needs some thinking out for various reasons (Virus's and stuff being one) but something I'm open to discussing as part of the overall HTTPD review.

Hopefully that covers off most of your points? I don't think I've missed anything but yell if I have.

@Miwojedk#4012 Unfortunately the number of people that like Flarum is fairly low, and it's beta software that has caused all sorts of headaches already. I'm looking to move us to something that feels a little bit more standard and that will be actually maintainable going forward.

@RoboEx#4011 It's unlikely to be something we'd have at a network side setup just because of the potential mess, depending on how things go we may decide to tie some of the chats up but it's not something we'll want to do too much / too often just because as we (hopefully) grow we won't want to end up with the chat just being a full on mess.

As we approach the end of 2020, and as 2021 approaches rather rapidly, I wanted to share with you my current thoughts around where I'm hoping to take the server over the next 12 months.

I'm hoping this might help give you all a bit of an idea of my vision here, and to help answer a number of threads that have been raised, but also around a number of other conversations that have been had in the server.

The Forums

One major area of improvement for me has to be that of the forums. I will start off by saying that unfortunately at this stage Proboards is no longer a viable option... We are currently doing some initial testing of alternate software to see what we feel will work best from a technical perspective before we start looking at how we can migrate the existing forum data across and where appropriate look to re-structure things.

We are hoping that early next year we will be in a position to have a beta version of the forums up and running where we can start to get community feedback around the format and structure, and to make sure people are able to effectively use the new software we end up implementing. As we're still at the point of doing initial testing, I am not in a position to say much more on the software we're going to be using or anything like that, but wanted to at least give you an update as to where we are, and to make sure people are aware that it hasn't been forgotten.

New PvP Oriented Gamemode

I'm pleased to announce that work is currently underway to start the development and design of a brand new game mode that will be exclusive to the TF Network shortly. At the moment the game mode is still in it's very early stages and we will be announcing more as the game mode details firm up. This is one of the reasons we moved towards a model where there is a hub in operation.

Splitting The Plot Server Out

Something I'm very keen to do is ultimately allow the FreeOP server to thrive and mixing plots in with that doesn't really feel like an effective way about doing it. At the moment at least from my perspective it feels like we have ended up in a position where the FreeOP Server is needing to be restricted in order to protect things like the plot worlds builds, while the plot world isn't able to unlock the true potential of running plots where we are in a strong position to restrict changes and who can build and where.

My hope is that once the plot server has been split out, we can start then looking to expand the plugin offering that we have on the server. I'm keen to work with the community, development team and master builder team to ensure the plugin selection we work towards on the new plot server will enable a first class building experience for our community which are interested more in the building side to TF.

Website Refresh

One thing that has been noted is that our website is not in the best state, and since moving it to the new hosting setup a lot of the functionality on the site has unfortunately broken. That combined with the moving to a network setup means even if we did have everything working how it should, it wouldn't really be effective in it's current setup.

Moving AdminWorld, MasterBuilder world and the rest of them out

At the moment we have a freedom server that is ultimately trying to run more than just the freedom server. In addition to what I had said earlier around moving the plot world out, we're also starting to look at how we can move things like AdminWorld and the Master Builder's world out into their own servers. This allows us to better utilise those servers and tune the plugins and configurations for those purposes, and will also reduce the current burden on the freedom server in a number of useful ways.

Introduction of a panel

Given this is something that keeps coming up, I thought I'd update to say that yes, throughout 2021 I will be evaluating options for a suitable panel that will meet the ongoing growth from an infrastructure perspective, and which can meet some of the requirements we're looking at. At the moment I have no detail on what the final choice would be, and would ask folks to refrain from making suggestions for specific options and similar, it just slows the process down and I need to tackle things in somewhat of a sane approach!

General Notes

There are a lot of suggestions that have already been approved and are being worked through. I'm in the process of working through everything else that has come in since my last sweep through, and the development team are focused on implementing these changes, and improving the overall stability of the Freedom server experience. They are however volunteers and have lived, so please stick with us while we work on everything.

Please also do continue to raise suggestions to improve the current server experience, your feedback is exceptionally valuable and helps to identify where we can make improvements especially those that I or others may have overlooked historically.

As a final note, I will also try to update you all on this progress, and as we identify additional areas we want to be looking at throughout the next 12 months as we go through 2021. I'm also sure I've missed stuff on this, but I've struggled to find the focus to write this as it is (And it's taken 4-5 hours to write up) so if I do think of stuff I've missed it'll be updated here or will be in a future status update.

Thanks folks.

It's 2AM here so I'll write something proper up tomorrow. In short the hub portal routes to Freedom-02 (This server) and anyone who is using the freedom. direct connect address will land on Freedom-01.

Freedom-01 still was being attacked earlier, it looks like at least for the right here and now the attack is over, but there's a good chance it could start up again.

I'm not sure what's wrong with the bot but something doesn't appear to be working, but I'm hopeful that between elmon and myself we can work that out tomorrow but I need sleep for now.

Appreciate everyone's understanding as this has developed, it's certainly not how I planned on spending my day...

So I started with the CJFreedom maps because I had them to hand on a server and knew I could restore them with ease, but I will be looking to get a lot of the old overworld spawn maps and restoring those in as well in the future and Woosh and Yoglympics are some, and I think I have the original Miwojedk 's Mountain map somewhere on one of my servers as well.

Due to the ongoing DDoS attacks we're suffering, and the fact that it is ultimately having an impact to our server, and the fact that due to the current world sizes of the freedom server making it impossible to move under these circumstances, I'm setting up "TotalFreedom Lite", a lighter weight, and slightly more "Traditional" TF server. It'll have less plugins, but should have the same feel.

The big difference is on this server things will likely get regularly re-set (Just because it makes life easier) and it probably won't last more than a couple of weeks.

While I know we're in a change freeze, having something freedom related to play on is better than nothing, so this is the best I can do without taking the server down again for hours and trying to move all the files around, which isn't really practical.

To make this fun, I'll give the community the first vote on the map we'll run. These are currently all ones from the CJFreedom days so some of you will know what they are, some of this will be guessing.

Luke I've made some changes to the policy to hopefully better capture what I actually am trying to achieve with this policy change. Would appreciate your thoughts.

If you can propose how you would re-word the policy, because right now Executives are a key aspect to the ownership policy, and to just exclude them ultimately means the policy can therefore never be invoked.

@Miwojedk#3850 I haven't changed any appointments and for the record, up until I made the change today to the ownership policy (Which I suggested) I could already block my own vote-off... At the end of the day when you own the server there will always be ways of blocking a vote-off, not to mention a vote-off was always intended as a last resort because of the fact everything in theory is lost when you do that in the first place...

Again if people REALLY don't like what I'm doing here, the current exec's are the same as they were before I made this change (And likely will be for some time hopefully) so feel free to start the vote-off, but this is all in the way I said I would be running TF from day 0...

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@zekurt#3840 There's no merit behind the idea that appointed executives are more effective. Marks appointed executives were consistently incompetent, and I know that because I was there. Mark appointed me as Executive Security Officer; was I the most qualified? Absolutely not.

I think I'd rather hedge my bets on reviewing suitable candidates and appointing someone who at least on paper is best fitted for the job rather than leave it to a blind popularity vote... Which has been my entire point here... I can't speak for Mark's appointments, and these things will never be perfect but I'm here to do what I personally think is best for the server, and that is what I see in this change.

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@zekurt#3840 The single most ineffective and corrupt executive, Infamas, was appointed. Executive inaction and corruption peaked here; there was no incentive for him to do anything he didn't want to do

This is always going to be the case though, it's the nature of running a server like this and not just paying your staff... I have yet to see any evidence that voting people in makes them somehow more inclined to do the job they're voted in for? Just means they have to lie when asked more...

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@zekurt#3840 because there were no checks or balances, outside the owner. The owner was incapable of enforcing the checks and balances the server needed, and as a result the server stagnated for the better part of a year.

That may well have been how things have ran historically, but I've already explained here how I intend that to be addressed.

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@zekurt#3840 The policy was changed to allow community oversight and voting, which lead to objectively more effective executives.

I've yet to see any actual evidence of that... From what I've observed since I've taken over it has made some executives nervous to make sweeping changes that could cause community upset (Though being overall to the servers advantage) because they don't want to lose their ranks...

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@zekurt#3840 With that in mind, changes to policy should not be based on the notion that we're passed such issues, or that we've entered a golden age.

It has not been.

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@zekurt#3840 These changes were needed in the first place because people didn't think it was possible under their own circumstances, and with respect, I don't see a smoking gun that says you're definitely not going to favor appointed executives over the community, or inherently more effective at judging character and merit.

If I'm trusting someone with my delegated authority, it should ultimately be my decision who that individual is, because they're doing a role I've specifically asked them to do, and with the full power in that role as if they were me. Take Fionn and the exec admin officer role, he has the same level of power as I do in terms of admin management, there are no "Oh I need to check with Ryan" type things, he has full unrestricted authority to carry out the role of Executive Admin officer as if he were me, and I trust him to do that, but I do need to be able to trust him to do that, and to do that in the same way in which I would if it were me making that appointment, which is the point.

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@zekurt#3840 Regardless, policy should never be based on the best case scenario, but adapted based on the worst.

I think we have a lot of policies very much like that, and while that can be effective in some places, it ultimately means you have a load of bureaucracy that for a minecraft server we shouldn't have in the first place. If you don't trust the servers owner to do their job properly, then either in the case of TF, remove them, or on any other server, find another server to play on...

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@zekurt#3840 In regards to voteoffs, there's nothing that backs up the argument of executives afraid of acting due to the prospect of being voted off. In quite clear contrast, the only people who really have been voted off or have had it threatened were people who were ineffective or just didn't do their job.

I've seen it first hand since taking over, and while I'm not naming names, it was a key reason I made this change. The community should never be in a position to strong-arm the servers executive / ownership into doing what they want at the risk of being removed. Now for me that comes with the territory of having the ownership policy that we do but it shouldn't be the case for anyone else on this server.

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@zekurt#3840 There are a plethora of reasons to point towards current community stagnation, but executives having being voted in is not one of them.

I disagree as I've said and explained previously.

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@zekurt#3840 This server severely lacks people who are capable and qualified of doing the work it needs.

If you would like to elaborate where you feel there are missing resources then that would be great. I'm doing the best I personally can to try to keep the lights on and grow the server, and am looking to push more of the day-to-day responsibilities for things like advertising and player engagement to the exec's like they should be doing. But if there are gaps that I've just overlooked please do say.

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@zekurt#3840 When given an option of trash to pick from, the server will vote in trash, and you will appoint trash.

Not really disagreeing, if there's a limited candidate pool it will always be an issue, but I'd rather be in a position where that's my problem and my problem out of choice rather than forced upon me which the old version of this policy did.

It's certainly something that we've been looking into (Though all be it in slower time) because it is a pain in the neck. My working theory is it's due to the size of our worlds and them just not being something that's particularly sustainable generally, as we didn't see stability issues when we were running the temporary server before we got the server files from Seth, however obviously that is just a theory.

In short yes, it's something that's being looked at, and we're looking to also improve the VM's that the servers run on as well in the near future which we're hoping should also help the server as well.

@simplynick#3837 The issue comes in some of the executive roles, for example the odd's are the community as a whole aren't going to be able to sensibly vote in a new lead developer in a meaningful way because they won't have visibility in to the conversations that happen around the servers development.

For the most part I would still expect there to be an application open to the general public to comment on and to ultimately inform my decision, but at the same time there will always be certain roles where that just doesn't make sense... Not because I don't value the community input, but because I don't think the community can make that informed decision without it turning into a flat out popularity contest.

@zekurt#3836 Sounds great on paper, but given we don't have a copy of the old forums and the proboards one is even older, it's a lot of work to identify what was introduced by means of an owner / exec making the decision, or a community vote.

Also, again as I've said from the start, TF is not a democracy. I am running things how I feel is best for the servers future and if people don't like that, there is an ownership policy with a procedure to remove me if the community feel I am being negligent.