Posts by wild1145

    This is one of the reasons root has come onto the team. Given Steven ans myself are awake throughout the Europe timezone and rylie is us time, it's been pretty good at covering when video is online and critical patches need pushing


    I'm personally reluctant to grant anyone file system access for a few reasons, one is to ensure we maintain a reasonable qa process or at least the checks and balances around it, some is around separating privileges to try to minimise risk if accounts are breached, and some are because I don't want people taking unauthorised backups / copies of the file system and potentially sharing them.


    If there are examples of where this has been actively problematic that would be helpful because afaik there haven't been any recent incidents where someone couldn't apply a patch where it was absolutely critical.

    The report that was flagged to me only a couple of days ago was in fact as Luke says from some time ago. I've removed my original posts on this thread and retract my original objection.

      Noah Actually that happened prior to me owning the domain… Owning the domain is the only thing and only way that made the current ownership policy null and void for the way it was used when it comes to actual enforcement.

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      jwmphall Quote 2 (am on mobile now where formatting is hard so excuse the informality) I believe theyre referring to certain category 0 offenses, especially 0a. Certain players are banned for loose interpretations of 0a like Flobbier while a discord mod streams breaking bad on discord. 0a is an excuse for you to ban any player you want at almost any time because at some point most players have done something you could describe as illegal if you do enough mental gymnastics.

    The reality is the cat 0 offences have always been a thing. Just previous owners for some time abstracted it away. There hasn't been a full actual permban wipe since probably Marks time. The ones that have happened were in fact selective as I found out. I've aimed to be more transparent in the logic and what we have to be aware of. Category 0 exists for those that simply are no longer welcome in the community and continue to be disruptive. Again flobbier is not one of those, instead I opted to issue a long term minimum indef ban because the dude lasted less than a month after his last incident… Ivan has been warned for years about his vehaciour#imposing as a member of my staff team was the final straw for him. And for the record, if someone had complained and he'd been imposing as another company the result would likely have been the same if it spilled into tf. You make it sound like both people here were first time offenders which is not the case. As for other rule breaking. Report it. Stop making it my fault for not knowing what happens 24/7/365. You're an admin for God sake, report it to someone when it happens instead of storing it on your list of things to have a go at me about.

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      jwmphall Quote 3 - you provided evidence initially, but in the thread where i refuted the points you resorted to circular reasoning and privately attempted to change the ban to 0c, indicating even you realize it doesnt fall under 0a. I recall you stating “i can frankly ban whoever i want.”

    You argued my points, but as you would know from reading the rules it is ultimately my judgement and I made a different judgement to you. That doesn't make either judgement wrong but ultimately mines the one that sticks… And again, when you run your own community you're welcome to ban whoever you feel like.

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      jwmphall Quote 4 - i was once banned for saying “i farted on your grandmas balls.” an obvious joke. (Literally stolen from a meme that you can google) you later said it was because your grandmother passed away recently (sorry for your loss). but i had no way of knowing this and received no warning prior to the ban. this is anecdotal, but i can list several similar situations

    I'm a human being that has emotions. I think I had told the admin team and a lot of the community I had been at my grandmothers funeral and was struggling, but I recall there being some degree of drama which meant I had to spend time here instead of grieving. So forgive me for being upset that you decided to make a poorly timed joke that didn't land well. Again though, I'm a human fucking being that sometimes gets shit wrong.

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      jwmphall Quote 6 - dumbing things down and saying its just a minecraft server doesnt work ever since cat 0 was added. tf rules obviously mimic real life law, everybody knows that.

    You're argument here makes zero sense. We have to comply with the law like everyone else does. And those that break the law threaten the long term existence of the community as a whole. Very few people have been banned for that shit under a cat 0 especially globally. We've had a fair share of discord bans where people have reported illegal content to us, but it's always been this way for the last 10 years at least.


    I don't want to be argumentative here, but I'm not going to sit here and get railroaded because people are upset I've put my foot down and got rid of Ivan permanently which is the crux of this thread quite frankly.

    I will also clarify the ownership policy now only applies to the freedom game mode since I took domain ownership, it resulted in no actually enforceable way of having an ownership policy, combined with the fact tf is owned by a registered legal entity.


    People are welcome to vote. But an ownership policy invocation would be removing Steven from his position not me from mine…

    If you're going to try and hang me out to dry, it's only fair I point out some of the areas this lacks truth.

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      jwmphall yet these same players can get punished for criticizing the company or displaying company logos.

    For the record. The only person that has been punished for anything like this imposed as a member of staff for my company and actively engaged members of the community in such a way that implied he worked for me. That was what the main ban reason was.

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      jwmphall but the size of this community cannot justify these strict policies to go forward doing so while carrying the brand “oldest freedom server.”

    Citation needed. What strict policies?

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      jwmphall Furthermore, the way certain players are seemingly singled out and applied weak interpretations of Category 0 bans at the owner’s whim is shady and downright petty.

    Subjective and misinformation… Full evidence was provided to you and others on why Ivan was issued with a category 0 ban, as have others that are now banned. Nobody has had any issue with any historic cat 0 ban prior to Ivan as far as I'm aware so please cite other times the community has expressed their discontent for a cat 0 ban.

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      jwmphall For instance, certain individuals are permanently banned without the chance to appeal because of an obvious joke

    I think you'll find the times people have been banned for "obvious jokes" have been impersonating people that work for the company I run or for actively harassing me and the staff team.

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      jwmphall Ryan has locked jwmphall’s thread about Flobbier’s indefinite ban, after garnering criticism. There was a clear consensus that the reason for Flobbier’s ban was manufactured and invalid, but the owner refused to step up, admit he was wrong, and retract – or reconsider the ban.

    The ban was reviewed and justification was provided for it. That is why the thread was locked. It was not going to be revoked.

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      jwmphall which is dangerous in a system that attempts to mimic law and justice

    We are a minecraft community, not a country. The community would do well to remember that…

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      jwmphall Is it not the owner’s job to be in touch with his community and positively interact with the people in it?

    It doesn't mean I should be everyone's friend. Again see the issues with multiple precious ownership where we has this. "Seth and friends" being a prime example. I chose to engage with the community through the discord and the forums. If people want to interact and make enhancements we have ways to do that. A lot of the time that's delegated to game mode owners now because that's what they're there for.

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      jwmphall Rather than listening to the TotalFreedom community, he has repeatedly chosen to ignore and silence anyone who attempts to criticize or oppose his judgment.

    Again citation? I've removed disruptive members of the community where there has been consensus or there has been clear conduct violation. Again I've not seen any recent suggestions that are wider than the freedom game mode that I've rejected or what on, or which I've chosen to ignore or silence?

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      jwmphall Through inappropriate handling of discourse, inability to listen to popular demand

    What popular demand? I again would appreciate citation. The current priorities for the network are aligned with a mix of community suggestions and improvements to make the player experience better and our ability to maintain the game mode (mainly freedom) more sustainable and reduce the delays in new mc version support.


      jwmphall I think I've probably addressed various things in your reply as well. Happy to discuss but hopefully I've made my points clear enough.

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      uvb all other main assets to TF (forums, discord etc)

    I and my company exclusively own the domain and associated domains as well as the forums, website and its content. Steven owns the server the freedom server now runs on with backups being pushed to my backup environment. I can't see that changing in any case. The agreement with Mark who transfered it to me was to shut down the server, given that's not happened that's quite frankly the only alternative I currently see.

      jwmphall and yet it hasn't happened. I had hoped pointing out what he did was in my eyes (and backed up with a detailed explanation you chose to ignore) would highlight why strictly speaking it was a cat 0 offence. Highlighting I should have already had it set as such but you seemed to miss the point and go on the witch hunt that has lead to this.

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      jwmphall Ryan has stated that Flobbier’s ban has been changed to a category 0c, meaning he apparently compromised the integrity of TotalFreedom or Atlas Media Group; neither of which are remotely applicable so I really don’t know. I was told by Ryan (paraphrasing): if I didn’t stop arguing Flobbier’s ban then Ryan would make it unappealable entirely. (meaning he would change it from 0a to 0b or 0c). Obviously, I didn’t stop, so Ryan changed the ban, completely bending the rules out of spite.

    This however is incorrect. As an admin you can view the unappealable ban list. Flobbier is not on it and never has been.

    For clarity and transparency, one of the individuals that was heavily involved in this thread has admitted to being a bypasser of an indefinitely banned player (Unrelated to the thread and the individuals mentioned in the thread) and as such their forum account was banned and all posts deleted. This is why there might be some weird context and missing responses in here.

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      jwmphall The issue is that players clearly didn’t want it - regardless of what went on behind the scenes. Even if you say its was a net benefit, greater benefits would’ve been gained focusing development of a project approved of by the community

    It's great to say that, but the reality is we have 0 developers that are active, so new projects that are actually things the community think they want, is really fucking difficult. There's a lot of game-modes that have been drafted as "Things we should do" but until the current dev situation un-fucks itself that can't happen, and Skyblock allowed us to merge two communities together (Or at least try) which might then have attracted more developers.


    If you can find me some developers willing to work on these things because they want to work on them and get nothing in return other than the fact they've developed for the server, that'd be great, and we'll be able to do a lot of interesting things.

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      jwmphall The thing is, survival anarchy isn’t unique. While I think creative anarchy is a terrible idea, it is actually unique. Again, the players are usually right when it comes to predicting the success of an addition.

    The thing is it's not unique, there are a lot of servers in TF's very close "Competitive Sphere" that are doing effectively the same thing… I will also point out, being brutally honest the community has a horrific track record when it comes to a success rate… We've tried and failed to launch more SMP's then you can throw a stick at all of which "Were wanted by the community".


    The bottom line is I don't disagree that some of this and there's a lot of stuff if I had the people I would be doing differently, but I don't have the luxury of doing interesting game-modes that require actual development effort which is what a lot of them really are.


    Again, more than happy to take suggestions for new game-modes as long as there's something unique and that will attract & retain players, because that's the current issue with what we have today… I also know I am behind on the suggestions I manage, so there are possibly game-mode suggestions in there I've not yet seen.

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      jwmphall Yes but there was a large volume of backlash and no decision to rethink the addition was ever brought up.

    The decision has been pretty consistently reviewed behind the scenes, the bottom line is that action bought in more players to the network than pretty much anything else we tried… It was a net benefit.

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      jwmphall There was definitely some demand when Panther was EMM for a creative anarchy server, but I saw little to nobody asking for a survival anarchy.

    There was demand for anarchy, everyone assumed creative anarchy, I wanted to try something different to make our server unique and actually different, because that's what the community said we needed. It was a 4-6 week test to see what worked and what didn't, and it's clear that it was a pretty big failure given the lack of players on it.

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      jwmphall I assume this was prior to your appointment of owners of individual servers? Because I’ve seen countless requests to bring it back, and I believe we have the means to do so - but none have bore fruit

    It was, it was pretty early on in my time as owner. I think the idea of an SMP is still (and always has been) something I'm open to, the issue has been nobody has been able to provide a good spin on it that will actually attract players / retain any players… I apreciate a small handful of our current players are into the idea of it, but we need to have game-modes that stand a fighting chance of actively attracting new players as well… The previous suggestions I'd seen for SMP lacked that, and again, last time we had an SMP the community wanted it gone because it was too much like every other SMP…

    I've decided to bring Anarchy to a close a bit before the original 4 week's I had originally planned, given the low-uptake and fact that nobody apparently actually wanted an anarchy server (Reference: https://forum.totalfreedom.me/…copyright-infringement/61 ) I'm going to close the server and mark this up as one of those things we tried and didn't get right.


    Appreciate folks support, hope those of you that did play enjoyed it :)


    I'll put the world up for download in due course.

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      jwmphall No shit. Not exactly premium owner behavior to be stubborn and unwilling to compromise

    Ahh yes, because bending over and letting everyone get their own way 100% of the time has done so well.

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      jwmphall By making the server a network with multiple servers that literally nobody plays on?

    You mean the one server that was actually really active until our community with your type of toxic behaviour alienated them and made them all leave? That sounds about right.

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      jwmphall And I guess removing policies that would restrict your power is technically making things more simple, but not in a good way

    The policy still exists, there's a comment to go "It can't be enforced any-more because I own the domain" but it's still there. I actually went to efforts to remove the stupidly long conduct policy that had turned into an act of law and replace it with something people actually read and we can expect to read. I've also made various changes to other policies and procedures to try to remove some of the nonsense nobody was reading, and make peoples lives simpler on here.

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      jwmphall And yet you partner us with your company and make rules around not bringing it into disrepute?

    Which was exactly what I stated I would do when I put my name forward to be owner… And is exactly what I have done. I don't see how that is a surprise?

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      jwmphall You make the server into a network against player’s wishes?

    There was no real view either way when this happened, we already had a "Hub" and this was the next logical step to making this a usable experience. If people don't like it, maybe they should suggest it instead of throwing a paddy.

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      jwmphall As for development, don’t even try to pretend development now is more organized than previous owners. I can recall countless examples of poor management of developers: whether that be high workload, confusing prohibitive decisions regarding fixes, or even the effort put into additions that failed immediately.

    The ask on the dev team has been crystal clear for some time, the fact the work that is a priority to me, and the server isn't what interests them, and then they don't do it, is not something I can control. I agree there has been confusion over the exact process to do some things like cut releases and publish them, but that impacted one person, not the entire team.

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      jwmphall You should have no fear of a vote off if you do your job effectively. Your admittance that you can ignore this fear shows you couldn’t care less what the community thinks.

    I absolutely care what the community thinks, I don't care to be blackmailed into doing what you and a handful of others want just because you're more interested in the power. I also don't fear a vote off because there is simply no way for it to be enforced any-more, which means I can make the tough decisions that aren't always liked in an effort to make things better.

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      jwmphall Even if they received warnings for other things, their ban reasons were hitherto unprecedented - so the warnings are moot. This would be like getting a speeding ticket, then being executed for jaywalking because you have a criminal record.

    No this is more akin to you getting 20 speeding tickets, then getting executed for running a child over doing 90 in a 20.

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      Michelangelo Nobody likes it when a question is raised about how the server is operated and they’re told to go fuck themselves.

    As far as I'm aware, that's not happened. I've aimed to be pretty transparent with my decision making, where I've told people to go fuck themselves is where they continue to stretch and push the boundaries, and ultimately cause more destructive action to the server then any net benefits.

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      Michelangelo It’s absolutely unprofessional and just about sums up the irony of this supposed corporate attitude from which the server has seen little benefit.

    Which sort of proves my point, there has been no "Corporate Attitude", I've been trying to push some industry best practice into our development process, and try to formalize things like releases, but ultimately gave up on it. The entire point being to ensure suggestions are actually at least tracked so they can be done rather than forgotten.

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      Michelangelo There have been players and admins alike willing to take on the server’s ownership. If you were actually willing to pass the baton, it’s that there wasn’t anyone to your liking who would run the server and this is why you’re still in control of it.

    The reality is that's not quite true, Steven has taken over the running of the Freedom server because he reached out when I was considering turning everything off, and made sense as the person to actually continue to run with the day to day operations of that game-mode, and because I wanted to focus on the other game-modes and plans I had which was hopefully going to bring in more players.

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      Michelangelo You’ve shown no respect at all for your predecessor, Seth, or the circumstances that he was under despite exaggerating your own on several occasions.

    Also not in any way true, I on many many occasions have explained how I very much see the stresses Seth was under, and spoke with Seth himself on the matter after I took over. The fact he lasted as long before throwing in the towel because frankly a lot of the noise that gets to me (And I suspect got to him) is toxic as fuck, and doesn't make the community a pleasant one to run a lot of the time. I'd also say I don't think you have any idea what my personal circumstances are, quite frankly I'm not convinced you're an active member of the community, or if you are you're one whom has been perm-banned given the nicely timed appearance of your account.

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      Michelangelo Is this supposed to mean “less strict” in terms of its code or are you saying that the rules were being enforced more strictly five years ago than they are now? If you’re claiming the latter then that’s flat-out wrong and I hope nobody really believes that. At least Total Freedom was not being held to the standards of UK law five years ago.

    I'm referring to development, as you would understand by the context under which I replied. The law point is true, we were never previously governed by UK Law, but historically we've had US owners of the server, so have been governed by US Laws which were enforced where reported. It's the only reason we continue to have mention of enforcing US Law in our community guidelines.

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      Michelangelo That’s because you’ve stated on multiple occasions that you don’t plan on following the policy. If you won’t follow the policy, why should it be in place?

    I've always acted and followed the policy, I've actually clarified that the policy is not able to be enforced, not that I would not follow it.


    In any case, all of this is off topic, if folks want to continue this discussion, I'm happy to do so on another thread. But if the report here wants to be treated with any sort of genuine care, this is just one big off-topic thread.

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      @SaturnRayo then why even think about replacing him?

    Because people don't like that I tell them to go fuck themselves… A lot of people are still used to the times when Seth was running the server, when if you moaned / threatened to vote them off, he'd flex to let you do what ever the fuck you wanted. I've also tried to make things simpler, remove the stupidly long policies and procedures that made TF far more corporate than what it is now, is it perfect? No. Is there more I could be doing, absolutely. Is it better than it was before? I think so.

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      jwmphall There are others that would be willing to do it if Ryan stepped down. The only reason somebody didn’t assume the position in October was Ryan was going to discontinue the server instead of hand over ownership.

    And I've made it very clear I have no intention of stepping down. I've delegated a lot of the power I hold to Steven and Hooke for the respective game-modes, but I'm not going anywhere. Quite frankly there was never going to be someone taking it on after October because the intention was to burn the domain (Well, renew the domain, and just have it go to a blank landing page) which was what was agreed with Mark who owned it at the time.


    I also want to clarify, I have no desire to "Corporatise" TF, I've wanted to put basic control in place to stop batshit crazy shit happening, like what development looked like for a long while, where the community complained because broken code was getting pushed to prod with 0 testing. The things I've put into place today, is still less strict than it was back 5+ years ago when it was being ran by just 2 dev's that knew what they were doing, and spent a lot of time working on TFM.


    Bottom line is, I don't have to operate under the fear the previous two owners had where the ownership policy could (And on more than one occasion very nearly did) get abused to remove an owner to put someone in who wanted a power trip.


    I'm doing my best here, Ivan and Flobbier (Which is what this comes down to) had a LOT of warnings prior to their respective bans. At this point if you don't like the fact they are banned and are going to continue to make a fuss, feel free to invite them to your own community, because they're simply not welcome here.