Posts by wild1145

  • Hub Applications - Application Response Instructions

    IMPORTANT: I am asking for a different way of responding when replying to hub moderator applications compared to other things on TF. This is a bit of a trial, please stick with it and respect it.

    Voting on Threads

    While voting on these threads is exceptionally valuable, posting "vouch" "neutral" or "object" is not, and in this category such responses will be classed as power posting and subject to moderation action.


    What I would really value is folks to elaborate their responses, something like "I've seen this applicant in game and they've been helpful and responsive to other players" or "I've never seen this player online, no idea who they are" or "This player is known for being a huge dick bag, I really don't want to see them get added as a mod" is FAR more useful to me than the one word responses.

    Applicants replying to their application

    Applicants are discouraged from replying directly to comments left on their application, and should not look to bump their applications. Applicants may challenge a statement that they believe to be false if they can provide evidence to back their statement up.

    Applicants replying to others applications

    This is fully acceptable, though intentionally objecting / providing false information to discredit another applicant will result in being excluded from future applications for a 6 month window.

    TF Staff Responses to applications

    I would encourage existing staff across the TF network to give their feedback on applicants again following the guidance in the first point here. Your feedback will be invaluable, but please use the guidance posted at the start of this thread.

  • Hub Moderators - Application Information

    FAQ:

    I currently hold OP / Other access to the hub, will that remain?


    TLDR - No. The current roles and access in the hub were always intended to be temporary. Executives and others who were given OP access will have it revoked when we start to appoint in individuals to this role


    Will there be an activity requirement


    Probably, though initially it's going to be a case of ensuring we have coverage and seeing where things aren't working as well as they should. Unlike the Freedom gamemode it's not like there are "Things to do" while moderating, so we will have to see on this.


    Will there be an "admin" rank?


    Maybe, I don't see it being needed, but there might be in the future


    Why did you name this "moderator" not admin. I WANT THINGS TO BE NAMED THE SAME!!!!!!!


    Because I think moderation is more accurate a description of what folks will be doing here. It's a pretty different role to our Freedom admin team and I wanted to reflect that here.

  • Hub Moderators - Application Template

    If you wish to be considered for moderator status on the TF Network Hub Servers, please post a separate thread (NOT a reply) in this section with the subject 'Hub Mod Application - your name', and answer all the following questions:

    1. What is your Minecraft name and time zone where you normally are online? (e.g. GMT+1:00 or MST). - Your Minecraft name must match your forum name or your Minecraft name must be in your forum profile.

    2. What is your Discord account details (Note that being in the TF Discord Guild (or server, whatever you wanna call it...) is mandatory) - Post your username#discriminator here

    3. What date did you first join the Total Freedom forum? (MM/DD/YY). - Required 1 month forum registration.

    4. How often can you be on the server to perform administrative duties? State either daily, several times a week, once or twice a week, or less than once a week. We realize that school or work will prevent constant service.

    5. What describes you best? Choose student, employed, unemployed, or retired.

    6. What continent do you live on? (e.g. N. America, Europe, Asia, Australia/Oceania).

    7. What personal qualities do you have that would make you a good moderator? (Answer with a short paragraph).

    8. Can you handle being a staff member without it negatively affecting your school grades, work, family, real life, etc? (Yes or No). If no, your application will be instantly denied.

    9. Are your accounts secure? Meaning are your passwords strong, not easily brute-forced, and not used across multiple websites?

  • Hub Moderators - Application Information

    This thread is intended to have some initial information around the role of a hub moderator for the TF Network.

    Scope Of This Role

    This role is to provide moderation capability within the TF Hubs. This will primarily be to issue warnings, mute players and issue temporary bans when players are breaking rules within the hub, or causing a scene within the TF Network.


    This role should also include helping players that may be "Stuck" in the hub or who are experiencing issues accessing the wider network, even if that ends up being that it's reported to a member of the team here on the forums.


    This role does not include any additional rights / access / privileges in any gamemode other than the hubs.

    Prerequisites

    There are no formal prerequisites for this role, previous moderation experience is desirable.

    Number of active moderators

    We are looking to gain a broad coverage of moderators across the time zones who will be able to connect to the hub when there are players in need or reports of issues. Reports are likely to come via Freedom gamemode admins in game, or via the forums or Discord.

    Management of this position

    Currently the management of this position sits outside of the scope of the Freedom EAO Team and will be managed by me (TF's owner) Directly. We will look to transition this in due course to a more sensible management structure.

  • Thread ID 2472 | The Recycle Bin

    I will say we don't really use it on Flarum, as Flarum has the concept of deleting without really deleting. It remains visible to forum admins but otherwise is gone. Same for posts.


    I will say the Proboards one is full of crap.

  • ATLAS Project Destiny - Level Of Interest?

    For some clarity.


    1 - I'm not 100% sure if we're going to do this this year or not yet. I'd just like to get some replies here to gauge if people would be interested or not.


    2 - The mod packs are both historic ones, we generally tweak / adjust the mod packs as they're created per "Season" as it were. The mods will probably be similar to the ones listed above but may change depending on what's available and to help keep things somewhat balanced.


    3 - This won't feel "Finished", because it's designed for some friends to just play together on. There will be plenty of things we could improve, but for a temporary server that's not intended to be public (It will be whitelist only). If people are dicks on the server, they'll simply be banned and won't be invited to similar events in the future.

  • ATLAS Project Destiny - Level Of Interest?

    About every 12 - 18 months the ATLAS Staff team and a select group of friends have embarked on a 6-12 week modded Minecraft experience code-named Project Destiny.


    Project Destiny is a heavily technical focused custom mod pack which we curate and ultimately play (Generally for far far more time than we probably should), since I've now taken on ownership of TF, I wanted to gauge interest from the TF community if we opened this up to TF as well for it's next iteration.


    I'm classing this in TF terms as an event, as usually it runs for a 6 to 12 week window, at which point the server is then shut down and we go back to doing what we were doing before.


    The historic mod packs have been reasonably memory intensive (The first time we did it the mod pack required 8GB Memory just to open MC, and MC took quite some time to launch so just be aware of this).


    Historically we've treated it as a modded SMP which a little anarchy flair to it, given it's always been between friends we haven't got a firm set of rules or anything like that, which we would need to write and publish, but I'd really like to know if this is the sort of things that the community here would like to be invited to if we decide to run an iteration of Project Destiny this year.


    For reference, this was the original mod list:

    Last Years Mod-Pack:

  • Ban Review - Shit Posting Accounts

    Those who recently got caught in my rather angry rage around shit posting have now had their bans reviewed, looking back some of them were slightly more aggressively banned than was probably fair.


    Anyone who had their account suspended have either had their bans lifted (Where they have already served a 7 day suspension) or their ban duration updated to have 7 days from the post that got them banned.

  • Changes to "Applications"

    As you will probably now see, the Applications category has been expanded and ultimately split out based on the type of server / application.


    This will mean that some threads will still be needing to be updated if they are referencing them by name, but it should be pretty obvious which category is what.


    Some of the categories won't have content in yet (Skyblock mainly) but you should start to see content appearing and applications opening as appropriate in the categories.


    Thanks for your understanding!

  • Update on TF's current priorities

    Hey folks,


    So I realised I've not really been doing a great job at keeping everyone up to date with the priorities as I see them, and that's my bad. I've had add-hoc conversations with a few people and on a few chats in Discord, but this feels like a good time to give you an up to date idea on my priorities following on from my original thread quite some time ago. This is sort of in priority order as I see it, but as this should be spanning the full breath of the executive team as well as other individuals, I expect much of this to run in parallel.

    Dev Updates - Java 16 & Minecraft 1.17

    The highest priority item for me at the moment across the network is to be in a position to bring Freedom-01 up to Java 16, which will enable us to start looking at performing the 1.17 update. At the time of writing this the development team and myself have done a significant amount of de-risking on the development server, and we're down to a single plugin which we must get updated to work properly on Java 16 before we can update the current servers java version. Everything else we believe should update fully and without issue.


    Once we have the entire network running Java 16, the next priority will be getting the Freedom game mode uplifted to 1.17, and should the Skyblock server be integrated fully into the network before this, the Skyblock will also be uplifted in parallel (Though we don't expect this should require our developers time as there are no custom plugins we support at this time there). Once we're ready to do the uplift we'll drop 1.16.5 support throughout the network and jump up to 1.17.1 (Or the latest 1.17.x build depending on patches).


    While there are folks that may not like 1.17, for us it's critical that we keep in step, we've noticed historically that most players will look to update to the latest version as it's released as they are using the default profile (or that's what I suspect anyway). We will however be giving plenty of notice before we jump to 1.17, and will look to open the development server for some testing before we roll the update out everywhere.

    Hub Improvements

    A clear need for better moderation abilities has been identified within our hub infrastructure, and while the hubs are unlikely to be heavily used at the moment we will be looking to bring on some staff to better manage the moderation in the hub server. Longer term we will re-review this and may merge the responsibilities of moderating the hub in with the Freedom or another game mode staff, but for now due to the way TFM perms work we aren't able to have cross-network Freedom staff.


    In addition to this we will be looking to make some cosmetic improvements to the hub many of which I had hoped to be made some time ago. I will be looking to work with the MB Team to start making more seasonal updates to the hub and to ensure there is a growing number of things that can be done there as per the original intention of the hub. While it's not intended that players will spend extended amounts of time in there, as we grow there's a good chance people may be in the hub waiting for friends, or waiting for server re-starts / similar.

    Plot World Improvements

    This is something I'm very keen to start making significant progress on, as @"Miwojedk"#64 so elegantly put it, the current plot world is pretty crap for enabling our building community to effectively build, and I want to do what I can to make that a better and more useable experience for all involved. I am currently looking at creating a new server on the network to be dedicated to creative plots, and this is for a few reasons. The first being it gives us the chance to be free of any "Weird Shit" that TFM does, Plots were never designed to run on a TFM server, and it's clear it's been "Slotted in" and I think that has served us well, but with the move to running TF as a network and with a lot more resources to play with, having a dedicated server gives us a lot more flexibility. This will also allow us to try a few things out in a safer environment, the first is to move to a 100% permission based system, which I think for plots especially will prove to be invaluable, and will allow us to give players a lot more access to work with their plots, without risking them doing damage elsewhere like they could on Freedom-01.


    The other key improvement I want to make with the plots server is to ensure we have as many good building plugins to aid our rather talented building community, there is already a thread asking for suggestions, and I really appreciate all the feedback so far! We will continue to work through the suggestions, and will hopefully find a configuration that the majority of folks finds works well.

    Skyblock Integration

    We still have some work to do in order to bring the sky block server into the full TF Network, and to bring it's community over with it. We're doing some work to improve the stability and performance of the server at the moment, and are looking at options to change it into online mode so that it can be properly integrated, so far this has proved to be a bit more complex than we had hoped, but we are optimistic that we can complete the integration and bring the Skyblock game mode into the TF Network.

    MB Project Servers

    To enable the MB Team to properly work on some of the work I have tasked them with (Updates and changes to the hub for example) we will be looking to stand up some MB Project servers on the network where the team can have additional permissions and access to make the required changes to the hub before they are then moved onto the live environment. This has been on my to-do list for quite some time, but has slipped for a number of reasons.

    Freedom-01 World Optimisations

    The Freedom-01 server is reaching disk sizes that are now impossible to properly back-up and restore. Despite making improvements elsewhere to TF's disk utilisation (Mostly in the area of CoreProtect data) we've not been able to shrink our file size footprint by a substantial enough amount to have a fully functional backup solution (Just due to how our hosts backup service runs).


    There is also a significant "Cost" (All be it sponsored) to having as much disk space used. With thanks to @"Folfy_Blue"#356 we have a script we will be looking to test in the near future on the Freedom-01 Flatlands and over world to remove any chunks that have had no modifications made to it, or have never had anyone actually enter the chunk. Our hope is this will help combat the Columbus style damage where chunks are generated and written to disk, but never actually built in. Our hope is this may help shrink our server file sizes down anywhere from 30% to 75%.

    Player Retention & Growth in General

    We're starting to notice a somewhat scary downward trend on players, despite this last 3 months historically being when TF should see it's annual peak of players. I suspect this is the result of a number of factors including the fact a lot of the world is only recently able to travel for holidays and such, but it is still a significant concern. I've asked @"RedEastWood"#47 to take up the overarching role around player growth and retention with the hope of having a single person responsible and accountable for such a role, it will enable us to grow our network better, and our community can begin to grow as a whole.

    Updates to Executive Roles (And non-executive roles)

    Over the coming months there are some changes I will be looking to make to ensure our current executives are best suited for the role, and also to ensure we have people responsible for the roles that I feel the server needs to have covered, there are a number of tweaks and changes I will be looking to make tweaks to the roles and the overall structure of things to try to clear up some roles and responsibilities generally

  • Changes to Skyblock

    Due to some unexpected issues that came up as a result of this we have postponed the move to online mode true.


    The team will continue to work through these complexities and look to make the change as soon as is possible to do so.