steve, i agree with you that shockman needs to state that he's going to behave, but there's more to it than that- he needs to understand what he did that caused the problem in the first place and lose the self-centered attitude.
reading that thread right there, he's still being an obnoxious asshole. this is still the guy who was posting here under a fake account with a new set of IP's less than two weeks ago. why do you want to do him any favors? why does the subject of shockman being let back in have to constantly, and i mean constantly be a hot topic?
if the guy could just sit down, shut up, and prove himself to be a productive member of the community for a few months it would go 10x farther making a good impression than his constant obnoxious and aggressive attempts to get back in to VPF. he's been told this by bob and other fairly neutral parties over and over again and he still refuses to listen and understand.
furthermore, despite the best intentions you can't force people to change. whenever we work with a difficult member we always hope that we can encourage them through either diplomacy or the D/A system to alter their behavior enough to fit in, but if they refuse to change then it's not our problem. the staff here spent 10x more effort than should ever have been spent on shockman, and he's no longer our problem. we owe him absolutely nothing, it's 100% clear that we did the right thing for the community, and frankly i want my wasted time back.
until the day he realises that he's the source of his own problems in the VP scene, then nothing has changed.
feel free to reprint this post at PN- i doubt it will do any good, but at least it will be clear that another staffer replied to your idea.
why does the subject of shockman being let back in have to constantly, and i mean constantly be a hot topic?
StevOz said:Well I did air your case at VPF, seems you've burnt all your bridges Shockman, can't say I'm surprised. Anyhows for the record, I can't restore your account at VPF, only an Admin has those powers, also I have never lied to you.
Here is the reply...
steve, i agree with you that shockman needs to state that he's going to behave, but there's more to it than that- he needs to understand what he did that caused the problem in the first place and lose the self-centered attitude.
reading that thread right there, he's still being an obnoxious asshole. this is still the guy who was posting here under a fake account with a new set of IP's less than two weeks ago. why do you want to do him any favors? why does the subject of shockman being let back in have to constantly, and i mean constantly be a hot topic?
if the guy could just sit down, shut up, and prove himself to be a productive member of the community for a few months it would go 10x farther making a good impression than his constant obnoxious and aggressive attempts to get back in to VPF. he's been told this by bob and other fairly neutral parties over and over again and he still refuses to listen and understand.
furthermore, despite the best intentions you can't force people to change. whenever we work with a difficult member we always hope that we can encourage them through either diplomacy or the D/A system to alter their behavior enough to fit in, but if they refuse to change then it's not our problem. the staff here spent 10x more effort than should ever have been spent on shockman, and he's no longer our problem. we owe him absolutely nothing, it's 100% clear that we did the right thing for the community, and frankly i want my wasted time back.
until the day he realises that he's the source of his own problems in the VP scene, then nothing has changed.
feel free to reprint this post at PN- i doubt it will do any good, but at least it will be clear that another staffer replied to your idea.
.....Just when I thought the evil shockman was gone
Can this pinhead be removed.....?steve, i agree with you that shockman needs to state that he's going to behave, but there's more to it than that- he needs to understand what he did that caused the problem in the first place and lose the self-centered attitude.
reading that thread right there, he's still being an obnoxious asshole. this is still the guy who was posting here under a fake account with a new set of IP's less than two weeks ago. why do you want to do him any favors? why does the subject of shockman being let back in have to constantly, and i mean constantly be a hot topic?
if the guy could just sit down, shut up, and prove himself to be a productive member of the community for a few months it would go 10x farther making a good impression than his constant obnoxious and aggressive attempts to get back in to VPF. he's been told this by bob and other fairly neutral parties over and over again and he still refuses to listen and understand.
furthermore, despite the best intentions you can't force people to change. whenever we work with a difficult member we always hope that we can encourage them through either diplomacy or the D/A system to alter their behavior enough to fit in, but if they refuse to change then it's not our problem. the staff here spent 10x more effort than should ever have been spent on shockman, and he's no longer our problem. we owe him absolutely nothing, it's 100% clear that we did the right thing for the community, and frankly i want my wasted time back.
until the day he realises that he's the source of his own problems in the VP scene, then nothing has changed.
feel free to reprint this post at PN- i doubt it will do any good, but at least it will be clear that another staffer replied to your idea.
Times change everywhere but vpf, i think....Can this pinhead be removed.....?
if the guy could just sit down, shut up, and prove himself to be a productive member of the community for a few months it would go 10x farther making a good impression
Just saving this for after work.this thread is rough for me to watch because pretty-much everyone who's posted so far is a net friend of mine. and i really wish this thread hadn't have veered onto the issue of the 2nd staff, but as long as it has:
> Don't make me laugh Kinsey.... here's the reality check for you: the
> "staff" that you were part of was an utter embarrassment.
> That staff basically divided the community in two....and it took
> years to get it back on track.
you might be surprised, kristian.
the first thing i did when i joined the staff around a year ago was to dive into the staff threads. i started reading them like i was a 12-year old devouring my very first encylopedia set. after years and years of speculation it was fascinating to see what really happened behind the scenes. and i must admit that one of the reasons i was on such a mission was because i was looking for a few villains- people who had abused their staff privileges and caused great harm to the scene back in late 2002-early 2003. i wanted to know once and for all who had caused the greatest harm to this scene so i could compare it against the likely suspects myself and others had speculated about for years.
but the funny thing is, the more i read the more ambivalent i became. as i read their posts i sank into these people's shoes and thought "yea, i can see why they thought this and said that and made such-and-such decision." it occured to me that these were ordinary people, just fellow pinball players volunteering and trying their best to deal with some very trying circumstances. when nicky special and later pacdude hit the scene with their powerful personalities, nobody that i could see, member or staffer, really knew how to deal with them from an even-handed perspective. for 99% of people it was basically either love or hate them, so to speak, and both of those people challenged everyone to think of the whole VP scene in far more complex terms than they were ready to at the time. because back in 2001-2002 it seemed simple and straightforward that VP was a revolutionary and free product (literally a godsend) and that anyone who loved pinball would contribute harmoniously to it's development in whatever way they could. it was a feel-good time of exciting breakthroughs, but as we can see in hindsight that was a naive way of framing things, even though i bet 99% of us felt that way at the time.
but i digress. so back to my process of reading the staff threads...
as for the staffers, i concluded that a couple of them lacked patience and lacked the natural qualities to capably perform forum moderation duties well. in a perfect world they probably shouldn't have been 'hired', but at the time it was all an amateur project anyway, starting at the top with AJ who hosts this forum to randy who coded the collection of routines that turned into VP that later became allied with the WPCMAME project. so from the top to the bottom it was pretty-much complete amateurs at this kind of thing, which we still feel the effects of today i should add. and webforums were still a new phenomenom- not even longtime BBS veterans such as myself and others probably realised the full implications of how webforums were going to work and the complications they were going to create. and furthermore there was no official site for VP other than randydavis.com and perhaps pinmame.com. VPF never was the official forums for VP, and the only reason it's perceived that way is because of the traffic. and because of that same traffic, VPF has become the place where randy has felt comfortable posting his (occasional) updates as well as the ultrapin folks posting theirs. but this place is only still here because of the traffic, and at the time back in 2002 nobody knew what the future would hold and knew whether this place would still be around in a year's time, much less four years time. so my point is, everyone from top to bottom to those in-between were all amateur participants in this scene. and i think it's good to remember that. at least if this whole operation was professional then you could point to people you you thought scewed up the scene and say "they took the money and what's worse, did great damage."
again i digress, so getting back to those staff threads i was reading...
in the end i thought there were a couple of people who didn't belong on staff. not malicious people- they simply didn't belong on staff. as for the rest, i think they made a few mistakes along the way and i don't doubt that those mistakes pissed off and inconvenienced other people. i was one of those people in fact. at the time i became angry and outraged. but in all fairness i see our current staff as having regularly made mistakes since the day we got on board. a couple people are feeling angry and outraged at us, including shockman who is the indirect subject of this thread. shockman posts almost every day at PN about the injustices we've done him and how we've lied to him and spoiled VP for him and so forth. and make no mistake, that sits badly with me. i feel like if i had handled things differently then i could have appeased shockman and a couple other people. i second-guess myself all the time and imagine that if i had only unlocked the puzzle and said the right words at the right time we could all be cohabitating peacefully and harmoniously right here at VPF and threads like this need never have been started. and yet for all my idealism and all my insecurity the age-old fact "you can't please everyone" has slapped me in the face again and again. whether it's my fellow staffers who get pissed at me for being too leniant or too hard on someone, to regular members who feel the same, to people we've come down hard on as a staff who naturally feel that VPF is a fascist dictatorship who's out to get them, there is always someone, somewhere who is going to be pissed at me personally, at us as a staff, at a bloc of users who was against them, or just at the whole damn site or the whole damn scene. our society does not really value wise men and wise sayings anymore, but somewhere out there exists a wise old man saying the wise old saying "it's inevitable" and if only i had paid attention to him i wouldn't have to torture myself with what-ifs.
but for the last time , let me get back to the staff threads i was reading...
about kinsey specifically, despite all the slings and arrows she took, she was one of the people whose work behind the scenes impressed me. she was the one who came up with the staff process and record-keeping, something that continues to this day. she learned a lot about how the site works and is still a useful resource when we admins need help with something. in thread-after-thread i saw her initiate site issues and lead the staff towards productive resolutions. yes "productive resolutions" sounds like corporate-speak, but i saw it happen again and again and the end result was to improve the site. and to be fair i also know that kinsey made some mistakes. there was no need to read staff threads to determine that- it was clear from public statements. but i'd like to stress that overall, i thought she was a very good staffperson who did a lot to improve the way VPF worked. and i wish i could take you all on a tour of her staff threads to point this out and the fact that i thought she did very well, but unfortunately there's probably no way to easily do that, so all i can communicate is my impression. hope you can trust me on that, at least somewhat.
> Apocalypse and others did their best
> to get rid of the bozos....and restore
> at least some kind of sense and
> lunacy here.
i agree- apoc and destruk and later loaf who i thought was the 'great communicator'. in fact if loaf was ready to return full-time right now i would gladly hand him my status as "head of the staff". unlike most of us he has the training and experience to deal with conflict resolution which the rest of us just have to figure out as we go along. yea, that's a lot of sickening hero worship, but i happen to believe it.
anyway, personally i'll just interject that i thought you (kristian) and bob did not deserve to be banned or RO'd as the case may be and i still resent the fact that those things happened for what i thought were such trivial reasons. i'm glad i founded the semi-private VPFL group at the time because i saw injustice being done and that i had to do my best to remedy it. and yet in the end reading those staff threads, i sort of understand why those things happened at the time. i don't agree with the actions but i can understand the stress. and i believe the stress produced some frustrated individuals who did what they thought they had to do in order to protect the site, as petty as that might sound. but bottom line i was very pleased when you were both allowed back into this site. if not i would prolly still be angry.
i guess the last thing i'd like to say is that i really resent the fact that various people have been villified in this scene. in other words, the idea of certain users or staff-members who screwed things up for everyone. personally i can count on one hand the number of people who i thought came into this scene to mess with it and bring it down. just about everyone else i know and have seen is here because they enjoy pinball, VP, and the scene and want the best for all three. being silly humans they have different, sometimes violently different, ideas about what is best for these three things, but i believe their intentions are decent. so i ask you to respect that and to take the frustrations you have with other people in this scene with a grain of salt for that reason.
i believe nobody here is a monster, each person deserves their dignity, and that people could find better ways to express their displeasure with each other than by slamming them publically.
thank you for reading this long-ass post,
nic
in the end i thought there were a couple of people who didn't belong on staff. not malicious people- they simply didn't belong on staff. as for the rest, i think they made a few mistakes along the way and i don't doubt that those mistakes pissed off and inconvenienced other people. i was one of those people in fact. at the time i became angry and outraged. but in all fairness i see our current staff as having regularly made mistakes since the day we got on board. a couple people are feeling angry and outraged at us, including shockman who is the indirect subject of this thread. shockman posts almost every day at PN about the injustices we've done him and how we've lied to him and spoiled VP for him and so forth. and make no mistake, that sits badly with me. i feel like if i had handled things differently then i could have appeased shockman and a couple other people. i second-guess myself all the time and imagine that if i had only unlocked the puzzle and said the right words at the right time we could all be cohabitating peacefully and harmoniously right here at VPF and threads like this need never have been started. and yet for all my idealism and all my insecurity the age-old fact "you can't please everyone" has slapped me in the face again and again. whether it's my fellow staffers who get pissed at me for being too leniant or too hard on someone, to regular members who feel the same, to people we've come down hard on as a staff who naturally feel that VPF is a fascist dictatorship who's out to get them, there is always someone, somewhere who is going to be pissed at me personally, at us as a staff, at a bloc of users who was against them, or just at the whole damn site or the whole damn scene. our society does not really value wise men and wise sayings anymore, but somewhere out there exists a wise old man saying the wise old saying "it's inevitable" and if only i had paid attention to him i wouldn't have to torture myself with what-ifs.
forcefully asking for the D/As a past staff handed out is not holding to the past Ron, It's an attempt to get past the past. Don't you think?
Shockman said:I have given up on VPF. They WILL die liars and with what is mine. I am going to sell tables with roms on e-bay now, but each one is going to be a mod., and better than the originals and locked. It will be the best package with the fewest tables at the highest price and there is nothing that anyone can do about it because no one will own anything I sell.