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Activity pit of doom

Tailsy, I'll share with you the wisdom of the past few minutes: now that I've refreshed the thread and seen all these new posts, I'm kinda just going to sit the rest of this one out on the sidelines and let you do the "light-hearted banter to avert drama" thing. Maybe throw in a hilariously appropriate GIF for good measure. Keep up the good work!

presses hand to your face (your entire face). i have taken the lessons, and now i am graduating from the light-hearted banter program. i can only hope you are proud of me.

in other news, I DON'T MEAN TOILETS toilet brownies would be terrible. unless you're making toilets out of modelling chocolate and just putting them ON the brownies, which would be sort of cute.
 
Right, I'm kind of at work which starts in a few minutes, so I only had time to skim the messages and I'll have to make this brief. But I want to make it clear that the main point of PMing Phantom was to reduce hostility towards people running ASB because if no-one trusts the running team, how is the place going to work? Of course, it seems to have backfired horribly, but it was hardly plotting to cover our asses - I only asked for the opinions of others and, when I didn't really get a yes or no, went ahead and sent the PM. Since it concerned the running team, or a large portion of it, I figured they'd want to see what was being said, but in the next PM Phantom emphasized the private nature of the messages so I stopped there. There seems to be a negative impression of us stemming from BfA and the reasons behind what happened never fully came to light. However, if we posted a thread attempting to clarify things, that would just stir up events long past and probably a whole lot of drama besides. After seeing Phantom's posts, I decided to ask just her, one person, her impression of what happened, to minimize drama... again, which seems to have backfired horribly.

I really apologize for speaking to you in that forum that way, Phantom, and I'm not going to make excuses for that. I'd just like if you could understand that the drama from BfA took a huge toll on us and we're tired of being misunderstood and mistrusted because of it. Whenever those things resurface, we tend to be very snappish about it.
 
Perhaps I'm overstepping my lines here, but I personally am very uncomfortable with the idea that those who were I guess centrally involved with the drama and subsequent shutting down of The Battle of Asber - whoever's fault it was - are now those who are in charge of restoring it, and I am sure I'm not alone here. I am also probably not alone in feeling uncomfortable that someone who declares itself to be "an evil douchebag bastard stalker" and "obnoxious and disliked" is possibly going to be in charge of something that is important to a lot of members and formed a core part of this forum's activity (which is what this thread was actually about, if anyone remembers). Whether this is a 'personal feud' between res and other forum members or not, it is ultimately tied into a major source of conflict within the old ASB, and is certainly relevant to the new one. I am not interested in seeing a new ASB fail because of various 'personal feuds'.

I suppose now is a good time to say that I did not know the discussion about Phantom was happening (I was also not part of The Battle of Asber drama, I didn't even join in), because majority of the forum was hidden from me, and that I do not support or appreciate the kind of behavior that has taken place. Whether or not Phantom was the intended audience, openly gossiping about and mocking a member of the forums is really not the kind of behavior you really want to see from anyone with authority, like an ASB moderator? And the fact that more of this behavior keeps being pulled up from a variety of sources does not really do much to help. Whether you are 'no good at PR' or not, you do need to kind of not be a douchebag if you're going to head ASB, if only because it also goes against the general grain of the forums.


uv said it better than I ever could. I agree and hold similar viewpoint.
 
Well, I had been preparing a quite long, carefully-worded post explaining how I saw the situation and the reasons for my decision, but I got tired of having to use politician-speak to avoid naming names or otherwise blowing the drama open wider. So I'll try to cut things down to something candid and succinct:

I do not like the fact that several of the current ASB moderators were heavily involved with the drama that ultimately closed the league down in the first place. If I had to guess, I like it far, far less than general-you do. When I agreed to hand the reins over to them, I made a bad choice because I did not see any good choices in front of me, and so I picked the option that I thought was most likely to lead, eventually, to a stable and functioning league.

Ultimately, I asked whether anyone was interested in taking over the administration of the league. These are the people that answered. The choice was not exactly "them or no one," but it was damn close.

The way the current group of ASB moderators has handled things does not inspire confidence in their ability to oversee the league, and I agree that the behavior of sreservoir and blazheirio889 in the posts presented is pretty damn awful. I remain unsure what to do about it.

I apologize to the people who are uninvolved with, and probably largely unaware of, all of the drama and who would really just like to play some ASB already. This is definitely a case where a very small number of people are ruining things for everyone else. I also have to apologize to some of the new ASB moderators: some of you have next to nothing to do with this issue and have just gotten dragged into it as a result of your position.

One way or another, I believe that a new ASB league, under any leadership, is in great danger of being taken down by these "personal issues." A lot of people have been hurt, in one way or another, by the fallout of all this drama, and I do not foresee the various people involved being able to reconcile their differences, either. I have tried to restrict the number of people it affected as much as possible by handling it in private as much as possible, but it's looking increasingly like the only way this is going to get resolved is by letting it play out and deciding how to proceed after people have gotten things out of their systems.
 
At this point I'd like to apologize again. The scathing posts towards Phantom were born out of exhausted irritation from having the BfA drama stirred up again, and again (irritation is putting it quite mildly, really). Directing these frustrations at her was an asshole-ish thing to do, and contrary to what the posts presented may indicate, I bear no malice towards her, except for maybe bringing up BfA again - but when people don't understand what happened, I guess it's unavoidable for things to keep coming to the surface. At this point I'm unsure whether to just... continue to try to keep things private, or explain them, or /what/, because no matter what it seems like drama keeps popping up.

At any rate, while apologies are important and all, that's not the main point of this post. As I said earlier, it's vital for leaders to be respected or at least not blatantly disliked by the community they're leading. Unfortunately, it seems res and I are headed towards the "blatantly disliked" section, and as such we've agreed that since ASB is a community thing, we'll step down if the community thinks it will be for the greater good. When Negrek asked if anyone wanted to take over the league, practically no-one else but us stepped up. However, as indicated by this thread, there are people willing to lend a hand, people who were not involved in the heart of the drama. Perhaps then, drama and personal issues will be less relevant and will have less of a chance of bringing the league down.

(as a side note, some people seemed confused about res' bigpost and I can attempt an English-to-English translation about any relevant bits, should anyone require it. Normally I'd just en-en trans it voluntarily, because it does contain context and important explanations, but I'm kind of exhausted (physically /and/ of all this drama) and if no-one's interested, then there's no real point...!)
 
Honestly, I think bring back ASB is, well, bringing back ASB. Perhaps something happened in the past that caused these people not to be the first people for the job (I'm relatively new, so I'm not sure what it is), but hey! They stepped up to the plate to help with it, and I think that's all we've been asking for since the beginning, isn't it? Even if person A) doesn't want person B) to work on ASB, tough luck! They were selected, and whether you like it or not, it seems like the group is at least trying to bring back ASB. I don't understand what all the big fuss is-- you're getting what you want in the long run anyway, even if it isn't under the management that you would prefer. When it's all said and done, ASB will be back, and you'll have gotten what you wanted.

Either that, or I'm extremely ignorant and everything I just said was crap and you're going to hate me for it. Either option is possible.
 
For me a lot of inactivity has to do with whenever the server is busy

Then I just ask for another waiter
 
The cookies thing about how read/unread memory is handled is part of why I'm such a lurker now -- when I do get on here, I make sure that I only do so when I have enough time to scour everything that has happened, because if I take more than a 20-minute break I lose track of all the unread posts.
 
The cookies thing about how read/unread memory is handled is part of why I'm such a lurker now -- when I do get on here, I make sure that I only do so when I have enough time to scour everything that has happened, because if I take more than a 20-minute break I lose track of all the unread posts.

Same. It's such a pain in the ass, honest. :\
 
To be fair, as far as I can tell, it seems to have fixed the "server busy" messages. Haven't really had that problem since the change anyway.
 
The forums are still on the same server. Only the site moved. I do plan to try to move the forums to a new server as well, but I haven't had the chance yet. Whatever you've been noticing, it's not the new server.
 
The server hasn't been busy for ages but people still seem to be leaving :(
 
The server hasn't been busy for ages but people still seem to be leaving :(
The plain truth is that this place is dying, and I don't think anything other than ASB can get it out of that, really. We'll just have to see after ASB starts back up; we can start referring people. I'm sure some old users will come back for that, and some new people will come just to try it. If that doesn't work... then this place is pretty much damned, sorry.

(And by damned, I mean we'll be staying with the current company for quite some time. Most of the new users don't end up sticking around, and they're very few and far between.)
 
It's been that way for a while though. I can't think of anyone major who's left.

There's no way of knowing when or if we will get a new round of permanent members, but it could still happen.
 
I think a lot of people are just busy, or aren't seeing much to respond to of interest.

I haven't really been that inclined to try making new friends of late, and most of the people I like here, I talk to elsewhere, haha. :/ I check here daily but posting's too much effort.
 
It should also be said that the months from february to about may are pretty bad on late high school and college students, and I assume a lot of people on here fall in that category. (I know I do.)
 
One of the reasons the place is dying is because there's nothing to talk about. There was a little more activity for a while when I was posting new threads, but seriously, it was too much for one person to keep coming up with new threads. If others helped out, just making a thread here and there we might be able to keep the place limping along for a while.
 
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