State of the Lancer Union: part 3
We seem to have gotten to a point where all the flaming has reached it's height. People are now only insulting others purely to get the reaction that they want to see. In the last few days, I myself have been accused of homophobia, Nazi-like dictatorship, paranoia and so on. I have a thick skin but unfortunately Chips and Gowserpaul didn't and so they decided to leave. Chips, a great staffmember, who did great work for the modding community, resigned. A great loss to the team and the community in general. The modding tutorial which would benefit every new modder out there he was writing may never get published now. Gowserpaul, a respected member in everyones view. Hang in there mate!
All the trouble on the forum seems come from Off-Topic. The other forums show no sign of problems. It all started when we told you guys they we were planning on covering Dungeon Siege II. Some people, who didn't even spend time in the other forums, "demanded" that we would choose a space-sim games. We tried to tell you why we wanted to do Dungeon Siege II. Then word came out that Microsoft pays for our bandwidth. In return all they ask us to cover one or two more Microsoft games. They don't tell us which ones, they don't tell us what to write, or what to publish. Some people have problems with Microsoft, but we are dealing with the Games department here. But back to the troubles. People started insulting eachother, and it came to a point where some people left (several reasons). Some people left a message saying that they would never return, some told us that they would stop posting, but just kept reading the posts. Things settled down and the forum progressed without any big problems.
A few days ago, a topic Wilde opened got locked by Finalday. His own judgement told him to lock the topic. A reason was that he thought that people would start to flame eachother as that thread was about homosexuality/politics/religion. Everyone knows that these three components are not well-mixed even in today's world. This is where the new problems began. People started accusing the (entire!) staff of censorship, tabooing and homophobia. People deliberatly started insulting people just to get a reaction. That got bakedpotato to post the thread about the "Zero-Tolerance topic". Maybe not the best move, but that aside. Then suddenly, people who didn't show us for a while made a "comeback", purely for a fact to stir things up even more. Why these people do this, I don't know.
Censorship: appareantly another hot issue these days. You all know that discussions on religion and politics have never been allowed on TLR. And suddenly, people use this as an argument against us! Nobody thought of this as a problem, let's say, a year ago. We gain nothing by applying censorship. As far as I know only a thread that was way out of line (just plain insulting and flaming) has been deleted. We don't ask you to post what we want you to post, we ask you to post what you want, just as long it's not in conflict with our rules. Just as in real life, rules apply. If you break them, the posts get edited, or the thread gets locked where, in real life, you would get a fine for breaking the law.
What I ask from everyone is just to review your actions from the past few days and use your own judgement wether you was out of line or not. All I hope is that things settle down now, and that we can discuss normal things again.
As for an update on the coverage of Dungeon Siege: people behind the scenes are currently working on a portal to acces the site. From that portal, you can choose to go to the different games. Therefore, if you choose for Freelancer, you'll only see the Freelancer content. They want to apply the same concept for the forums. This is all being done in Dot Net Nuke. If someone has knowledge of this technology and would like to help out with the project, please drop me an email!
As for now, I just hope that everyone wants to contribute to this forum in a positive way again. Staff and other users. Thank you.
Vincent "Wizard" Hoogeboom
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The Lancersreactor: where the screenshots are never blurry, and the spammers get publically kicked around.
Wizard
Moderator for The Lancers Reactor
E-mail: [email protected]
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