Man it takes a bit to get me mad....

I rarely shoot from the hip but in this instance I am going to, but before I do I want to say that this is not directed specifically at anyone.. so if I offend some of the "detractors" then it is not aimed as a personal attack, however if the cap fits then wear it.

I have spent the better part of 18 months on this site and I have "known" baked via msn for about 12 months of that... now take a look at history.. and tell me if you think this site would still be here if not for baked... IT WOULD NOT.. it would be a distant memory and freelancer would be a game that "Freelancer, yeah I used to play that..." I wonder sometimes if he has a life away from TLR he spends so much time working on keeping the site up and running he must be a couple of people.. AND HE DOES IT ALL FOR NO PAY.. not one red cent, zip... nothing... Plus, he gets hundreds of emails a week, (and so far as I know answers all of them), plus mods to test, posts to make, news items etc..all on a bunch of code that has so many holes in it you could fly a jumbo jet through them, so I figure he has a right to a ***** now and then I'm surprised he doesnt ***** more.. but he is not only a nice guy, he is one of the hardest workers I know.. so lets support his efforts with some kind words, not whining about.. "I dont like this, you should do this, can ya make this better/nicer/easier to load..." etc et al

I have a broadband connection, but suffer from the "tyranny of distance" living in Australia I doubt if I could get much further away and sometimes depending on ping it takes several minutes to load the news page.. but I put up with it cause I love Freelancer and this is easily the best site I have ever seen.

Now I have a cure... lets tell him to take a bloody holiday .. and then watch this site degenerate into an infighting, spamming, flaming match, crap situation that I have seen so many times in the past.

Grrr... I could go on and on about this...., this type of whining is bull****, grow up.. If you dont like it.. dont visit.. we'll be better off without you...

Harrier.

Edit....note to other moderators, let's leave this thread open.... please...

Edited by - harrier on 12/3/2004 6:16:56 PM

You guys Cracks me up..... it takes hummm less then 2sec to load up the news on lancers reacttor after a fresh start... Someone said he had cable and it took a while even to load ? Get yoursefl a real cable connection not the cheapest that is barely faster then those DSL anyway... We re approching time with Optical fibres connections will enter homes... About time you get along with some new technologies... Lancer's Reactor always been ahead with new mods and stuff for our game... Leave it that way... They are doing a GREAT JOB and you guys are complaining about END USERS problems... IT IS YOUR PROBLEM if you cant load it quick... I and MANY OF US don't have any problems at all loading this site news's section so please, leave our guys from Lancer's alone with this stupid complaints. All you do is putting a negative sight on the fabulous job those guys are doing here ....


KEEP GOING WITH THE GREAT JOB LANCERS.... Don't listen to those little babies crying!

i'll fix the news, or try to.

im staying out of this, but if baked is overbaked with work, i'll have a look at the coding for the news section, someone email me if they want the help.

incidentally. who died and made you admins martyrs, you never think about asking for help. There ARE website coders who post on the site that would be more than happy to assist, they just werent asked. a "help wanted" sign on the frontpage could get a lot of people volunteering for your free site. alot of work on 2 people is a lot of work, spread the load, lighten the burden.

im just saying, i'll come out of retirement to have a sniff at your news system. dont know if i can fix it but i'll take a look. cant hurt can it. Email me though with your thoughts, i dont come round here often enough to keep up to date on the forums.

EDIT:
WHile we're on the subject as well, i just saved the front page and opened up the folder, 100+ images, 3.72 megs worth in all. Some of us dont have cable, and there's sig limits in the forums, hmmm.


Seek the truth
Behold the truth
Reveal the truth
That is the law and the whole of the law

Edited by - Arcon on 12/3/2004 7:19:09 PM

What do FL fansite admins have against people? WHY are we always picked on?

"To the minor problems of Bretonia and Kusari that keep us all sane."

Admins and Mods are not against people. They arn't apreciated sometimes, and that lets tempers out a little and some venting. Growing pains mainly, but things will settle down soon.

First off... Pinger's remarks aside... this is not the "bash BP" thread. I came into this to argue for a change of policy which would help BP & E and TLR in general, not hurt them.

...and for the record, I don't mind if you vent, or if it's directed my way. I don't take any of this very personally. I wasn't out to hurt BP's feelings in the first place. I can't un-say what I've said, and quite frankly, I don't think that what I've said is inaccurate or unfair- and I didn't mention BP's name once- not even ONCE... in a way that suggested that he's not a hard-working person who's put his heart and soul into things.

But, as I pointed out, at great length... I think BP should do a lot less work , not more. And the website should be structured to make that possible.

And if he needs help to figure out how to do that... I was hoping that my suggested changes would get the ball rolling. I'm not here to re-fight the decision to show DS news... those of us who disagreed lost that battle (in most cases, before we were even aware that it was occuring- I was totally ignorant at the time). So, as that decision has been made, we should all live with those consequences, whether we like them or not. So... please... let's not get sidetracked by what happened in the past. Let's think about the future.

My first post was pointing out Reality, which is that the News is poorly-structured and wastes bandwidth like there aren't consequences. Which I think is beyond argument.

As our multiple attempts to measure the full bandwidth used have all shown, it's about 4 MB of data for today's News alone. For a FRONT END.

I get the News plenty fast, just like most other cable/T1 users- but not everybody's on cable. This isn't about whether or not I'd like to shave a second or two off of my view of the News. It's about DSL users, Dialup users... and bandwidth costs. Which even M$ has to worry about.

It's not "modern" to waste bandwidth like the front end currently does. It's bad policy.

You don't see Yahoo throwing out megabytes... or Google... or counter-strike.net (whose MB makes TLR's look teeny-tiny, in terms of traffic and userbase), or any of the Planet 'sites, or... do I need to go on? So we're talking about facts here, not opinions- good design principles remain good design principles. And wasting bandwidth is always bad design. It's not "modern" to load up 500KB of Flash to do the same job as a 5KB GIF file... it's stupid.

So at some point or another, the front-end needs to be recoded, and I think that the News editorial policies should be changed. I said that with full knowledge of what that means- I have read the other posts describing Bargib's somewhat organic coding techniques, and how the current 'site maintainers have had to wade through lots of code that they don't understand, just to make small changes. So it's probably time to start from scratch. If the current DB can be ported, great... if not, too bad. If the front end can be recoded in situ, then great... if not, too bad.

But for now... the answer is pretty simple. Screenies and other visuals should be restricted to the Download pages of the mods. BP should not quote the entirity of a mod's Blurb when they submit News- just a synopsis. The rest of it should be relegated to the Download page for the mod in question. And older versions of a Mod should be taken down when newer versions are put up... thus keeping the DB clean. It's just that simple. This set of reforms would cut bandwidth wastage to maybe a hundredth of what's going on now, be easier for BP to edit, and would keep the Download DB cleaner.... and this is controversial? Sigh.

I have never, ever said that I think that taking care of this would be easy, and I offered to help in the way that I'm qualified best to do so- as a glorified librarian, removing old junk from the download DB so that we only have the latest versions of X, Y and Z mods, among other things. My offer is, and will remain, open- I will happily take time away from my life and my mod to help out TLR. Because it needs doing. Because I care about the health of the 'site. I'm here a lot, too- and I help out where I can, and write tutorials, and distribute my mod. I'm not just a whiny leech who doesn't do anything... I've been trying to help the latest crop of newbies get to the point where they'll make mods... which in turn will help attract people to this 'site. So I'm not trying to hurt anybody here... just pointing out the facts, and offering my opinions (backed by clear examples) about what could be done.

Edited by - Argh on 12/4/2004 3:11:07 AM

I'll address a few of your comments and questions.
I wasn't going to bother because most of you don't know me personally and don't know what you're talking about anyway so I just let it go but there are a few things.

First for Neo_Kuja
Hey...first off I never said "I get no thanks" so don't put words in that I didn't say...I don't expect or want thanks I never asked for it but your twisting what I said around...and that's putting it politely.

What I did say is "I'm really getting sick of the moaning and groaning"
and "All I see is the complaints but nothing in the way of hey, I appreciate it"
Out of the 1000 post that I've done only about 5 people have said...
Hey I appreciate the effort you put into posting my mod or utility...and taking the time to fix the bugs, take the screenshots, and giving up so much of your free time to make this site interesting and worth coming to...I realize how much time it takes to make some of the mods, I made one myself but had to stop working on it when I accepted the offer to join the TLR staff. So I know how much time and effort you put into giving some enjoyment to others.

The thing that bothered me was a few people have a problem with something and instead of sending me an email like they should...no, they post it in a public Forum and make it look like I don't care...well you're wrong I do care or I wouldn't be here...I have a life, fact is I have an excellent wife and am lucky enough to have a nice house and a business of my own but I worked for it.

We are doing the best we can to improve things...spending way to much of our free time...that's time I could be enjoying myself after putting in 10 to 12 hours a day at my real job and then working on the things for the site.

The fact is I did ask people on dial up if the front page takes longer to load, I'm not ignoring the fact that it takes a few seconds to load but I was trying to make it more interesting. Besides if you come here everyday as some do everything should be on your harddrive and be loading from there.

As far as some offering help it is appreciated and I will talk to Eraser about it and see what his thoughts are on either sending the code or giving access to the server but that is a hard decision because it is not our server.

We are adding more content to the site for people that like to play games because we feel we can offer more. And we will keep adding more as new games become available including Freelancer 2 if (hopefully) it is in development.

If you have a problem with something and if it's something where it makes it seem like I don't care send me an email and we'll see if we can work it out.

__Thanks! from bp__

@BP:

First off... I would've just stuck with email, but I felt like this was something that needed to be talked about in public, and once my first post was up... well, this has kind've snowballed. I didn't chime in with Pinger to attack you or your conduct, but so that everybody could get a word in edgewise, if they felt like bothering. Which, in retrospect, looks like a bad choice, as most of the return comments haven't been all that constructive- they've been either pro or anti-BP, which is not what I was intending

Feel free to email me if you want to talk about strategies for cleaning up the Mod downloads DB... at the very least, I can take a good long look and suggest what I think might be done there, and how to go about it... and then if you want to do it, you can take a look at what I'm suggesting... which isn't quite the same as just letting me get it done, but is fraught with fewer negative consequences, as then it's being done by authorized people, not just lil' ol' me

Cleaning up the MB DB... is an almost Herculean task, and as Chips remarked at one point, not one that's likely to happen. Which is understandable. So I don't think it should even get worried about.

And changing the News format is mainly an editorial choice- if you don't like the idea of the News being Plain-Jane on the Front End... and M$ doesn't mind the costs of the bandwidth... well, that's up to you. I just put my little header graphics into my fake News, though... and it actually looks OK, at least to me... go to the previous page and see what I did there... needs work still, but it's colorful, readable and informative, imho.

I think that the News could be both easier to edit and lower-bandwidth... without hurting anybody. Not that people wouldn't whine- change always brings whining, and you can't please everybody, ever

But they'd still get the information they're interested in, and they'd still be able to d/l the game mods that are the primary draw of the website. And the 'site wouldn't be in danger of hitting its bandwidth caps, ever again, unless 'site traffic really soared... which would mean that the other big changes were having their desired effect