Moderation Discussion

I’m posting my view on this here after seeing comments from some people about threads not being locked vs. being locked.

In real life, what you say cannot be unsaid: you say it, and it’s out there forever. You can apologize for it and make amends, but what you said will always be out there. My view is that the Internet is much the same. When you make a post, that post is forever. You should not be allowed to go back and remove it or edit it (barring adding information, slight clarifications, and fixing language errors). Nor should moderators go and delete a post simply because it is too “flamy” or too “off topic”.

In the COBBS days, there were flamewars that would continue on for 15 pages of highly personal attacks before the administrator would even offer a warning to the people involved. Yet now, people are sending angry messages to moderators because of a single inflammatory post?

Arguments happen, both in real-life and online. Often it is by looking back at those arguments that we are able to make better judgements in the future. By removing those arguments, you are effectively rewriting history. I’m fairly sure we would all agree that is a very bad idea!

I do understand situations such as the MOUL Forums, where Cyan must maintain a policy in order to keep their future ventures open. While I find the moderation there oppressive and inconsistent, I am able to at least understand what rules the moderators were trying to follow.

People have probably noticed that one of my preferred method of presenting argument is with raw chatlogs. This gives people the chance to make their own decisions and make up their own minds about what happened. By keeping the flamewar threads, we allow people to do the same thing, and form their own opinions about the issues.

Opinions? Please discuss…

CyanChat 1.4 for Pidgin

Haven’t worked on this for a while, and since it’s mostly complete I hadn’t made any large changes. However, there are always the small annoying glitches that you keep promising to fix and never actually do. Hence, we have a new release of pidgin-cyanchat! :D

Major new features include:

• /rot13 command to “encrypt” chat
• !version now reports “libpurple” rather than “Pidgin”
• Fixes for pipe characters in messages
• Fixes for > and < in chat messages
• The default port has been changed to the main server (1812)

The full changelog is available at Google Code.

A huge thanks to Chucker for working on an Adium extension using this plugin, and thanks to vaaht for testing and reporting the !version issue.

pidgin-cyanchat: Go forth and download. (Windows installer, and Debian installer for 32 and 64 bit)

Lag in Uru

There has been a lot of discussion about lag recently, with many people blaming the servers. Allow me to quote a chat that I found with chip. For those who do not remember/know, chip was an intern at Cyan, and he was ultimately the one who worked on the Untìl Uru servers and released them to the public.

<chip> oh man, can we please start arguing about plasma again
<chip> the problemm isn’t plasma2.0 or the plNetCore
<chip> its the fucking physics crap
<chip> it was sloooow
<chip> you put like 30 people on the same screen
<chip> it just goes to all shit
<chip> * same area
<chip> I learned lots at cyan. mostly that you can optimize the backend servers all you want
<chip> but in the end
<chip> a shitty client (in this case in c++ and python)
<chip> can still make the whole thing suck

So there you have it, the servers are not the problem. There were a number of improvements during MOUL (including removing the cones entirely), but for lag to disappear entirely will be a client-side issue and has nothing to do with the servers.