StarDestroyer.Net BBS

At least "Comical Ali" knew he was spouting BS.

The people over at the OS has been going on about 'slander', but IMHO Dork Moose slandered me when he in a response to a poster in Forum Feedback referred to me as being 'aggressive' and 'harassing posters' when I only asked Dork Moose to back up his repeated claims that the Jedi wasn't responsible for the GAR despite the fact that I had posted canon evidence (from the ROTS novelization and Lucas' introduction to Shatterpoint) which showed otherwise. He then had the gall to say that I should "stop being antagonistic to other posters on this site when you are engaged in discussions". I've been a member of the OS forums since 1999, which is longer than Dork Moose has been a member there, and no moderator have ever complained that I've been 'antagonistic'. I've asked one person who ignores canon, one, to back up his claims. So, acting like a troll, baiting and make outright lies about peoples' posting habits is acceptable behaviour for the OS forums if you're a moderator. You're also free to make up moronic rules on the spot. Who runs the OS forums anyway?

Does anyone know any addresses or e-mails for people at LFL who we can take this to? This is clear bullshit, and I think we can really nail DM for this.

Jim Raynor wrote:Does anyone know any addresses or e-mails for people at LFL who we can take this to? This is clear bullshit, and I think we can really nail DM for this.

My past attempts to call Dark Moose's numerous disgressions, including his banning of me on false pretenses, have proved largely unsuccessful, an experience no doubt many have shared. The Admins (Ghent, Bonniegirl, and Pabawan) do have the authority to reign in Mods, but I've never found any way to contact them directly, even if they could be convinced to see reason (which is questionable, as some, at least have been shown to share mindsets with their underlings, or at least apathy for the general affairs of the board and acquiescense to Moderator recommendations). The only official avenue set up by the board is to post a complaint in the Forum Feedback, but as you can see, even if such a complaint gets through, Dark Moose will handle it himself, continue to slander the person who posted it, and not allow them to respond.

I believe that there is some email mechanism for contacting the staff of the website directly, but I can't seem to find it.

The people at LFL consider the forums to be unworthy of serious attention. They obviously set them up as a service to the public but only did a half-assed job of it (just look at the horrible forum format and restrictions that make it markedly inferior in features to 99% of the forums on the Internet). That's why lying little shits like Dork Moose are allowed to run wild; nobody at LFL cares, nor are they particularly concerned that unreasonable behaviour on the part of the forum mods could have any significant impact on their public image. Seriously, Dork Moose could randomly ban 100 people for no reason at all and I'll bet LFL wouldn't care.

Darth Wong wrote:The people at LFL consider the forums to be unworthy of serious attention. They obviously set them up as a service to the public but only did a half-assed job of it (just look at the horrible forum format and restrictions that make it markedly inferior in features to 99% of the forums on the Internet). That's why lying little shits like Dork Moose are allowed to run wild; nobody at LFL cares, nor are they particularly concerned that unreasonable behaviour on the part of the forum mods could have any significant impact on their public image. Seriously, Dork Moose could randomly ban 100 people for no reason at all and I'll bet LFL wouldn't care.

Unfortunately, you are most probably completely correct. Indeed, I just reviewed their terms of use, which make it clear that no one in the company really gives damn about what you do or don't post in the forum, as long as it doesn't make them legally liable for something or infringe on copyright. They delegate authority to non-pay functionaries (the Admins seem to exist only very superficially in the forum, and have different jobs in the company), who are empowered to do as they wish, and are literally within their rights to ban or edit into oblivion anyone who they deem to be "disruptive" or any of a dozen vague discriptors.

I knew how much they cared about the forums when I realized that there are teenagers out there who have set up their own forums with vastly more functionality than theirs. These people can create computerized space battles with thousands of moving objects onscreen and yet they can't make a decent Internet discussion board? Obviously, they just didn't care. The fact that they don't bother to hire real professionals to moderate the forums is even more proof. You can summarize their entire approach to the forums with the word: "whatever".

Darth Wong wrote:Seriously, Dork Moose could randomly ban 100 people for no reason at all and I'll bet LFL wouldn't care.

He probably has already, just not at the same time.

nightmare wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:Seriously, Dork Moose could randomly ban 100 people for no reason at all and I'll bet LFL wouldn't care.

He probably has already, just not at the same time.

Given what we've witnessed (such as him banning a user for simply making a joke about not criticizing KT as I mentioned earlier), I wouldn't be surprised. It's a pity that LFL apparently doesn't care about the forums which to me is somewhat odd.

What about Hyperspace then? Hasn't he banned people from writing blogs and whatnots there? LFL might not care about their forums, but Hyperspace involves money, so surely the customer service must be at least somewhat better.

Jim Raynor wrote:Does anyone know any addresses or e-mails for people at LFL who we can take this to? This is clear bullshit, and I think we can really nail DM for this.

Here's the main address:

P.O. Box 29901, San Francisco, CA 94129

Dooey Jo wrote:What about Hyperspace then? Hasn't he banned people from writing blogs and whatnots there? LFL might not care about their forums, but Hyperspace involves money, so surely the customer service must be at least somewhat better.

It doesn't. I was banned from writing blogs as well as posting in the forum, and he didn't even tell me explicitly what I had done. No doubt, he's done it to others. There's a thread somewhere in HOS about it.

Hell, by their rules, I think Mods can even get Admins to rob people of all of their paid Hyperspace features, rather than just the customary ones, although i've never seen that occur.

Noble Ire wrote:It doesn't. I was banned from writing blogs as well as posting in the forum, and he didn't even tell me explicitly what I had done. No doubt, he's done it to others. There's a thread somewhere in HOS about it.

Hell, by their rules, I think Mods can even get Admins to rob people of all of their paid Hyperspace features, rather than just the customary ones, although i've never seen that occur.

Well, who's runs the place, apart from the admins and mods? Tell them that you demand a refund and why. If enough people does so, it should get their attention.

Dooey Jo wrote:

Noble Ire wrote:It doesn't. I was banned from writing blogs as well as posting in the forum, and he didn't even tell me explicitly what I had done. No doubt, he's done it to others. There's a thread somewhere in HOS about it.

Hell, by their rules, I think Mods can even get Admins to rob people of all of their paid Hyperspace features, rather than just the customary ones, although i've never seen that occur.

Well, who's runs the place, apart from the admins and mods? Tell them that you demand a refund and why. If enough people does so, it should get their attention.

They probably cover their asses with a very restrictive and vaguely worded "terms of service" policy which allows them to ban you and keep your money if you look at them funny.

Seriously, I've had plenty of experience dealing with big quasi-monopolistic companies that don't really give a shit about customer relations, and you can not force them to behave. It's like dealing with Microsoft. Lucasfilm knows they have sole ownership of Star Wars, so they also own the fans. I have a feeling that Mr. Lucas himself would not approve of treating his fans shabbily, or encouraging a balkanization of fandom where one group is allowed to oppress another group, but there's a shitload of layers between him and the people running the official website.

Sonnenburg wrote:I think the true irony began the day the side who kept referring to their opponent's with the name of an Islamic terrorist group turned into the Iraqi Minister of Information. "There are only 6 of them. We have crushed them all. They are just the same people running all over the Internet. All the evidence supports us. They are all crazed misogynists, trolls every last one of them... which is 6, of course."

And that's it's own kind of funny. "Of course you can wage a war with 3 million clones! Look, these six guys have taken over the Internet!"

Hahaha this goes right up there with Sonnenburg's Luke Skywalker/Spider-Man quote

Darth Wong wrote:

Dooey Jo wrote:Well, who's runs the place, apart from the admins and mods? Tell them that you demand a refund and why. If enough people does so, it should get their attention.

They probably cover their asses with a very restrictive and vaguely worded "terms of service" policy which allows them to ban you and keep your money if you look at them funny.

I guess that's very likely... Still, it could be worth a shot if no-one has actually tried it yet.

Seriously, I've had plenty of experience dealing with big quasi-monopolistic companies that don't really give a shit about customer relations, and you can not force them to behave. It's like dealing with Microsoft. Lucasfilm knows they have sole ownership of Star Wars, so they also own the fans. I have a feeling that Mr. Lucas himself would not approve of treating his fans shabbily, or encouraging a balkanization of fandom where one group is allowed to oppress another group, but there's a shitload of layers between him and the people running the official website.

Yeah, it's strange though. What do they gain from being assholes? It certainly wouldn't cost them much to fix these issues, and if they did, DM and his ilk wouldn't even stop buying their products. But not doing anything is giving them a bad reputation, which means that they are going to lose customers.

Dooey Jo wrote:

Seriously, I've had plenty of experience dealing with big quasi-monopolistic companies that don't really give a shit about customer relations, and you can not force them to behave. It's like dealing with Microsoft. Lucasfilm knows they have sole ownership of Star Wars, so they also own the fans. I have a feeling that Mr. Lucas himself would not approve of treating his fans shabbily, or encouraging a balkanization of fandom where one group is allowed to oppress another group, but there's a shitload of layers between him and the people running the official website.

Yeah, it's strange though. What do they gain from being assholes? It certainly wouldn't cost them much to fix these issues, and if they did, DM and his ilk wouldn't even stop buying their products. But not doing anything is giving them a bad reputation, which means that they are going to lose customers.

You are looking at it from the standpoint of a lone human being, rather than that of a big corporation.

What do they have to gain from being assholes? Assholery is usually cheaper, and if you don't lavish attention on something in the first place it won't usually jump up and scream at you due to a lack of it. It would not monetarily cost much to fix these issues, but it will take time and screwing around with customer relations. (As well as that damned unpredictable human factor.) Why bother? The main gullible masses of fans aren't up in arms and raising a gigantic stink, their sales are not plummeting, and at most they lost... what? A few hundered sales? Not a big deal in the long run and not worth the effort needed to keep them. It's more profitable to keep churning out shit that retarded fanboys gobble up than improve that shit and hire respectable authors/webmasters. They have a bottom line to worry about and investors to report back to.

Unless they start taking big hits because of stupidass author antics or random bannings, it won't be a big concern. They might write some memos about it and eventually can Traviss when someone offers to do the same thing cheaper, but by-and-large this is just SOP. 'Tis a production based marketing philosophy, if we make it they will buy it.

Ar-Adunakhor wrote:Why bother? The main gullible masses of fans aren't up in arms and raising a gigantic stink, their sales are not plummeting, and at most they lost... what? A few hundered sales? Not a big deal in the long run and not worth the effort needed to keep them.

Isn't it? A few hundred sales is a few thousand dollars, probably. Fixing the system would take a day at most and cost approximately nothing, while not fixing it is bound to cause similar shitstorms in the future, costing a few thousand dollars more. They wouldn't have to hire any professionals, just make sure that there is a way to deal with rampant mods, and perhaps revoking some of their privileges (who the hell thought that giving mods ban-power would be a good idea anyway). There are lots of functional boards and blogs out there, without the owners having to do anything or actually pay for anything but the servers and the bandwidth.
LFL seems to be a bunch of lazy morons...

For a business the size of Lucasfilm, a few thousand dollars is a rounding error in the bottom line. As long as there is no discernible impact on the overall performance of the franchise, the corporation as a whole is not going to give a shit.

Edi

Dooey Jo wrote:

Ar-Adunakhor wrote:Why bother? The main gullible masses of fans aren't up in arms and raising a gigantic stink, their sales are not plummeting, and at most they lost... what? A few hundered sales? Not a big deal in the long run and not worth the effort needed to keep them.

Isn't it? A few hundred sales is a few thousand dollars, probably. Fixing the system would take a day at most and cost approximately nothing, while not fixing it is bound to cause similar shitstorms in the future, costing a few thousand dollars more. They wouldn't have to hire any professionals, just make sure that there is a way to deal with rampant mods, and perhaps revoking some of their privileges (who the hell thought that giving mods ban-power would be a good idea anyway). There are lots of functional boards and blogs out there, without the owners having to do anything or actually pay for anything but the servers and the bandwidth.
LFL seems to be a bunch of lazy morons...

A few hundred sales netting a few thousand dollars is nothing to a multi-billion dollar corporation. They just don't care. It would take a real deluge of hate-mail and some actual sales loss (rather than the equivalent of a random fluctuation or stock market drop) to make anyone with any power care. It has been mentioned these admins have other things to do in the company, and moderating the forums is not their main job. They rely on free volunteer aid for that, and you get what you pay for. Hiring someone (or several someones) to oversee the forums fulltime is without doubt going to cause more of a stir within the company and be more expensive than losing ~$10k in sales this quarter. And what of firing an author and raising the standards? You are going to have to fund these new authors, and because they are better they will, logically, want more money for the work they do.

Now, you mention that you can just "put in a system to control the mods" or somesuch. Okay, sure. Who is going to figure out what needs to be fixed? Either someone who is directly hired to troubleshoot and could be off saving much more money by reviewing more expensive projects, or the equivalent of a contractor which was hired to review the forums and find solutions. In that situation you lose money by hauling the troubleshooter off of expensive projects, or you lose more hiring the contractor than you would due to the problem. Either way you are paying out the nose for a professional troubleshooter to come in and devise a way to stop the losses. Why do the managers need troubleshooters to figure out the problem? They are managers, not psychics; they have to get a specialist in there and get the reports on what is wrong. This works if your strategy is customer-centric. It is stupid if your strategy is production-centric or need-centric, as it seems to be.

Dooey Jo wrote:

Ar-Adunakhor wrote:Why bother? The main gullible masses of fans aren't up in arms and raising a gigantic stink, their sales are not plummeting, and at most they lost... what? A few hundered sales? Not a big deal in the long run and not worth the effort needed to keep them.

Isn't it? A few hundred sales is a few thousand dollars, probably. Fixing the system would take a day at most and cost approximately nothing, while not fixing it is bound to cause similar shitstorms in the future, costing a few thousand dollars more. They wouldn't have to hire any professionals, just make sure that there is a way to deal with rampant mods, and perhaps revoking some of their privileges (who the hell thought that giving mods ban-power would be a good idea anyway). There are lots of functional boards and blogs out there, without the owners having to do anything or actually pay for anything but the servers and the bandwidth.
LFL seems to be a bunch of lazy morons...

(sigh) this is the same company which took forever and a day to relent to massive fan pressure and finally release the OT on DVD, remember? And then they spit on us by pretending that the classic versions are gone forever even though they could be restored? And then they spit on us again by finally relenting after years of pressure and releasing the classic versions on DVD, but only in a craptacular non-anamorphic low-quality print?

You have to be dreaming if you think they give a shit about pleasing customers beyond doing the bare minimum necessary to keep the profits rolling in. And that's a very bare minimum indeed, for they have a monopoly on one particular product: Star Wars. And the immense cultural footprint and popularity of the franchise means that they can get away with a lot, in much the same way that Hollywood acting prima donnas get away with their bullshit.

For those who claim there is no insults on Saxton as a person, and merely his work, while our "attacks" on KTJelly are "personal" and insulting to the author and not the work, I would like to point out this little gem I dug up on the ToS from 2004 after the release of the OT:ITW, from Kaelis the moderator no less.

Kaelis wrote:Saxton can quite frankly screw off. I don't care about the Super/Executor-class designation. . .

+http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa? ... &start=330

Yes, it's old. But it's sweet and to the point.

What do you suppose ole' Mooseshit would do if I was to go post "Karen Traviss can, quite frankly, screw off" over on TOS. I'd be banned before I could click "post."

Ahhh sweet double standards.

I'm not at all surprised to see that. I wonder what would happen if someone called Odds a sheet of toilet paper over at the OS (hey, if people can call specific novels "rolls of toilet paper", why wouldn't a really poor short "story" be a sheet?).

So I'm reading the New Essential Guide to Droids. Its interesting. Basic summary:

Del Rey Memo wrote: Dear Ms Traviss,

Suck it.


- Dan Wallace

A quick flip through has "millions" of factories, the Confederacy's army is made of "uncountable number" of droids, tens of thousands of one kind of droid guard a single factory, the size of the Confederate army was "unprecedented" and a couple of other bits.

Oh boy.