The Unoffical Absence Thread 2.0

So the past two weeks have been spent in a hospital as my wife's preeclampsia went into overdrive. Short story, we now have a son, about a month and a half early. Liam was born on Jan 16 and we just got out of the hospital today. Things are going well, but I'm going to be just as scarce as I have been while we start getting into the swing of being a family with a teeny tiny baby.

Congratulations, Arrow, to you and your wife. Welcome to Earth, Liam. :)

I hope your wife and son are recovering well.

Best of luck for everything Arrow. Congrats to you three.

Happy birthday Liam!
Best of everything for you and your family, Arrow!

Best of luck and congratulations Arrow :)

Thanks folks. We're doing pretty well so far.

Congrats, Arrow! I'm sure he's a beautiful baby.

(There better be pics when you get back :p)

Congrats Arrow.

Much belated congratulations man :). Best wishes and good luck.

Sick again, sorry. Back when i'm feeling better.

I'm sorry I've been absent.

I've been going through serious bouts of stress, and it's been hard finding the urge to write. I'm sorry, owners of the threads I'm in.

Congratulations, Arrow.

Yarp?

(Back sort've maybe kinda okay yes fine.)

So yeah, I'm back like. Not entirely sure why I even went away but whatever, I'm back now I guess, and pleasantly surprised to see this place is still as active as it is to boot.

Glad to see you back Jules ::)

I'll have to remain absent for at least another couple of days (I THINK till Wednesday at most, but I can't really promise yet.) due loads of RL work (only to be interrupted by some sleep XD) so, no time for posting and chatting.
I'm very sorry @ all the nice guys I am posting with right now. I'll do my best to be back ASAP. :)

First off I would like to apologize to the people I'm currently RPing with (Dippy and everyone in his thread, Nasat, Pinky) by saying that because of ongoing personal issues in my life that are making writing seem more like work than I would like that I will be taking a momentary leave of absence.

If you need to pester me for any reason (questions about the RP or whatever) pester me via PMs (I'll check them eventually I promise!) or deviantart/tumblr for those that have it.

Have fun

In many ways this is the wrong place to post this, but in one way it is appropriate. After mulling it over I've decided to lower my involvement with CDN, effectively this means I'm going to avoid IRC, and will only try to maintain my main characters, Dippy, Nex and Hadas.

The reason for this can be best explained by an analogy. Imagine you are a new hire of your favorite sports team, you play a few games and it's obvious to all is not well. Sure you pass the ball well enough but you don't run fast enough. So after a particularly hairy game the coach calls you in his office, and says something along the line; "sorry man, but this isn't working out. Your passes are impressive but I need someone who can keep up with the rest of the team. I'm letting you go."

You would be sad. You gave it all and it was not good enough, sure it was a blow to your pride but you would understand and move on, being grateful for the time you had playing for your favorite team. Who knows it would incentivize you to train harder.

Now imagine instead of the above you would be called into the office to be confronted by not just the coach but also the two assistant coaches. You would immediately find yourself much more under attack, now imagine that one of them said not only the above but also; "and due to your lack of speed the rest of the team is more preoccupied with fighting each-other than playing the game." You wouldn't be just sad, you would come out of it hurt, they did not say you fell short, they said that it's your fault that your favorite team is doing bad. This is more than just a blow to your pride, this is a a sucker punch in the emotional gut.

Valiant is being replaced by phpBB, I was sad when I was told, felt attack when I was told by three people instead of one, but there was one phrase that turned it from a blow to my pride to a sucker punch in my gut;

"In fact, I'm willing to say that at least 75% of the forums drama over the last year can be attributed to that loss of private communication."

It turned me from feeling sad, to feeling hurt. Here I was told, by someone that I greatly respect, that not only was I not good enough, but I had seriously hurt this community, I was not just somehow complicit in it, but that I was mainly responsible for all that shit. There was an attempt at mitigation, a weak attempt, and one that could not undo what was said.

When a person creates software he's putting himself out there, many people underestimate it as they just see the outside of it, but there is an union of creativity and engineering going on; solving practical problems, working within restraints, and making thing work in a good way, and so on, it all needs to happen. When you program something that has not been done before, and do so solo, you literally put a little piece of yourself into it. If you look at such a software you can often see how and what the programmer was thinking at the time, because that's what software is on a certain level; a codified thought process.

So when someone tells you that that piece of software is hurting something you care about, (at least enough to write the software in the first place,) it hurts.

I don't want to quit, but I don't want to get hurt again. Hence a compromise; I'll, still post but I'm drastically reducing my involvement, my involvement with this site will be just as another user.

As Assistant Coach #3 and the idiot who opened his fat fucking mouth to make that statement, it falls on me to point out who should primarily be held responsible: The moderators, particularly those who can't keep their mouths shut when they're angry.

For the past several months, I have been responsible for several bannings, suspensions and other disciplinary actions. I have done my damnedest to remain impartial when mediating, but over time I have become less and less willing to force people to air their grievances instead of hiding behind a wall of passive aggressive bullshit. As such, I have grown stressed, angry, and unwilling to allow for extenuating circumstances when considering other people's behavior on the forums.

This is unacceptable behavior for a moderator who deals in day-to-day business on this forum.

Lack of communication is certainly a massive factor for the current state of the boards, make no mistake of that. But the responsibility for that lies squarely with the board's management - particularly with the moderator whose posts make up more than half the "State of CDN" thread, and particularly for the moderator who (intentionally or otherwise) blames the worker for his own failings.

I have not done due diligence in checking for board updates.
I have not communicated the need for these updates, nor attempted to establish any update schedule.
I have not been clear in moderator statements to the board.
I have been neither tactful nor polite, two required characteristics for someone claiming to help other people work through their issues.

Part of the reason I play characters like Spiza, Dwick and Dietrich has to do with my (nonexistent) understanding of poise. I am rash, impulsive, and yet have created a fantastic record of being so bad that the results of my actions somehow turn around and end up putting me on top. The downside to this is that my careless statements very often end up hurting those that I care about, and tonight, thanks to a nonstop marathon of communication-based disasters, I aired my frustrations on you.

At this time, I can only offer you my apologies. As of writing, I had also drafted a note stating my intent to step down as moderator, but I have been told in no small amount by the those moderators present that this in itself is the same sort of rash, impulsive behavior that caused this situation in the first place. I thus implore forum members to seek redress through those moderators more than myself, at least until such time as I manage to pull my head out of Dwick's monumentally cavernous ass and act professionally in my duties again. I may still (undeservedly) be in a place of power within this community of ours, but I will be damned if I have to put people through the sort of wringer you were thrown through at the ass-end of tonight.

I also implore you to place the responsibility for this forum's lack of proper PM system with those ultimately responsible for it: that is, with those administrators demanding work from you while providing zero support in return.

I come here to inform I'll be a week or so away due to having to rely on my host family's graciously donated mobile internet dongle to get online

Well I'll be still away for a week but coming to here after a day of absence to see the forum coder announce his withdrawal and a cornerstone moderator with lots of plots (Dwicks misadventures and Rainfall) under his belt contemplate retirement

What the fuck happened?

What the flying fuck went down in the IRC to lead to this?

The short version:

We (the mod team) have decided that we will, sooner or later, be reverting back to phpBB as the forum format of the board. Since Dippy created and built Valiant, we had to let him know. His analogy is spot on: instead of being one-on-one and straightforward, we did a terrible job of breaking the news, and ended up hurting him. It was never our intention, of course, but the road to hell...

I want to publicly apologize for the way I handled matters, even if it was held outside of the boards. I should have known and done better.

I'm sorry.

Dippy and I have had the chance to talk about this. Things have improved, nobody's angry at anyone, but it's Dippy's call when everything's really smoothed out, and not anyone else's. Dippy's been nothing but an awesome friend, and I can't stress enough how much I appreciate the work he's done for this site, both as a poster and through developing Valiant. I still support Valiant, even though the decision to switch back to phpBB remains. That decision in no way reflects the quality of the work Dippy has done, not to mention the effort and creativity he's put into it. There are still plans for Valiant, and we'll likely make announcements regarding it in the future.

This isn't the place to discuss the phpBB switch, obviously, and some details are still in discussion. Expect a more detailed post sometime in the coming week.

Thank you.