Site rules update and staff electing.

Started by DJ Omnimaga, February 28, 2009, 02:37:48 AM

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DJ_Omnimaga

Due to the recent fights on the forums that occured everyday, I decided to update the forum rules. Unfortunately I cannot satisfy everyone, but I do run this site and I try to do my best to handle things as correctly as I can. However I am not perfect and because I am the sole moderator, it is even harder as I am one single person to decide and one single person to receive the flood of criticisms if bad decisions are taken. This is why, as written at the end of this news article, I am electing new staff.

From now on, any public fighting or arguments will be deleted. If someone baits you just try to solve it via PM. I understand you may feel like retaliating but let's not pollute the public boards with it. TIMGUL is meant to be a discussion environment free of any hostility. However, with such a large userbase it's impossible that everyone will get along with each others and arguments might occur. However, public fighting gives TIMGUL a bad name, a reputation of an hostile site when it's not. New members will be scared of joining and old members will leave or be tempted to get into the fight to try solving it, which will not work. Keep your stuff via private message, chat or e-mail. I don't think it should be that hard to do and at the same time you will not risk of getting a bad reputation toward other members who are less active and happen to see the fight. Also, remember that the other person may not be trying to sound harsh; everyone has their way of saying stuff. Public fights will be deleted. Name calling as well as deliberate troublemaking (for example, you decide one day to send hate mail to a member for no reason, don't like him much or because you don't like his songs, that's not allowed and the other member is free to report the PM to a moderator) will lead to a warning, then a 7 day suspension, then ban.

So again, if you have a personal problem with a member, please resolve it in private. If a member is harrassing you, bullying you or trying to start fights with you for no reason and you can't resolve it, report the message to a moderator for abuse. Deliberate troublemaking will still not be tolerated. In the future, we may also have a forum feature allowing individual users to ignore certain users

Also remember we don't want anyone to leave and we are all here to share music together, after all. Some wants to get better at making music, some people do it as form of expression, some people just for fun and some people to get input. Nobody comes here to deliberately cause trouble. We are just all different people who use, used or are planning to use the same music softwares and want to show what can be done with it, use them because we are more comfortable with them or express ourselves.

From now on, I would prefer if we started back one week ago, as things were before the 6 MB to 20 MB cap increase. All bans were lifted and the past week fighting posts will be moved to the trash bin. All warnings members received are now reset, too. We do hope that members will continue cooperating to make TIMGUL remain a good place and not get a reputation of hostile community.

For those who are willing to be a moderator of TIMGUL forums, you can apply in the following thread:
http://www.mtv-music-generator.com/index.php?topic=1428.0

All applications will be retained and Sunday or Monday the elections will start in a poll form. The 4 staff with the highest amount of vote will be promoted to staff next Wednesday.

Fear 2 Stop®

Fear 2 Stop are: Billy Castillo (me), Dana Castillo (my wife) Raymond Proseus (best friend)http://www.soundclick.com/fear2stop

Casper AudioGhost

hello.just a qiuck apology.i'm sorry i got too personal and broke the rules.want to live in peace,be helpful and post music.thank you for unbanning me omni and to all i apologize
RIP Marna Patterson (1947-2009) i love you mom,my music is for you:)
my net label http://www.archive.org/details/white-trash-poptronica
www.showcaseyourmusic.com/audioghost 57 tracks
www.myspace.com/audioghost
www.jamwave.com/audioghost
www.youtube.com/casperr37
dj on http://chat.paltalk.com/g2/paltalk/1352831106

DJ Ryznup

YES!  ;D
Love the new site rules.

I completely agree with the choice to delete all the public fights, because I felt that it would be even harder for the members here to forget about them and move on as long as they remained in the forums for everyone to see. I totally agree that if you have a problem with a member or anyone for that matter, you should take it up with them personally and try to solve instead of doing it publicly.

While I think having disagreements are good for individual growth among members and help the community become better. Public fights do nothing but hurt a communities growth. Because the members fight, other members get involved or give their opinions on the matter to try to help, words and intentions are misjudged, a line is drawn in the middle of the community as it is divided and people on both sides of the divide who weren't a part of the original disagreement are standing there looking at the opposite side confused about what just happened and how they got where they are. Then people who were interested in the community watch as its all going down and are discouraged from joining. Because to be honest, people like watching drama unfold but nobody wants to be a part of it. Its kind of like watching a train wreck, while its horrific to watch, you just can't seem to look away from it, and no one in their right mind would jump on that train while its happening.

I'm glad to see this update, as it now seems these rules will help the community get back on track(no pun intended ;)).
http://www.youtube.com/user/Ryznup

"Limits may hinder us, but they also bring out our creativity."

DJ_Omnimaga

actually if a fight occured, then it was resolved then people moved on it would have not been as bad, but now it was like every day. I think constant fights in public really hurts a forum image. Also, the members who fight may be both seen as people who are rude regulary. I think this won't help anyone, which is why it is better if it is solved in private. if I recall correctly, there are other forums which have rules saying that problems between members should be solved in private, too.

That said, I still need to copy the rules mentionned in this news in the registration aggrement box and the rules tab, though. As for an ignore feature I found a SMF hack that does it, but unfortunately it's for SMF 1.13 and older, so we're really forced to wait until 2.0.  Hopefully TIMGUL should be much easier to upgrade than Omnimaga, considering I am using the default forum skin and on Omnimaga I use a custom one

Fear 2 Stop®

Huh? I thought you ARE Omnimaga...?

I'm confused....
Fear 2 Stop are: Billy Castillo (me), Dana Castillo (my wife) Raymond Proseus (best friend)http://www.soundclick.com/fear2stop

DJ_Omnimaga

#6
I am, but I own another forum of the same name:

http://www.omnimaga.org

Omnimaga existed since September 2001, except it only got a forums in 2004 (which didn't worked, though, since the site was not known enough yet and the other team members were no longer involved in calculator stuff. I reopened a forum in 2005, which worked, but then troublemakers came and nearly brainwashed my entire staff to side with them so I gave up on the site. A small group of people then convinced me to restart a temporary board and request a backup of the old site (from Invisionfree), but their backup services has been interrupted since 2006 so the backup never came. We got spammed to death (I got like 200 PMs from a member saying We are Legion, We do not forget, We do not forgive, We Are Anonymous, Expect Us, and the entire board got filled with these, including every member's inbox. I had to disable registrations on the forums completly as well as make the IRC channel private. The spam attack, including 3 other ones, were from the actual troublemakers, so my old staff finally saw they were really troublemakers, and came back, but the site backup wasnt coming so they lost hope. I closed the site and waited 6 months later before reopening one after multiple requests. The backup requests is still pending so one day maybe the old site will return, but this could take up to 2 years. The old site was annoying to use sometimes, though. First, the View New Post feature didn't work properly, so I had to disable it and replace it with Today's posts, and ppl thought we were inactive sometimes. Also, the search function wasn't working, it was replaced with a google search which barely returned any relevant results. We had lot of downtimes, no download system so files were all hosted externally, same for images, and a not very stable host for images and files, so sometimes the forums were all white or gray-ish and new topic buttons were gone so people couldn't post when the file server was down. We also had a huge crapload of spambots (about 40 registrations per day). Thankfully, the "Hello" thing blocked all of them in the later days. The old TIMGUL members probably remember that thing from when we were still using IPB 1.3.1. This was the old site:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070924075344/http://omnimaga.org/

In the later days it had 55K posts

The troublemakers I am talking about hated me and the site because this was the only site where trolls were dealt with in the calculator community, and they advocated purposely attacking each others and they were banned there. On all other sites, if people insulted others, nothing was done, so we lost a potential POTY contender and admins didn,t care. They still hang out in an IRC channel and they barely do anything else besides trolling forums. No wonder why the TI calculator community is so dead now. Only one other website besides Omnimaga has barely ever any problems anymore and both are the two most active websites of the kind.

Sometimes people confuse me and the site, though, altough I can understand them. But this is why I go with DJ Omnimaga on most forums, instead of just Omnimaga.

Fear 2 Stop®

TI calculator community? I think my head just exploded. LOL

On the bright side, you just gave me an idea for a song title now, and I was already thinking about math for some reason. About to finish it up soon & upload shortly...
Fear 2 Stop are: Billy Castillo (me), Dana Castillo (my wife) Raymond Proseus (best friend)http://www.soundclick.com/fear2stop

DJ_Omnimaga

oh lol yeah this might seems weird, but you can actually program video games on TI-81 through TI-86 and TI-89/92+/Voyage 200 calculators :D either directly on them (easy, but slow), or on a computer in a language close to machine code (ASM) that was used in the late 70s on old computers. The funny thing is that despites games being generally slower and less good looking than their gameboy counterparts, there are actually things on calculators that were never done before on a gameboy by game companies, not even the COLOR version:





Someone even ported the entire Commodore 64 Ultima V: Warrior Of Destiny RPG on the TI-89

Fear 2 Stop®

Holy crap, that's pretty damn cool!

Okay, that helped me finish my song.
Fear 2 Stop are: Billy Castillo (me), Dana Castillo (my wife) Raymond Proseus (best friend)http://www.soundclick.com/fear2stop

DJ_Omnimaga

ROFL now I am curious about what you came up with, I'll go have a listen before listening to new Pillage tunes

Season 8


DJ_Omnimaga

You should at least put it in your signature or WWW field on forums (or do a Youtube ad like I did with TIMGUL in the beginnings... In fact I should really repost mine lol). I also wonder if I should add other Music Generator websites in the links section on front page? Right now I only got the links to the companies that were involved in the making of Music series or the publishing of them, but I thought about re-adding other websites again. I used to have an affiliate bar at the bottom listing the german Music 2000 forum and Omnimaga.org, but both went down, so I removed it altogether

.:DJ Droppin:.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on February 28, 2009, 08:38:37 AM

We got spammed to death (I got like 200 PMs from a member saying We are Legion, We do not forget, We do not forgive, We Are Anonymous, Expect Us, and the entire board got filled with these, including every member's inbox.


I know what that is, that online organization. They are an organization against the cult religion Scientology because they claimed and supposedly had evidence of many murderers at the hands of Scientologist leaders for those that investigated their people/meetings. I actually know/knew someone from Arizona that is/was in it. I wasn't sure what to believe, so I didn't get very involved in wanting to. Creepy eh.
Bass is a force that defies the universe of logic, time, and space. http://www.reverbnation.com/djdroppin

Season 8

Where can I advertise my site? http://timgul.freeforums.org Haha we should partner up, means more disk space for forum users bro

DJ_Omnimaga

#15
Oh thanks for the link. I was surprised you called it TIMGUL too though O.o I think you should change the name a little bit or maybe change the meaning of the acronym because if your site gets a lot of success and shows up high in the rankings in google at one point people might be confused about why there are two timgul sites :P. Personally I don't mind though (providing you don't use the same banner lol), because my site name TIMGUL is an acronym including "Music Generator" in it and is pretty generic. I just tried to play with the words so it sounds like Tim Gul which looks like a first name/last name. In fact I was tempted to use that as nickname at first, but then I realised it would confuse people since I use DJ Omnimaga everywhere.

As for site advertising, that's what I have been wondering for a long while, because most advertising boards are generally not really active and on non-advertising site they see it as spam, so you are nearly forced to just put it in your signature on forums you are active on (a logo helps, if the forum allow images in sigs). Youtube is a good way to get members, though, if they like forums. This is pretty much the only place where I ever talked about TIMGUL and advertised it (in Music 2k videos comment pages, my video description, made a video about the site (altough it's currently gone))

EDIT: another thing: I started my TIMGUL site on October 29th 2007. By January I think I still had like only 300 posts maybe and there were days with no posts at all. It took until march until it became active regulary with an avg of 20 posts per day. Plus, since there is alerady an english Music 2000 site this might be harder (altough you might get luck since you got the exact same name)

Season 8

I called it TIMGUL cos well it basically is but its like I put above, we should partner the 2 up and then people will have plenty of space to post their tunes. Mines banner free mate, but the name is the Music Lounge cos you can share other music on there too not related to TIMGUL so then everyone can see music by other artists.

DJ_Omnimaga

Nakamura, nothing wrong happened. I just updated the forum rules and posted an announcment about it. Don't worry everything is fine now. Don't worry :P

The Lyricist, Aah ok, I was just wondering. Also the fact you also have an entire section dedicated to non M2k softwares might help too. Personally I didn't want that on my site (altough I'M fine with ppl posting such tunes outside the music showcase) because I wanted to keep mine as MTVMG-related as possible and this is what made the site unique in some ways. The best way to get members is not have a forum skin like this:

http://s14.invisionfree.com/missiletest

Have stuff that other forums doesn't have to offer (like an entire section dedicated to Ableton music showcase) and not try to copy other forums too much (like exact same sub-forums hierarchy and order

And once you're setup and there are members, backup often or make sure your host provider backups often (and restore your board in less than 2 years if something wrong happens), in case, because I got hacked many times when I used IPB 1.3.x and I could have lost my forums completly if I didn't do any backups. This happened to some people I know online, altough with websites, not forums x.x

Season 8

Well I have a forum dedicated to Ableton and other formats, and I'm open to suggestions on my board as to any other sections people would want. I got quite the upload limit too so people can upload as many tunes as they want no matter the size!

DJ_Omnimaga

Oh nice, I didnt thought on free forum hosting providers I noticed sometimes the upload cap is very limited. On Invisionfree you got 16 MB total and on Zetaboard you got infinite diskspace but each files can be only 250 KB max. If I ever get a bigger hosting plan I might actually increase my upload limit too on TIMGUL, but I am waiting right now because of the recession, in case food prices skyrockets once again.