What's happening in here?
 

10/10/2015 Update: DossarLX ODI

I feel like this thread has run its course and efficiently delivered a wake-up call. Check the Weekly Batch Update Thread for updates on the Batch and Temporary Web Development Team. There will also be What's Happenin' front page posts which are planned to be bi-weekly according to psychoangel691. Front Page Posts will be utilized much more now.

Thanks for all your patience. The original post can be seen in the spoiler below.

- Dossar

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Nobody wanted to have an official with old files, I asked and the community didn't want it. So I can do nothing with that until the batch situation is sorted out.

P.S. AJ was never an admin

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Fiffer is generally dying, however staff still does it's job as best as it can, and with somewhat decreasing manpower (due to real life reasons like school starting soon or already starting for some).

I cannot speak for the Event Staff, but there should be an Official Tournament this year as a poll and thread were made directly for the files being used in the Official Tournament which would verify that an OT is going to happen this year. Even though some Staff Actions aren't public, they are still doing something, ya know?

Scores are still janky and I agree, however there iirc is no easy distinguish-able signs that a score was rated or not (except for the 99s). It's a problem that the dev team is probably tackling as best as they can even if no public movement has been made (apparently and I would assume devs have testing ground now).

Batch I cannot say anything about because it's one thing I definitely do not know so someone can answer that accordingly, but the additions of judges should help with the process even if it's just a slight shift in help.

Most of Staff are aware of its issues, and where it may seem beneficial to bring them to light, I'm sure it is a redundant statement to say "What's up with Staff and why is fiffer dying". It is apparent that some staff parameters are understaffed, but staff is entirely volunteer, which means that when real life conditions happen then they have to be attended to which can cause a lapse in staff activity.

It's an ever-growing topic, however I'm not that worried.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Honestly this site is being held down by red tape at this point. Every time anything gets suggested, you have to cross verify the changes with 3 other people and check the 13 year old rules and make sure nobody is ~offended~ and all that shit. The amount of potentially beneficial actions and events I've seen get stuffed because "da rules" or "needs to be judged!!! (9 month wait)" or "but muh levelranks" is starting to get old. If it's not clear by now to people in charge that things need to just happen quickly, then the site is going to die.






You know it's bad when I want Tass to come back.


EDIT- This is not to say I've personally been a huge part of the solution. I'm too pessimistic about the site at this point.
I'm torn between having seen how incredibly inefficient the site setup is and how difficult it is for meaningful change to happen, with the fact I love the game and the *most* of the community.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

There isn't anything offensive about change. The GM Team has been discussing issues with the batch for the past several days, and tonight we can provide a detailed response about what's been happening and some of the next steps forward. However when it comes to dev that is outside the scope of the GMs and the dev team itself will have to give updates on their end.

I've been on this site for a decade and it's been an archive of rhythm gaming history and a home for me. I feel your pain too and these issues are actively discussed between the GM staff -- I can't say how it is for the other groups though.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

HeZe: flattering, but I was never an administrator for reasons that I'll never come to terms with agreeing with. Maybe it was because of the fact that I had too much of a straight-forward and direct attitude towards people when they failed to get shit done the way that it was supposed to. I came back to the forums on my account for the first time in over a month after hearing about this thread, because you know what - I'm no longer on staff and I've finally moved on from this community to a different one. I finally feel like I can be as honest as I can while not giving two shits about the feelings and emotions about the others on the top levels on staff.

Here's the first step: stop being offended of what you're doing wrong, own up to it, and fix the problem rather than cowering away in your hidden little staff bubbles. Everyone is human, everyone makes mistakes, and everyone gets tired of what they're doing on occasion. Let it out and work towards fixing things, and if it becomes too much to handle, then find someone who you feel is as passionate about it as you are.

Right now, the administrative team is absolutely fucking useless. You guys can sit here and preach that things are being done on the back, but you guys NEVER offer any sort of transparency. How the hell are people supposed to believe that anything is getting done when you guys are too inconsiderate to even provide any sort of reasonable updates about what is and isn't getting done? I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no understanding as to why half of the administration team is even on the team in the first place when they're providing absolutely no useful contribution to the site. Users upon users both in the community and out of it are saying that the site is dying, and that's because absolutely nothing is moving. Have the administrators ever thought to maybe come together and make a weekly update about the progress that's going on? Are there updates to the site coming in the future? Is the game being worked on? Is there anything being done to bring the site back to life? No? I didn't think so. If there is, why haven't you shown anyone? Staff seems like a massive circle-jerk at the top levels (p.s. I've had this thought even while I was on staff) at this point.

I can direct this part to someone on the administration; to my knowledge, it was Zageron but it might not be anymore: when I was on staff, there was a so-called "community manager" that was supposed to be overseeing the community and everything contained within it. Who has that job? Why are they NOT doing what they are supposed to? A community manager that is resting as an administrator is not just looking after the user community contained within the forums, they are looking after the ENTIRE COMMUNITY AS A WHOLE, including the staff members, to make sure that things are getting done in the interests of the community. If people who are in their respective teams are having issues with getting things done for whatever reason, that's completely fine - people have their issues and sometimes things get in the way. If said people are continuously making excuses and not helping in the progression and growth of the community. With another thread like this popping up, it's very obvious that the current team situation isn't working and the person who is overseeing things isn't doing a good job. And I absolutely do not want to hear a bullshit excuse about how you tried to transition people to Slack and others didn't keep up with it -- using Slack was a dumb idea in the first place and if people weren't keeping up with it, you should have forced them to have some activity if they wanted to keep their staff position... or you know, not been so fixated on trying to gather people on a different medium and instead actually use the Skype staff chat properly by incorporating all various staff members, since you know, according to that previous staff chat, the judges and events teams that help keep the game alive and interesting for users don't matter at all. But hey, what do I know?

The simfiling team is complete and utter fucking shambles right now. Now, with all due respect, I do have some blame to take here because I didn't resolve this situation, but the activity of those who have the simfile judge title is absolutely pathetic. The lack of committed judges is a big reason why FFR is in trouble right now -- the file releases have had to slow for the purpose of saving files for the presumably soon to come official tournament, but very little has gotten done with the addition of a new team. The structural issue on the game management side that I hoped to resolve by doubling the staff for one area of the site ended up falling flat because the transition was simply too rough at the start, and it's gotten to a point where it's probably much harder to even want to work on things because the previously mentioned lack of staff. I have no doubt in my mind that the task of game management can be done properly, but it needs to be pushed WAY harder than it is now, without question. There are two very capable users who are able to do a lot more than they have, and they need to step in and do what they were told to do. They can only do so with a competent team below them. If it were my way, I would remove the simfile judge title from a huge majority of the judges because they have done jack shit for whatever reason/excuses they have.

At the very least, the Events team has TRIED to keep things going with TCG, but even their activity levels have gotten reduced a ton themselves and not enough is being done to engage with all of the users. One of the things that I can say that is extremely frustrating with the Events management (and I had to deal with this myself) is that they have to rely on the administration team for occasional things rather than being self-sufficient, which is an annoying problem in the first place. Right now, the two biggest attractors of users are simfiles and events. Events engage users, simfiles engage users. Both are being stifled for various reasons.

I agree with hi19 in this point: the site's staff have a LOT LESS to worry about than giving a shit about the trivial bullshit of "level ranks this" and "old rules that" and yadayadayada. Changes need to be made, or this site is going to completely crumble and there will be nothing left. As shitty as this sounds for the userbase, radical changes will probably be the only way to get things back together. And for the first time in a long time, I can actually agree: I wish Tass was here too. I was not the biggest fan of Tass, but after being on staff and evaluating how things were done then and how they are now, there's one thing that I can commend Tass for: he knew how to keep EVERYONE flying right.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Lets migrate FFR to osu! or something.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

You know, this problem goes right to the top.
The KING of being useless and having no transparency is Synthlight himself.
Where has that fucker been? Makes a huge "coming back" announcement.

THEN DISAPPEARS AGAIN.




I'm not going to have any faith in this site again until he shows his face. For real.

EDIT- I'm aware that the top-level admins have the access they need to the site.
That doesn't change the fact Synth is completely MIA for other important business-related stuff.
What if I get a big label that would give permission contingent on contacting the company owner? OOPS OUT OF LUCK

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Oh, btw, Halogeeeeeeen, what community are you a part of now?

I think my new home is GameFAQS, lmao. Well, one specific area of GameFAQS, but I gets to be my forum crazy self there as well so it's all gooood.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

tbh, imo synth isn't even relevant because staff has had all of the necessary accesses to do what they need and there was an established top end (this "community manager" position); there were/are three tiers of administration, with Synth being the top as the main webmaster. I know for a fact that access was passed downward to Zageron and potentially others in that tier of administration that sat just above being a regular forum administrator.

if you have something specific you want to tell him that's fine, though.

edit: way to beat me to my point you fucker

Re: What's happening in here?
 

I still like FFR, because I can play it

Re: What's happening in here?
 

and SoFurry (#exposed)

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Staff has contact with Synth though, all they have to do is shoot a text to him. I've talked to him through text a few times. Yes he's not a huge presence on the site anymore, but things can still get done without him.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

News to me. Last time I asked about contacting him it was "nope he's MIA again"

That is good to hear though. Sadly that last part of the statement doesn't seem to be happening.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Well anytime I ever had to reach out to him he got back to me. It may not be immediate, but I've never had him ignore a message totally.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

Maybe it would help if more staff positions were offered to the community so that people who could devote more time towards FFR could be more productive.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

This has happened a few times, there were dev applications, event team applications, mod applications, judge applications.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

When was the last time any positions were offered? Maybe it's been long enough that new members can help with site updates and judging files.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

It really hasn't been that long, judge applications were the most recent. New judges were just brought on.

Edit: June 16th new judges were announced.

Feb 16 Trumpet was added to dev team

Oct 27th last year had a major staff addition with devs and the switch in game management and such.

It really hasn't been that long.

Re: What's happening in here?
 

i'll tell you what's going on:
you are an entitled whiner prick