tsc

From the Pyromania ARG, one of the images posited that the Australium suitcase was actually filled with gravel water, which is why the rocket crashed. Obviously the Administrator made off with the Australium while everyone was focusing on the rocket.

Not if he's using the latest hacks due to the banwave system.   But yes, getting votekicked/banned has nothing to do with it.

They won't do anything to help you, so there's not really any point.

We're all just waiting for Raz's imminent VAC ban now.

As I have said to Davjo before, there's nothing special that's preventing him from changing title. I know that there are restrictions on when people can change their title, so that may be what it is.

It's a WONTFIX from IPB.

Well, I already told you that anybody that was accepted had to be exceptional. It takes a lot to be exceptional. Even I'm not exceptional.

This is the nomination thread for the 2014 mod selection process. Mods elected here will serve out the remainder of 2014.   A few rules: Candidates will be checked for eligibility on March 31st. Anyone who is not eligible by then will not be listed on the election ballot. In order to be eligible for election, a candidate must be nominated by one other person and supported by two other people - none of these people may be the candidate himself/herself/itself. This must be done in this thread. No discussion of candidates is allowed, nor is campaigning of any sort allowed. A candidate must let his/her/its record on the forum speak for itself. Administration, for the sake of impartiality, is not permitted to nominate or support candidates in this process. A candidate must explicitly accept his nomination in order to be listed on the ballot. Members are limited to 5 nominations each.

I apologize. Your application came in after I had already read a wave of them, and I kept putting off reading the remaining PMs in my inbox.   However, I was fortunate enough to be already aware of your qualifications to the degree where I could make a decision.

I'm pretty sure negarep that is that old isn't meant to be there. It may be a porting issue.   The only way to find out is to ask Grobag whether he really did negarep you all the way back then.

The idea was that applicants would only be judged based on their behavior on this forum. Given the exceptionalism that we already have, it's not far off to say that moderation in a conventional setting doesn't have enough of a relation to moderation here to the point where moderation experience will make a difference.

Alright, I thought I said this before, but I'll rehash it and hopefully make it clearer.   When I announced I was opening moderator applications and inviting people to send PMs to my inbox, I never intended to appoint a mod. The entire administration team (which means Binary, Rammite, and me) were in consensus that we didn't feel that the moderation team needed to be expanded further, and the application process was simply to see if we had any immediately useful additions onto the team that we wanted to make. After reviewing the applications, we decided that we didn't have any. More recently, we decided as a group that it was perhaps time to expand the moderation team in light of recent events. I can't and won't speak for Binary or Rammite, but my reasoning behind an election was to allow more community input into the team, which was one of the requests from a while back. There were concerns about it being a "popularity contest", but the general sentiment was that as opposed to other elections for other positions that had happened before, the moderator election would be taken more seriously and not made into a popularity contest, especially with the restrictions that were placed on it. In addition, we added the caveat that we could veto elected candidates in order to insert some quality control and make sure that only people who we thought had a reasonable chance of performing the job well would be able to take the job. Obviously this will be an imperfect process - the intention was that you all could help us find better possible moderators than we could by ourselves, since we were unable to identify any gems in our own search. This requires a bit of trust in the fact that you all will be able to do so, and we've retained the ability to moderate the process as necessary. However, we're open to input in refining the process or changing it entirely, and we are definitely discussing and making changes as necessary.    Well I am not, because you didn't answer my question yet; why are you a mod in the first place? You just were there out of nowhere and every administrational act you've done since then has been a fuckup.   Just get a fancy guy-who-pays-the-bills user title and give the admin position to anyone who actually cares for this forum. In order, then: I became a mod because ian appointed me so in recognition of my technical abilities, and I was able to use that power to more effectively manage the forum. I didn't actually become an administrator until the transition to IPB. But that's all old history and I'm wondering why you're asking since you were definitely around for that. I understand that you may not understand what goes on behind-the-scenes in running a forum, but please don't try to handwave it into "paying the bills." On the contrary, this forum ONLY runs because I get enough donations from you guys to support it, and if it doesn't, the entire forum collapses because I can't support it with my nonexistent income. And then you act like I'm the only one around here running things. Well, Binary and Rammite don't have those shiny titles for nothing, and in fact they do more of the hard work of managing the community than I do. Most, if not all, of my actions in recent months have either been purely on the backend or as a result of deliberation with both Binary and Rammite. Very few decisions lately have occurred without them pushing. But if I'm REALLY such a terrible admin that this entire forum thinks I'm absolutely out to destroy it with all of the decisions I've made, please forward your complaints to Binary and Rammite. If they both agree with you all that I'm unfit to run this forum in any capacity, I'm happy to step down and hand off everything to those two. It's not as if running a forum is that difficult technically, and Binary is more than qualified to do so. I'm not aware of any such forums existing anymore... the only ones that are "hidden" from public view are contributor forums, administration forums, the Saloon, and SPUFurb, to my knowledge. Even I don't have access to the latter two, though Binary and Rammite certainly do. If there are any others that I'm not aware of, please feel free to PM me so that we can resolve this.

From my experience, Admins can do pretty much anything, from locking/moving/deleting posts/threads to banning users, to changing the forum itself. Mods can only deal with threads and users. Basically Admins edit the forums, Mods police them.   An apt summary.

The admins have released a comprehensive administration update. The notes for the update are below. member registrations are now required to go through a light administration check and approval before being allowed to access the forum all public access to the forum has been blocked, and now requires a login to see anything members are no longer allowed to request self-bans, and all members so banned have been unbanned alt accounts are now not allowed to be made without explicit preapproval by the administration, and all current alts have been banned moderators have been enabled - elected (with admin approval) for 1-year terms - more details to be released shortly forum staff may be requested for specific forums by active users Further updates may be released shortly.

Reminded me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4wM5KvUGEc

Some updates to the guidelines: A candidate must explicitly accept his nomination in order to be listed on the ballot. Members are limited to 5 nominations each.

Jeez, I thought you could get a joke when you saw one, Raz.   You cannot do that.  I nominate everyone except myself. Here, let me clarify: if you don't give me an explicit list of people, your nomination does not count. As in you have to list every single person out.   Also:

You cannot do that. The result of the application process ended up with nobody being selected. As I talked it over with the other admins, we felt that anyone who would be added (which was back when we didn't feel we needed mods) needed to meet very high standards in order to justify adding them onto the forum team, and nobody met those very exacting standards in our eyes.  Also, we are still reserving the right to deny or veto elected candidates if we feel that they would not be able to adequately serve as a moderator. Yes, the administration team will not change. I do not see the need to sack Binary or Rammite just yet.

We'll get the 5 users renewed for free with our forum license anyway, but until I finally do renew that we won't get it at all.

Currently chat is down because our subscription to IPB has expired. I have temporarily disabled it to prevent it from appearing while this is the case. We can renew it, but I currently don't have the funds and I wanted to wait until the new version of IPB was released before renewing. Another option is to only pay for the chat, but we would ultimately end up spending more money that method (since we'd pay for the forum support eventually + the expanded users now) and I don't have the funds to do that right now either. Thanks for your understanding.

Fixed.

We can't even get a Dota or TF2 1v1 tournament done...

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=35392601&postcount=199