Public Service Announcement: Smurves
While I have nothing (yet) against the registration activities of certain individuals who shall remain unnamed (but you know who you are), please be advised that certain moderators (myself included) have a tendency to decide to use or upgrade to the heavier penalty vs. a lighter one (e.g., an official warning vs. an unofficial warning, a ban vs. a warning, a month ban vs. a week, a week ban vs. a day) should, after a check for smurves, it is discovered that you own multiple accounts, should you run afoul of the Code of Conduct accidentally or intentionally.
Mea Culpa
Visitors to HGMain may have noticed for about a day HGMain’s font was all weired and screwed up. Some reported a font that was too small, some reported a font that was too big, etc.; in all cases it was BAD.
So what the hell happened?
I was doing a quick demo on-site at a conference to a couple of teachers about how easy it is to configure stuff on the web, and I used my test installation of the forums for the demo. After changing a few styles around we went to the control panel settings, and it was then I realized that the configuration was still set to update HG Main’s configuration, so I changed that live to the right location (the testing forums), but didn’t have a chance to fix it on HGMain until I had free time later that evening.
The reason why everything looked so bad? I put quotes into the font-name style box. The forums auto-quoted fonts with spaces in their names already, so when the change was done, it double-quoted everything, resulting in a parsing error that some browser couldn’t deal with—and subsequently caused them to revert to the default font, which is “Times New Roman” for many, and for it to ignore any size settings set by the forums in places where the size is specified along with the font name.
Oops … =S
General rudeness
So I’ve been briefed on a recent situation where a mod was flamed over e-mail, and the user’s ban term was increased as a result. So, first, attacks on anyone is frowned upon at HG. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the attacking and who’s at the end—it’s just flat out wrong. “Attack the idea, not the person,” the common saying goes.
If reading about the latest iDrama is your thing (yuck), then read on.
Our staff of volunteers are here because they like what they do, and they definitely aren’t being paid to be abused on the forums, over e-mail, or IM. They are, like you, humans and have feelings as well, a concept that is sometimes lost in heated debates/flames.
If you flame them, expect to be eventually warned or banned. If they flame you, they can expect some disciplinary action on HG. Both of which have to be proved to have taken place, with supporting evidence, of course. Everyone at HG is required to abide by the Code of Conduct . The relevant sections in this instance are quoted below:
Ad-Hominem:
Ad Hominem comments/personal attacks towards anyone – staff, forum member, or a visitor who is likely to view it on the forums – is subject to the message being deleted and action taken against the user, regardless of how pertinent or thoughtful the rest of the message might be.
Harassment:
You may not use terms or audio/visual materials referring to ethnic/national origin, ideological/religious beliefs, gender, or sexual preference in a demeaning context.
We have no tolerance for discrimination. You are in violation of this rule if the nature of your post discriminates, promotes hate, promotes violence or advocates hatred or discrimation against individuals, groups, races, cultures or organizations because of their ethnic/national origin, skin color or culture.
Derogatory Terms:
If you use any terms in an offensive context against a person, race, culture, group or organization, as determined by our moderators, you are in violation of this rule.
Please note that words carry different meanings in different cultures, and that while a word may be acceptable use in one part of the world, it may not be in another. In addition, any one can invent their own derogatory terms, unfortunately. Because of those factors, we will evaluate the context in which the term was used to determine whether a violation has occurred.
iDrama
Here we go again. The latest iDrama episode involves a user who was banned because he broke one of the cardinal rules in the Code of Conduct. The consequence is standard procedure—it’s an instaban. Then comes an email from him that says a hacker hacked his account, followed up by a very public confession (and then some) from the hacker. Accounts banned, case closed, everyone’s happy. Right?
No, not by a long shot.
See, said user was popular, so when his account was banned, his peers got very unhappy, got their pitch and forks, and threatened to lynch the moderators. So, I get a call from the mods asking me to look up IP accesses to verify whether the account was really hacked.
Well, it sort of was.
The hacker created the user’s account. This whole thing was a staged incident.
Frak.
So, until further notice, all related accounts will stay banned.
Forum Changes
The topics/page and replies/page settings have been removed and set to 25/page to alleviate server load during prime times—this change should give a slight speed boost to how fast things load on the site, as well as making way for better caching of dynamically-generated pages.
In the templates, user location, skype, and www icons have been removed. Those items can still be found in the user profile.
The user database back-end was partially converted to a relational database as part of the efforts to lower server-load. The change is also required for the following purposes:- to reduce penalties incurred from disk I/O operations, especially when admins need to track down smurves
- to greatly speed up user-lookups in the admin interface
- to support the upcoming user-to-user messaging feature
- to support upcoming changes to the user-registration system to make it a lot less frustrating if the email/user name is not valid for any number of reasons (email/user already exists, username contains censored words, email banned, etc.)
- to support the upcoming CRM system
Partially because other apps on HG are still using the old file-based user database format.
The registration sentinels have also have been balanced. They are now a little less aggressive, and more caching proxies operated by ISPs have been added to the white list.