“And it is still true, no matter how old you are -- when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”
Today has been a pretty sucky day for being my only day off, my laptop fried itself then I undercooked sunday dinner so me and my husband ate broccolli and potatoes LOL. then as a consolation prize i made apple crumble but accidentally incinerated it into charcoal LOL so didnt eat that either. so today hasnt exactly gone to plan and for some reason that made me think of the admin here. you know a lot of people bash admin decisions and whine about their heavy handed nature or their lack of response or just general lack of action, but truthfully from my own personal experience I think the admin here try their hardest to be fair. its not an easy job, its not paid and its largely thankless. Like trying to battle the tide they solve one problem only for that problem to be replaced by a new one. it must be such a pain in the neck at times. I think if you speak to them with respect they generally try to respond in a similar way and well i think people here think FA is a democracy but really it isnt. I have a server in my house and collectively me and my husband run several websites and well..when you are responsible for a website you need to protect it and also yourself because if something comes on your website and does something illagal then you as the webmaster could technically be held responsible. Thats why there are rules on this site to protect those who run the site and to make the place nicer for everyone. So I know admin make bad choices from time to time but theyre only human giving up their free time for free in order to help make this place run a little smoother, perhaps we should go give them hugs or something once in a while cause actually for all the whining the majority of us do, its their hard work that keeps this place ticking over so that we can enjoy this special place.
I for one praise our admins. People constantly whine about "double standards" and "the rules" but fact of the matter is, if it's against the ToS, it's a rule everyone has to follow. They can make whatever rule they want because no one is paying to use this site. People need to stop complaining about free services. EA's Origin is a free service technically, it's shitty, therefore I opt to boycott the purchase of any games exclusive to it because I do not wish to use the service.
There's a group of pepole I used to call 'The Loyal Opposition'. The term was ironic, because they were the group of people who would take anything, and harp on it, and overinflate it's meaning.
They're also populated mainly by people I think are disgusting and assholes. I saw one of them get rightfully banned, then bitch in another channel they got banned for nothing.
Ad in the whole "The admins yelled at me, they're mean and evil" journals and everyone goes "Oh yeah yeah"
That's an all too familiar happenstance. It seems to be in human nature not to own up to your stupidity and apologize, but claim that you were innocent and did nothing.
I've seen it at all the communities I used to run, and I still see it in the chatroom I run. Person acts like a dingus, we request that they stop, they tell the admin to "fuck off," they get banned, then they post in the ban appeal thread asking why they were banned.
I believe the voluntary donations stopped the only way you can fund the site is by buying advertising space. I would very happily just randomly donate money to keep this place running
They still accept random donations. They just can't take things like AlertPay or PayPal. They do take old-fashioned money orders and Amazon gift cards, which they can use to purchase equipment as needed. I suspect their ongoing bandwidth costs is their largest bill. If someone really wishes to help directly with that, I'm sure they can work something out with Dragoneer or something. I donate from time to time, when I am able. It is the one site I use the most on the entire net, so that's worth something to me. This site has so many users that if each one donated just one dollar, FA could run ad-free for probably the next five years!
yeah I guess being british things like posting postal cheques is a bit of a pain in the butt, although truthfully i didnt know they took amazon gift cards, that'd be doable on my end
When they lost their ability to take electronic payment methods a few years ago, I think their donations came to a near stop. Paying by money order wass not a very user-friendly alternative.
If you do want to know how to donate, you'll probably want to ask Dragoneer what the process is to go electronically through Amazon. It's probably in the journal history on Fender's page (the official FA announcement page). I'd still ask Dragoneer though, since those journals are certainly old now. I wonder if Amazon lets people send gifts from the UK and other countries to the US. When I did donate, it allowed me to choose how much to send, or to buy actual hardware. It was not as easy as using PayPal, but it was still a lot better than buying a money order, filling it out and mailing it.
I know how it is and how freaken hard it is as a admin when dealing with people. Ive been a admin on forums and sites before and trying to make the right decision on things are ALWAYS hard. and when you do, do it people are just make you feel like you are the villain when your just doing your job because of the rules that are in place. and everyone always tries to work around the rules to think that person was wrongfully banned.
Bad decisions are made in all walks of work and life, particularly with information and people. It happens everywhere, but in something as impersonal as the internet people can take it extremely harshly. The admin doesn't have the capacity to come to you or know everything about what's been happening, and they work with information they have. They don't necessarily do their jobs right all the time, but it's important to appreciate how difficult it is for them.
My thing is that well, theres no problem solving, or at least none visible. I do conventions, its my hobby of sorts, I sit on the BOD for two one them, one furry, one not. I'm one of the guys devoted solely to problem solving for one. My only job is finding solutions. Thats it. I don't touch reg, I don't touch planning. I'm seated with a problem, and I fix it. The BOD/Folks in charge/Admins here seem to not understand how to separate personal preference from professional behavior. I notice that ALOT with some of the higher ups, witnessing their behaviors at cons, and how they pick and choose to respond to only select people when issues crop up. There's no impartial governance for FA, and after FurFright and that fiasco, its somewhat obvious why there isn't. Select admins behavior in public, and eagerness to rally up an army shows that impartial governance isn't the goal here. The goal for the site seems to be an open place where presence can push agendas.
As far as speaking to them with respect, I saw an admin at Furfright threaten to ban someone because they asked him to keep it down in the bar. He was, for the record, piss drunk.
I think the site could be good, but, I think people need to look at it for what it is, one guy's furrypolitical(bonus points, brand new word. :P ) platform, that you happen to be able to post art on.
I've always had good luck with the admins here. They've always dealt with the spam accounts I've reported in less than an hour, and any error tickets I've filed were always fixed or at least acknowledged within a day or two. That's pretty good, when you consider that the ratio of the number of admins to the number of user accounts is about 1:32,000! I know that over half the accounts here are fairly inactive, but that's still an insane ratio. I honestly don't know how they keep up with things, but they will always have my thanks and respect.
Generally, when people have problems, it is usually because they either broke rules that they never bothered to read, or they tried to chew out a new tail hole for an unsuspecting admin. Of course, admins as people too, so sometimes mistakes are made. Politeness and respect go a long way when that happens, but people's reactions are more often a hate tantrum on all of FA, thus showing where the problem actually is!
i thnk its all depending on thire views of stuff sis and some just are power hungry and wanna controll the site them self i know some of the admins is awsome at stuff some of them i never meet or heard of but you know ppl left cuz 60% or more of the admins would remove thire clean babyfur art
The problem is that there's plenty of examples of when the admins have refused to enforce the rules, or they'll bend the rules just punish someone that hasn't actually broken any rules. There's been lots of times where it takes a mass outcry for them to actually DO something about a real problem, and lots of examples of just plain hypocrisy.
Really? tell that to their shitty personal system that always crashes, along with how they deal with some art theioves, although they're not as bad as deviantart's admins, those guys are complete retards
Always crashes? FA is rarely ever down. They had their big month-long failure at the end of 2008, and I believe only a few other times where they were down for over 24 hours, mostly in the early years. That's not bad for being around for nearly eight years. Most free sites don't such a good record.
The upload stats on Yak's page show all the times when the site was down for a significant amount of time. Here's a graph of the upload stats.
Each column across represents one day, starting with December 5th, 2005 on the left, and going out to June 3, 2012 on the right. The number of black pixels high for each day is the number of general submissions that day. Blue is the number of mature submissions, and red is the number of adult submissions. The large white gap to the left of center was the big 31-day outage in 2008. You can figure out the dates of every significant outage from this data, and it really isn't bad at all. So, where are all these crashes that I don't remember, and that the actual data doesn't support? Oh, that second largest white gap was the week-long semi-outage when FA was put into read-only mode, therefor, no uploads during that time, but the site was still usable for downloading. Since then, there have been no other outages of significant length. That was over three years ago! I wish the same could be said of my banking site, my home mortgage site, and many others!
