Hey folks,
I'm Centurion Wind, a member of the Taiganet dev team - this thread came to my attention a few days ago and I wanted to clear up a few things that have been said in this thread. A lot of the things that have been said have ranged from being simple exaggeration to being outright false. I had a chat with Mike about some of the things he wrote in this thread, and he acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when it came to certain aspects of his posts. Unfortunately, this pattern has continued and I would like to clear a few things up.
1) The current restrictive measures in place are due to spambots and certain other miscreants who have tried to evade bans via proxies and the like. I wish these weren't in place, but unfortunately the alternative is letting these guys get through. As a lot of you may remember, we once had a case where a spambot signed up and began sending virus-laden URLs via the PM system to Taiganet users. Bill would prefer to err on the side of caution rather than risk this happening again. Yes, I hate that it has false positives too, but for the vast majority of board users, it isn't an issue. And there are pretty easy instructions to follow if you need to be manually whitelisted, whether it's because you don't have a forum account or because you've run out of whitelist attempts.
2) When curtjr4 referred to "development team members [who] have quite the attitude," he really just meant me. When he referred to "colorful vocabulary," he really meant my tendency to use swear words - something I make no apologies about. He specifically referred to a case in which we had a discussion at length about his inflammatory behavior on the forums - something he vowed to change. If you would like to know what else we talked about, I suggest asking him, but I don't see how it's on-topic to this discussion.
3) Not a single user has run out of whitelist attempts since October 17th; since the whitelists refresh every 2 - 3 days, what localonthe8s posted is absolutely, completely untrue. I can only speculate as to why someone would post something here that is false, but it's really not beneficial to anyone involved in this.
4) Finally, a lot of you, like Martin, have criticisms about the way the Taiganet forums are run. I give you this challenge in response: if you have specific criticisms about the way the forums are run, I suggest bringing them up to the person that runs the forums. There are people on this site who have no interest in the health of the Taiganet community - you really don't do any good giving your criticisms to them. Bill is not a close-minded, Machiavellian dictator who will ban you at the first word of criticism, I promise. Sometimes I criticize him myself, but I do it to him, and not to other people. You ought to do the same.
I'm sure you have a great, thriving community here - my interest is solely in helping foster a great, thriving community at Taiganet. Discussions like these don't really help further that goal. I have no authority on this site; I am just a simple member, but I (and Bill) would appreciate it if more thought, honesty and sincerity was put into discussions about Taiganet. We don't bite and we really do appreciate feedback - we'd just prefer it if it was in the form of constructive criticism rather than insults on a site where it doesn't really matter. And for what it's worth, there IS an easy way to contact him: via PM on Taiganet, via the #taiganet channel on freenode.net (he goes by the handle "Salador"), or via me - cw1nd - in the same channel.
Thanks very much for your understanding. I hope we can keep this discussion civil and polite.
CW
