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What's been going on with TSR?
Many of you will have been following the events of the last week or so, for those not in the know here is a run down on events. Any television producers wanting to serialise this please get in touch.
On the 18th of April Pig posted into the Mod forum saying 'I'm off' he then demoted himself from a site Administrator to general users.
Since then there has been loads of speculation as to why he left and in particular what I did to make him leave.
From my point of view, perhaps Pig has a different story, he left because of the following:
He didn't like the way the site developments were being coordinated by me, the time it was taking to get things done, his lack of confidence in our developer Michael. This all came to a head when the first of my site improvements, a new site search, was launched in a form that was not tested well enough. It caused some site disruption, and some lessons were learnt by me.
I also edited a post that Pig had written on the forum that was offensive to our web developer. I emailed Pig and told him I had done this and also told him I had apologised to Michael for the insult. We are a professional company and we work with professional people, in a professional world you cannot abuse someone and then expect them to do good work for you at a later date.
Fact is since I started at TSR Pig and I never fully established our roles with each other. Communication between us was not regular enough and as a result I wasn’t really aware of what he was doing and he didn’t really know what I was doing. This just caused frustration for both of us.
So since he walked CN and I had a long chat about how we could get Pig involved again. We wanted to work with Pig, he has lots of site expertise, has been greatly respected by users and has done a hell of a lot for TSR. I really wanted him to fully engage with me and Michael our developer. Passing onto Michael recommendations and knowledge he held about his own site customisations so that Michael could confidently work with and around them.
So I emailed him with a proposal for how he could have more input in new site products and more control over their roll out which is what he told me he wanted. I also apologised for appearing to tell him off in the email I had sent him, that hadn’t been my intention.
Following the email we had 3 telephone calls over 3 nights. In each we discussed what had gone wrong, and under which circumstances he would get back involved. Each conversation was a little easier and it was genuinely good to talk to him – as I say we hadn’t talked a great deal before this other than when I met him up in Newcastle when I started. We both want to see the website do well, realise its potential and be a brilliant resource for its users. That’s a lot of common ground.
Pig said he wanted to think about things over the weekend and when we talked again this week, for the last time on Tuesday night, I was happy with the outcome when I put down the phone.
Pig told me he was enjoying his time away from the site, he was happy to see the site wasn’t falling apart without him and that the supermods and mods were doing a great job. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be involved with product development but he would answer any specific questions we put his way about his site customisations. We talked about him coming to a future Mod meeting to discuss the future and I was pleased about that. The conversation ended well with us talking about specific site plans, such as fleshing out user profiles with more functionality.
Then I was away for two days from the site, and in that time the following happened:
In AAM Pig put in a request for his site plugins and customisations to be disabled on the site. Neither CN or I saw this and the request was carried out by a Mod.
I heard about what had happened, that the site had lost its nifty tools, by text message and was baffled because as I say last time Pig and I spoke things were good.
Yesterday afternoon Pig contacted CN explaining that he had requested his site customisations to be removed because he had seen a PM sent to me from P which had been insulting to him and that had refered to TSR users as 'numbskull inbreds'. He says this was the final straw.
So several things here,
1) someone has been reading my PMs
2) A private message from a colleague of mine offering me his support in a jokey way because he was appalled at the abuse I was getting on the site was taken out of context as a direct insult by someone who shouldn’t have been reading it.
3) Users being refered to a 'Numbskull inbreds' was not a serious comment, it was meant to be funny and hell I have been called worse by you lot all week.
Subsequently we have looked at site log data and have seen who has read my PMs. As a result we have secured the site Admin area with new passwords and have removed so called ‘backdoors’ Pig created into the site.
I’d like to point out that the reading of other peoples PMs is entirely unacceptable. It is not something that would be done unless a user needed to be investigated for a very serious matter. Your PMs are private, it is unfortunate that in this instance mine weren’t.
The Moderators informed us that we shouldn’t reactivate Pigs customisations on the site until we had cleared things up. So to avoid ill feeling with Pig and to keep things friendly CN posted on the forum and emailed Pig stating that we have a signed contract signed by Pig that gives us permission to use his customisations indefinitely. CN asked Pig to get in touch within 48hrs to explain what was going on, if we hadn’t heard after 48hrs we would again enable the site plugins.
CN got a simple reply to his message, referring to the signed contract saying
"I haven't signed a contract, my name isn't Billy Bell, that's not my address and that's not my signature.”
So here is where we currently are, and it is sad that we have got to this point. The site is a mess at the moment, it works fine but is missing lots of its nice features. It is sad that now Pig – ‘Billy Bell’ or whatever his real name is not working with us but is working against us and seems to have deceived CN. Weird considering that CN, Pig and I all get on well as people and have enjoyed a beer or 3 together.
This morning we have received legal advise on the contract Pig signed and have been informed that a contract is more than a piece of signed paper. The emails, PMs, forum posts, text messages etc. exchanged between Pig, CN and myself that support the intention to sign the contract and confirm that it was signed and returned validate the contract.
We have emailed Pig subsequently to inform him of this and to tell him that we will be reactivating the site customisations when our developer in Canada is up and able to. It is then up to Pig to pursue things further through the correct channels should he wish to.
All this bitchiness, gossip and revelation leaves a really bad taste in everyone’s mouth. It’s a situation that could have been avoided, it has resulted in problems for you the site users and the Subs, it has cause untold headaches for Mods and SuperMods. Pig is no longer an Admin which is a shame because he has put some much time and energy into TSR and clearly cares about it.
I’ve obviously not been feeling on top of the world for the past week but now its time to get focussed on where this site is going.
First step we are setting up a stand alone development environment – a copy of this site that we can do stuff to without causing disruption to the main site. We’ll be able to give Mods and site users access to this to test and work with us on new site features before they go live to the main site.
First priority is that search!
We are going to have a meeting with Mods and SuperMods to regroup, talk about what’s working and what’s not working and to talk through concerns about the direction the site is taking.
From now on I will be working much much closer with Mods to understand their needs and to include them totally in all of my work.
Let this be clear, I want to steer the site in a positive direction. I want people to love using the site. It should be fun and an unrivalled student resource. I want the Mods to enjoy their role, hell I want to enjoy my job! We need work collaboratively to get there, and get there we shall. TSR isn’t going down the pan, on the contrary for the first time in its history it has a dedicated team working on it. The site is being invested in for the long term.
We do listen to everything you say about logos about search about everything, sometimes what you say is hard to take, sometimes its hard to even pluck up the nerve to read it! But rest assured I’m NOT trying to screw this site up, I do have expertise, and I will prove to you that you should have confidence in me, our developer Michael, in AcumenPI and all of this team.
J
On the 18th of April Pig posted into the Mod forum saying 'I'm off' he then demoted himself from a site Administrator to general users.
Since then there has been loads of speculation as to why he left and in particular what I did to make him leave.
From my point of view, perhaps Pig has a different story, he left because of the following:
He didn't like the way the site developments were being coordinated by me, the time it was taking to get things done, his lack of confidence in our developer Michael. This all came to a head when the first of my site improvements, a new site search, was launched in a form that was not tested well enough. It caused some site disruption, and some lessons were learnt by me.
I also edited a post that Pig had written on the forum that was offensive to our web developer. I emailed Pig and told him I had done this and also told him I had apologised to Michael for the insult. We are a professional company and we work with professional people, in a professional world you cannot abuse someone and then expect them to do good work for you at a later date.
Fact is since I started at TSR Pig and I never fully established our roles with each other. Communication between us was not regular enough and as a result I wasn’t really aware of what he was doing and he didn’t really know what I was doing. This just caused frustration for both of us.
So since he walked CN and I had a long chat about how we could get Pig involved again. We wanted to work with Pig, he has lots of site expertise, has been greatly respected by users and has done a hell of a lot for TSR. I really wanted him to fully engage with me and Michael our developer. Passing onto Michael recommendations and knowledge he held about his own site customisations so that Michael could confidently work with and around them.
So I emailed him with a proposal for how he could have more input in new site products and more control over their roll out which is what he told me he wanted. I also apologised for appearing to tell him off in the email I had sent him, that hadn’t been my intention.
Following the email we had 3 telephone calls over 3 nights. In each we discussed what had gone wrong, and under which circumstances he would get back involved. Each conversation was a little easier and it was genuinely good to talk to him – as I say we hadn’t talked a great deal before this other than when I met him up in Newcastle when I started. We both want to see the website do well, realise its potential and be a brilliant resource for its users. That’s a lot of common ground.
Pig said he wanted to think about things over the weekend and when we talked again this week, for the last time on Tuesday night, I was happy with the outcome when I put down the phone.
Pig told me he was enjoying his time away from the site, he was happy to see the site wasn’t falling apart without him and that the supermods and mods were doing a great job. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be involved with product development but he would answer any specific questions we put his way about his site customisations. We talked about him coming to a future Mod meeting to discuss the future and I was pleased about that. The conversation ended well with us talking about specific site plans, such as fleshing out user profiles with more functionality.
Then I was away for two days from the site, and in that time the following happened:
In AAM Pig put in a request for his site plugins and customisations to be disabled on the site. Neither CN or I saw this and the request was carried out by a Mod.
I heard about what had happened, that the site had lost its nifty tools, by text message and was baffled because as I say last time Pig and I spoke things were good.
Yesterday afternoon Pig contacted CN explaining that he had requested his site customisations to be removed because he had seen a PM sent to me from P which had been insulting to him and that had refered to TSR users as 'numbskull inbreds'. He says this was the final straw.
So several things here,
1) someone has been reading my PMs
2) A private message from a colleague of mine offering me his support in a jokey way because he was appalled at the abuse I was getting on the site was taken out of context as a direct insult by someone who shouldn’t have been reading it.
3) Users being refered to a 'Numbskull inbreds' was not a serious comment, it was meant to be funny and hell I have been called worse by you lot all week.
Subsequently we have looked at site log data and have seen who has read my PMs. As a result we have secured the site Admin area with new passwords and have removed so called ‘backdoors’ Pig created into the site.
I’d like to point out that the reading of other peoples PMs is entirely unacceptable. It is not something that would be done unless a user needed to be investigated for a very serious matter. Your PMs are private, it is unfortunate that in this instance mine weren’t.
The Moderators informed us that we shouldn’t reactivate Pigs customisations on the site until we had cleared things up. So to avoid ill feeling with Pig and to keep things friendly CN posted on the forum and emailed Pig stating that we have a signed contract signed by Pig that gives us permission to use his customisations indefinitely. CN asked Pig to get in touch within 48hrs to explain what was going on, if we hadn’t heard after 48hrs we would again enable the site plugins.
CN got a simple reply to his message, referring to the signed contract saying
"I haven't signed a contract, my name isn't Billy Bell, that's not my address and that's not my signature.”
So here is where we currently are, and it is sad that we have got to this point. The site is a mess at the moment, it works fine but is missing lots of its nice features. It is sad that now Pig – ‘Billy Bell’ or whatever his real name is not working with us but is working against us and seems to have deceived CN. Weird considering that CN, Pig and I all get on well as people and have enjoyed a beer or 3 together.
This morning we have received legal advise on the contract Pig signed and have been informed that a contract is more than a piece of signed paper. The emails, PMs, forum posts, text messages etc. exchanged between Pig, CN and myself that support the intention to sign the contract and confirm that it was signed and returned validate the contract.
We have emailed Pig subsequently to inform him of this and to tell him that we will be reactivating the site customisations when our developer in Canada is up and able to. It is then up to Pig to pursue things further through the correct channels should he wish to.
All this bitchiness, gossip and revelation leaves a really bad taste in everyone’s mouth. It’s a situation that could have been avoided, it has resulted in problems for you the site users and the Subs, it has cause untold headaches for Mods and SuperMods. Pig is no longer an Admin which is a shame because he has put some much time and energy into TSR and clearly cares about it.
I’ve obviously not been feeling on top of the world for the past week but now its time to get focussed on where this site is going.
First step we are setting up a stand alone development environment – a copy of this site that we can do stuff to without causing disruption to the main site. We’ll be able to give Mods and site users access to this to test and work with us on new site features before they go live to the main site.
First priority is that search!
We are going to have a meeting with Mods and SuperMods to regroup, talk about what’s working and what’s not working and to talk through concerns about the direction the site is taking.
From now on I will be working much much closer with Mods to understand their needs and to include them totally in all of my work.
Let this be clear, I want to steer the site in a positive direction. I want people to love using the site. It should be fun and an unrivalled student resource. I want the Mods to enjoy their role, hell I want to enjoy my job! We need work collaboratively to get there, and get there we shall. TSR isn’t going down the pan, on the contrary for the first time in its history it has a dedicated team working on it. The site is being invested in for the long term.
We do listen to everything you say about logos about search about everything, sometimes what you say is hard to take, sometimes its hard to even pluck up the nerve to read it! But rest assured I’m NOT trying to screw this site up, I do have expertise, and I will prove to you that you should have confidence in me, our developer Michael, in AcumenPI and all of this team.
J
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Wow.
At least we have an explanation. An insightful and seemingly credible one at that.
Ain't it shocking how people can hide behind false identities on the internet? It especially hurts when professional and personal relationships are developed based on that identity, with the former taking a larger financial hit when things go topsy turvy, as in this case.
I have no legal expertise and shall hence refrain from commenting on any party's statutory ownership or estate if you will, but I reckon that the contract will remain valid, as it was signed in the spirit of cooperation and corporate security from Acumen's point of view. Acumen signed it with the person they had no reason to doubt was the legitimate owner of the scripts/plugins, and that will probably hold in the realm of justice. It doesn't matter if Billy Bell or Willy Wonka signed it -- as long as the public has been intentionally deceived and misled into assuming someone's identity, we cannot be held responsible of that.
pig, you know I respect you for the splendid work you've done on TSR, but if what J described above is true, then..... that was just a low blow. I'd love to hear your side of the story.
At least we have an explanation. An insightful and seemingly credible one at that.
Ain't it shocking how people can hide behind false identities on the internet? It especially hurts when professional and personal relationships are developed based on that identity, with the former taking a larger financial hit when things go topsy turvy, as in this case.
I have no legal expertise and shall hence refrain from commenting on any party's statutory ownership or estate if you will, but I reckon that the contract will remain valid, as it was signed in the spirit of cooperation and corporate security from Acumen's point of view. Acumen signed it with the person they had no reason to doubt was the legitimate owner of the scripts/plugins, and that will probably hold in the realm of justice. It doesn't matter if Billy Bell or Willy Wonka signed it -- as long as the public has been intentionally deceived and misled into assuming someone's identity, we cannot be held responsible of that.
pig, you know I respect you for the splendid work you've done on TSR, but if what J described above is true, then..... that was just a low blow. I'd love to hear your side of the story.
J
We are a professional company and we work with professional people, in a professional world you cannot abuse someone and then expect them to do good work for you at a later date.
J
he had seen a PM sent to me from P which had been insulting to him.
DOUBLE STANDARDS!
MB
I managed to read the lot. I am proud of myself.
It is nice to finally have an update on the pig situation because he's not said much himself. In the shoutbox he'd said that he hadn't signed a contract (soon after CN had said that he had) and this makes a lot more sense now.
It's great to hear that we'll be getting the plugins back.
It is nice to finally have an update on the pig situation because he's not said much himself. In the shoutbox he'd said that he hadn't signed a contract (soon after CN had said that he had) and this makes a lot more sense now.
It's great to hear that we'll be getting the plugins back.
Well Pig's really done himself proud now, hasn't he?
Read through the whole thing, and am glad that the situation is now slightly more clear.
I doubt that will be an end to it, but at least its a beginning, and i hope that the efforts of J, the moderators, and everyone involved can now go forwards, towards a better TSR for everyone.
I doubt that will be an end to it, but at least its a beginning, and i hope that the efforts of J, the moderators, and everyone involved can now go forwards, towards a better TSR for everyone.
Eru Iluvatar
Read through the whole thing, and am glad that the situation is now slightly more clear.
I doubt that will be an end to it, but at least its a beginning, and i hope that the efforts of J, the moderators, and everyone involved can now go forwards, towards a better TSR for everyone.
I doubt that will be an end to it, but at least its a beginning, and i hope that the efforts of J, the moderators, and everyone involved can now go forwards, towards a better TSR for everyone.
Can't disagree with that.
A hell of a lot of pettyness on both sides by the look of things...
Oh well i have faith and appreciate the latest update, although I don't think letting everyone know about the reading of PM's business was a good move.
Oh well i have faith and appreciate the latest update, although I don't think letting everyone know about the reading of PM's business was a good move.
Wtf.
I know you all love pig, and I know he did a lot of amazing things for the site when he was here....but if this story is true, I'm rapidly losing respect for him.
Signing contracts with false information? Leaving the site with no explanation and letting everything devolve into chaos with speculation? Taking away all the site customizations because someone said something mean about him in a PM? Reading peoples' PMs (or getting others to do it for him, or something)...?
Does this not seem so petty to you?
As much as I disapprove of the direction TSR has been headed and the proposed updates, and as much as I'm not sure J has improved the site much...all this chaos is *not* J's fault. How are you supposed to run a site when everyone is flipping out, the person who used to be in major control takes away a zillion things he's built for the site, there is no communication between the various site admins/owners/etc, and everyone hates you?
As I said in another thread, this whole thing is ****ing ridiculous.
I know you all love pig, and I know he did a lot of amazing things for the site when he was here....but if this story is true, I'm rapidly losing respect for him.
Signing contracts with false information? Leaving the site with no explanation and letting everything devolve into chaos with speculation? Taking away all the site customizations because someone said something mean about him in a PM? Reading peoples' PMs (or getting others to do it for him, or something)...?
Does this not seem so petty to you?
As much as I disapprove of the direction TSR has been headed and the proposed updates, and as much as I'm not sure J has improved the site much...all this chaos is *not* J's fault. How are you supposed to run a site when everyone is flipping out, the person who used to be in major control takes away a zillion things he's built for the site, there is no communication between the various site admins/owners/etc, and everyone hates you?
As I said in another thread, this whole thing is ****ing ridiculous.
January Victim
oh and J shouldn't you make this a sticky? so that it doesn't get lost.
For the record and I'm being impartail by saying this; that is only J's side of the story. Pig has his own story, which whilst similar to the one J shows here has important differences. I think it would be inappropriate and difficult for pig to comment on TSR due to the whole situation. Anyway, it really isn't my place to get inbetween these two but please understand there are 2 sides to every story.
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- New to TSR!
- How's life?
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- Thanks TSR!
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