Gerard

Beta 1 was available to the public back in February (which I'm using right now), but that was stopped after a while. As Don says, May 5th is the next public release (RC1).

He was suggesting that you only get 3 uploads a day, so it can't be much work for you to approve mods.

We've talked a lot about the selection of elites, but are you happy with their privileges? Is there anything else you can think of that they should be afforded? What about some advantage on MTA, such as access to the heavy weapons (minigun, RPG etc)?

Nice. Just like we did... 3 years ago? After an overhaul of our rules and staffing, we changed everything from a free-for-all banfest into a society where members earned respect and everyone was dealt with fairly. No double standards, no bad days.I'm really impressed when our staff realise they're having a bad day, or realise they're getting angry at someone, and they step back and hand over to someone else. It's far too easy just to go psycho on someone that's annoying you, but it shows real maturity to admit you're not in the best position and be able to step back. Our staff also have the option to temporarily suspend someone until an Admin is available to deal with the problem fully (whether it be a warning, suspension or ban). Oh that's reassuring! Sounds like they have some good staff. Hiring ex-cons might explain the harshness of the moderators there... . Time after time we get members coming here complaining of unfair treatment. It's been happening for years, and there are loads of independent topics about it. That's not just a happy coincidence, that's a steady stream of overzealous moderating.As for allowing someone to stay given that many warnings, that's equally bad moderating. I don't know what political detail there was to his incident, but he was treated very differently to the average member. And by allowing him to stay, it looks like you allowed a lot of damage to happen. A long-term suspension (eg a month, 3 months) usually does the trick in these situations - which we sometimes do to very active members (eg Connor/Twisted). Here we insist on it. Also we (almost) always PM (or email) a member to explain why we are warning/suspending/banning them, explaining exactly what the consequences of that are, and advising them how they can avoid it happening in the future. I find that members appreciate us being open and honest, and quite often we get a sincere apology in reply to that, and it never happens again. But (as with GTA F) if the member is obviously a spam bot, or a banned member that keeps coming back to spam, often we simply don't need to send a PM because the reason is obvious. Earthbound - I don't think anyone has mentioned an unprovoked ban, but simply a ban being used as a retaliation to any negative comment or even questioning staff. Spider - No I haven't had any warnings. Only Sky messing around by banning me for a laugh. By "none for a couple of months" I was referring to raybob.

Nope, not at all. Entirely decided by staff, currently there is no other criteria except the staff agreeing that they're good enough.

Isn't that just basically a gang then? But with privileges instead of teamwork?

When we promote staff, we have a very simple rule. Anyone who asks to become staff will not be considered. If they don't know the forum well enough to realise that we don't give people admin access just for asking nicely, then they don't know the forum well enough to become a member of staff. A similar policy could apply to elites? Anyone who is arrogant enough to think they should become elite, is too arrogant to be an elite. Although I do like the idea of running a campaign, getting friends together to show off. So.. perhaps if the staff pick a few people to be nominated, and announce those nominations. Then those members do everything they can to persuade the staff to pick them as an elite, such as running a campaign, a petition, owning everyone on MTA or whatever. Similar to this.

Sounds like he wants to change his PC's internal IP (for his local network). Which is easy if he just goes into the TCP/IP settings of his connection and configures them manually, instead of using DHCP.

Do you mean your own bones? I've broken both my arms (separately), but nothing else of my own. As for other people's bones, I smash them all the time!

I think the suggestion of voting then vetoing is a bit long and complicated. I think a better version would be that members need (say) 10 nominations before the Staff consider them as being an Elite. That way the membership could put loads of people forward, and the staff would discuss them - rather than waiting for the staff to get round to it themselves (which could take a while). Obviously if someone got rejected, they'd have to not be nominated again for (say) 6 months. Would we make a big deal out of it? Probably not. I mean it's cool having elite status, so every time we promoted a few members there would probably be an announcement or something. But not as big as the Awards, and not an announcement for every individual new elite (like we do with Staff). We could do it every month, and make it a regular thing? Groups for gangs are being worked on at the moment. There are a few behind-the-scenes things happening with the gangs and the servers, and we're waiting for the big plan to be fully worked out before we start implementing it.

With regards to money, it's not fair for people to gain access to things just for paying. This site is about its users, and those that contribute the most should gain rewards, not just those who have rich parents or their own credit card. Not to mention a large number of our visitors are young (as in not adults) so are not physically able to pay, never mind legally able to enter a contract! And I'm not sure how the site benefits if noobs simply pay Chris to have access to stuff we currently reserve for the best members? The current Elite group (which was expanded from the Veterans group) mostly contains those who have made valuable contributions to the site over time, and as such contains a lot of inactive users. The active Elites are all in gangs, so they do all their social activity in the private gang areas rather than in the Elite section. As such the Elite area is just dead, and always has been. Sometimes you need a few noobs to spice things up, and obviously the lack of that means people have nothing to moan about. And we don't want to restrict topics in the rest of the forum (to convince Elites to post them in there). So perhaps we should expand the Elite group to be all the decent active users - rather than a tiny number of the best? I'm sure we could work out a balance that encompassed exclusivity with activity. Are there any other features we should add for Elites, or any that we should restrict from non-elites?

Wow an entire page without a photo. You guys suck.

Limited colours FTW Should have some real pics up soon

Actually you have 5.... 3 Formal and 2 Verbal None for a couple of months now, which is good. Same with Connor.

Warnings on this site are a historical record. Having a warning listed on your account isn't a punishment, it's just information for staff dealing with an incident in future. For example, if someone was a spammer when they first registered, and got lots of warnings, then went quiet for a year, then they started spamming again, we would know that they had done that in the past, so we could deal with it much easier. We know it's not an accident or one-off, because of the history. But it doesn't stop him being a member and using everything (unless he is suspended/banned). What difference would it make if it was removed? There's no advantage or disadvantage (to you) of either. But for staff, it lets us make the right decision.

http://messenger.msn.com/STATUS.ASPX

Manchester? That means he's under my jurisdiction as a cop. Fun!

You write fan fic and put it on my wiki... But I'll leave out the opinion and comment about the above

The current betas of Windows 7 actually have the SAME system requirements than Vista. Add that to working faster, and it's all good. Requirement Vista Premium Windows 7 CPU 1GHz 1GHz RAM 1GB 1GB GPU 128MB 128MB And of course both need DirectX 9 cards and 16gb of HD space available.

He's been here since november - how long does he get to learn? As for name changes - a lot of the staff have been through a change once or twice. That's once or twice ever. Many staff are choosing to use their real names now (eg Chris, Gerard, Sherman) instead of their old pseudonyms (Pyr0xide, Xenon/Zino, Sky/Skyline787). This is changed simply because you regret your initial choice and choose to use something better. Changing it every few weeks, or changing it to hide from people (pretending to be someone new) is just wrong, and not what the system was intended for. There was a time when you had to pay for a name change in forum dollars, and perhaps that should return.

Anybody know why you can spot these a mile away?

Assume it's a REAL virus that will activate itself and kill everyones computers. Normally we would fix it with virus scans, updates etc. However, if we think it's fake, a lot of people won't bother. April Fools Day is the perfect cover - even Chris just said it is obviously fake, so assuming he was in charge of a big company, he might not bother patching the vulnerability, and if it's real you're in the shit. As Sky said, the creator WANTS everyone to think it is an April fools joke so that they don't protect against it, and he wins. This is the same with ANY news that happens on April 1st, everyone assumes it's fake, so that is when companies announce a lot of (real) bad news, so people deliberately ignore it.

It happened at my school years ago, was all over the papers ages after it happened, when they found it in google maps.

Not sarcastic. Was talking about the one on the site: "Zac Efron is fucking gay. Anyone who voted for this douche is another one of those Disney Channel Bitches."