As people have been asking a lot of questions about this, I feel that I will just have to make a further explanation on the how and why I demoted meggawatts, a Valar that has been around since the beginning of time.
This article is about my perception, my experience with him as a person, and what lead me to taking this decision.
In order to have this project go into a direction I want it to go, it is important that my administrators have the same vision and collaborate, constructive nature to continue the project. As a Valar, 'playing' Minecraft actually becomes work, instead of play. In the early days when the community wasn't really big, and consisted of a handful of people, decisions were made by a single entity/person that hold absolute authority and decision making power. As the project grew, responsibilities came to life, and workload increased. Thus the need arised to have administrators that focused especially on an aspect of the server: the Valar.
I put Meggawatts in charge of managing and maintaining a server box called Thesia. Thesia was responsible for running Freebuild and Teamspeak. Overtime, new services and extra's were added to it, and plugins/code/server functioning 'behind the screens' changed dramatically. Despite me sometimes saying that I didn't want certain things to be run that way, for example how permissions were being handled, the introduction of new ranks, a self-declared terms of service for freebuild that conflicted with the 'official terms of service', ... this caused great frustration on my end, as I feel that he disregarded what I said most of the time, with what to me feels as an 'bugger off'-attitude. If you would ask people who have been around for a quite long time, they would know me as someone who doesn't make demands often, but when I do, I expect them to be done.
As time went on, Meggawatts had something that other Valar didn't had: a sense of freedom, and the possibility to be free. He claimed a domain called mcme.co, hosted it on the server I allowed him to use, though the original intent was merely Freebuild and Teamspeak. At first I had mixed feelings about this, because it felt as if it would split up informational sources and services, but I decided to wait it out anyway. After a while though, mcme.co became a very extensible website with running processes not visible to the user (our own whitelist processing program, api calls, mail services, url shortening, wiki ...). Those things are what Meggawatts excels in, and he did a great job doing those. But I didnt want two websites to co-excist, I wanted it under one common banner, since that allows me to enforce the policies (Terms of Service and Rules, and the direction of where the community goes) that fall upon everyone in this community. I can't enforce a policy over things I can't influence or control directly, and that's when the problem began.
I sent a request to Meggawatts with my expectations of what I wanted to do and see, basically it was moving over the functionality of mcme.co to mcmiddleearth.com, more specifically:
- The integration of whitelisting on mcmiddleearth.com, so we could look into hooking it up with forum registrations.
- Featuring the Resourcepacks and changelogs on mcmiddleearth.com and promoting the use of these packs to enhance the community collaboration so we can get better and faster texture updates and improvements.
- Have the Bounder Pages (Oathbreaker list and Bounder page) available on mcmiddleearth.com for quicker access.
- Closing registration and edits on mcme.co's wiki, so we would have the time to move over the articles to the wiki on mcmiddleearth.com, so that we could focus on only editing one wiki with credential information.
Instead of collaborating, he replied to me with: 'I don't want code that I've written to run on a domain that I don't own.'
That really ticked me off, especially since all bukkit code is GPL, and the Terms of Service states that everything that is saved on the machines, is property of Minecraft Middle-Earth. There is no I or mine.
This final act made me had enough of his behaviour, and I demoted him because of the direct breach of the Terms of Service. I logged into the machine and took archives of what was available there. In a retaliation attempt, Meggawatts shut me off completely of my own server (which I pay for) that I allowed him to use for Freebuild and Teamspeak. He changed all the passwords, including the root password, and made the server lock me out completely. To me, this is an act of sabotage. Nobody gets to impose demands in project they voluntarily chose to participate in, and especially not using data as a leverage to get what you want and contest my decision. This is when I realized that we no longer trusted each other.
As safety measure, I disabled the power supply remotely so no harm could come to Thesia. Meggawatts proved unwilling to hand over the passwords, I do however were able to recover everything through Linux Single User Mode, and reassessed control over Thesia.
I had a long discussion with Meggawatts, that didn't really help us anywhere, I offered him to stay as the main developer, which he didn't respond to. Even though his code is not copyrighted or owned by him, I chose to not use his code as a courtesy. I asked him if he wanted me to submit the code that he wrote to him, to which he didn't respond as well.
This is is the reasonwhy some services are or were unavailable: Teamspeak and Freebuild, which ran on Thesia. mcme.co which was hosted on Thesia, various 'behind-the-screens' functionality that ceased to work such as automatic server texture pack downloading, automatic whitelist processing, email services, url shortening, ...
As of this moment I have found a few new developers to restore the functionality, without making use of the old code.
I found it pretty sad that it had lead to this, but I felt it was necessary to do.
This article is about my perception, my experience with him as a person, and what lead me to taking this decision.
In order to have this project go into a direction I want it to go, it is important that my administrators have the same vision and collaborate, constructive nature to continue the project. As a Valar, 'playing' Minecraft actually becomes work, instead of play. In the early days when the community wasn't really big, and consisted of a handful of people, decisions were made by a single entity/person that hold absolute authority and decision making power. As the project grew, responsibilities came to life, and workload increased. Thus the need arised to have administrators that focused especially on an aspect of the server: the Valar.
I put Meggawatts in charge of managing and maintaining a server box called Thesia. Thesia was responsible for running Freebuild and Teamspeak. Overtime, new services and extra's were added to it, and plugins/code/server functioning 'behind the screens' changed dramatically. Despite me sometimes saying that I didn't want certain things to be run that way, for example how permissions were being handled, the introduction of new ranks, a self-declared terms of service for freebuild that conflicted with the 'official terms of service', ... this caused great frustration on my end, as I feel that he disregarded what I said most of the time, with what to me feels as an 'bugger off'-attitude. If you would ask people who have been around for a quite long time, they would know me as someone who doesn't make demands often, but when I do, I expect them to be done.
As time went on, Meggawatts had something that other Valar didn't had: a sense of freedom, and the possibility to be free. He claimed a domain called mcme.co, hosted it on the server I allowed him to use, though the original intent was merely Freebuild and Teamspeak. At first I had mixed feelings about this, because it felt as if it would split up informational sources and services, but I decided to wait it out anyway. After a while though, mcme.co became a very extensible website with running processes not visible to the user (our own whitelist processing program, api calls, mail services, url shortening, wiki ...). Those things are what Meggawatts excels in, and he did a great job doing those. But I didnt want two websites to co-excist, I wanted it under one common banner, since that allows me to enforce the policies (Terms of Service and Rules, and the direction of where the community goes) that fall upon everyone in this community. I can't enforce a policy over things I can't influence or control directly, and that's when the problem began.
I sent a request to Meggawatts with my expectations of what I wanted to do and see, basically it was moving over the functionality of mcme.co to mcmiddleearth.com, more specifically:
- The integration of whitelisting on mcmiddleearth.com, so we could look into hooking it up with forum registrations.
- Featuring the Resourcepacks and changelogs on mcmiddleearth.com and promoting the use of these packs to enhance the community collaboration so we can get better and faster texture updates and improvements.
- Have the Bounder Pages (Oathbreaker list and Bounder page) available on mcmiddleearth.com for quicker access.
- Closing registration and edits on mcme.co's wiki, so we would have the time to move over the articles to the wiki on mcmiddleearth.com, so that we could focus on only editing one wiki with credential information.
Instead of collaborating, he replied to me with: 'I don't want code that I've written to run on a domain that I don't own.'
That really ticked me off, especially since all bukkit code is GPL, and the Terms of Service states that everything that is saved on the machines, is property of Minecraft Middle-Earth. There is no I or mine.
This final act made me had enough of his behaviour, and I demoted him because of the direct breach of the Terms of Service. I logged into the machine and took archives of what was available there. In a retaliation attempt, Meggawatts shut me off completely of my own server (which I pay for) that I allowed him to use for Freebuild and Teamspeak. He changed all the passwords, including the root password, and made the server lock me out completely. To me, this is an act of sabotage. Nobody gets to impose demands in project they voluntarily chose to participate in, and especially not using data as a leverage to get what you want and contest my decision. This is when I realized that we no longer trusted each other.
As safety measure, I disabled the power supply remotely so no harm could come to Thesia. Meggawatts proved unwilling to hand over the passwords, I do however were able to recover everything through Linux Single User Mode, and reassessed control over Thesia.
I had a long discussion with Meggawatts, that didn't really help us anywhere, I offered him to stay as the main developer, which he didn't respond to. Even though his code is not copyrighted or owned by him, I chose to not use his code as a courtesy. I asked him if he wanted me to submit the code that he wrote to him, to which he didn't respond as well.
This is is the reasonwhy some services are or were unavailable: Teamspeak and Freebuild, which ran on Thesia. mcme.co which was hosted on Thesia, various 'behind-the-screens' functionality that ceased to work such as automatic server texture pack downloading, automatic whitelist processing, email services, url shortening, ...
As of this moment I have found a few new developers to restore the functionality, without making use of the old code.
I found it pretty sad that it had lead to this, but I felt it was necessary to do.
You always were my favorite turtle! Thank you!
