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^Rampastein
Rampastring


Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Location: Gensokyo

PostPosted: Thu Jan 27, 2022 1:20 pm    Post subject:  DTA DISCORD SERVER Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Over the past few years we've mostly moved DTA's development efforts to Discord, and our most active fans are there as well.

If you're looking for discussion, technical support, help with modding, other people to play with or anything else, we highly recommend joining there as it's far more active than this forum and so you'll also receive help much faster.



Join the official DTA Discord server at
https://discord.gg/tgUnvd8

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Crimsonum
Seth


Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Location: Fineland

PostPosted: Fri Jan 28, 2022 9:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

You don't have to yell #Tongue

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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 4:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Honestly, Discord channels do not need to replace forums. It can complement it instead. You can get a faster response in Discord, but the posts created here are visible for the whole internet and search engines and will help other people to get their questions answered without bothering the developers with the same questions over and over again, while messages in Discord will disappear under walls of text.

This kind of post (from Rampa) is extremely toxic and only contributes to deteriorate the existing community as a whole, especially the PPM forums.

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Kerbiter
Cyborg Soldier


Joined: 05 Jun 2018

PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 11:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

So this is "extremely toxic"? Quite hypocritical to hear that from someone who goes out of their way to force their views of how things should be onto others, while also attacking others when they mention Discord (remember how you and Haosis attacked me when I mentioned that to do first-hand testing you need to go to Discord?).

P.S. You also conveniently ignore my requests to lock Phobos thread because I don't want to maintain it.

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WoodleMyNoodle
Cyborg Soldier


Joined: 09 Apr 2018

PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 2:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee wrote:
Honestly, Discord channels do not need to replace forums. It can complement it instead. You can get a faster response in Discord, but the posts created here are visible for the whole internet and search engines and will help other people to get their questions answered without bothering the developers with the same questions over and over again, while messages in Discord will disappear under walls of text.

This kind of post (from Rampa) is extremely toxic and only contributes to deteriorate the existing community as a whole, especially the PPM forums.


I understand that you want to keep your site up till you die as you're passionate about it, but pretending to have good morality by first talking about how they compliment each other, but then screeching when someone mentions that they have a discord server sounds quite contradicting.

Even in an active forum, 90% of the people won't read pages anywhere between the first and the last page, thus the "messages disappearing under walls of text" argument is pretty much non existent and the search engine of both discord and a forum pretty much have the same amount of impact on that human behavior to the same degree.

I'll concede on the fact that forums basically force people to make use the search feature whenever they are searching for something. This means that the amount of re-occurring questions is less compared to discord, but this only counts for that specific group of people, which is usually only the majority on a dead forum and only a very small percentage on an active forum.

Either way, this post is in no way toxic WHATSOEVER and thus your post almost looks like it serves as some kind of drama starter to try and get more traffic on your site.

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m7
Commander


Joined: 17 Apr 2009

PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 3:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Quote:
Honestly, Discord channels do not need to replace forums. It can complement it instead.

This I agree with, there isn't the best form of organization to a Discord in comparison to a custom forum software designed with modding in mind. Just like mods can be complimented with ModDB pages for those who are not engaged in this community but a larger generic modding one.

Quote:
help other people to get their questions answered without bothering the developers with the same questions over and over again, while messages in Discord will disappear under walls of text

It is very possible to create "information" channels in a Discord channel, and is very often used in larger Discords for static information. For example, a few TS/YR mods include a Support channel full of common debugging issues that cannot be posted in normally, as well as a "live support" where not only the developers but also the fans contribute to quickly answer the questions asked. In this exchange, I gain additional support staff while I sleep while players are always receiving help with any issues or questions.

Quote:
extremely toxic and only contributes to deteriorate the existing community as a whole

A hot take, considering the author of the post is directly responsible for my return to modding in 2016 with the CnC Net.

I don't think that there's any proof of aforementioned deterioration, as Banshee is also in several of the mod discords and could at any point see that in comparison to the Skype years, things are much more active and healthy. We have many active thriving mods. Communities are capable of building up to game nights and having competitive lobbies for more serious players to enjoy. Mod content creators and mod authors are streaming their development sessions in voice chats where people can come in and actively learn new skills or see behind-the-scenes developments.

I'll also admit I understand being upset that the work and effort that has been put into this forum software is a work of love and it's hard to see projects decide to engage with the community elsewhere. I can understand many nights of stress about financing servers or finding new homes during moves that can handle PPM's activity levels.

EDIT: To support my argument, this is what PPM looks like on my phone. Rampa's post is clear and easy to read on my 5 1/2" screen, while I have to zoom in to read Crims (not counting as a part of the problem) and Banshees. There is lots of empty space, and the formatting of the posts eats up tons of space. This is loaded via Google Chrome for mobile on an Android phone.

https://imgur.com/a/ZufjFFF Image code doesn't seem to be working correctly with imgur.

Last edited by m7 on Sat Jan 29, 2022 7:11 pm; edited 4 times in total

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Medalmonkey
Missile Trooper


Joined: 26 Nov 2003

PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 4:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

^Rampastein wrote:
Join the official DTA Discord server at
https://discord.gg/tgUnvd8
Joined.

Banshee wrote:
Honestly, Discord channels do not need to replace forums. It can complement it instead.

YES, anyone can make a discord channel. The real question then becomes - If you care about keeping the community together, why haven't you made a PPM discord? Get with the times brother.

Banshee wrote:
This kind of post (from Rampa) is extremely toxic and only contributes to deteriorate the existing community as a whole, especially the PPM forums.

You're wrong. He said "it's far more active than this forum and so you'll also receive help much faster." - He didn't say "don't post on PPM - you wont receive help"
This kind of comment and mindset from the ONLY admin at PPM is actually super toxic. It gives the impression that you think the C&C community is yours to lead...

Instant messenger have always gone hand and hand with forums and no one ever had an issue.

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You can find all of my old work, and all of my new work at my website.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 9:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Quote:
This kind of comment and mindset from the ONLY admin at PPM is actually super toxic. It gives the impression that you think the C&C community is yours to lead...


Amen

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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2022 6:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

There is a lot of posts to reply, so I'm sorry if I'll try to be more objective here and not directly reply all of you because I have a life, although I think I'll cover what most of you said in some way:

Medalmonkey wrote:
If you care about keeping the community together


Medalmonkey wrote:
It gives the impression that you think the C&C community is yours to lead...


This has never been the objective of PPM, nor my objective in any community. PPM is a content producer like many others inside the C&C community and even outside it. It is a place like many others that produce content and depends on user-created content to survive. It was never created to centralize things or destroy other content creators. If you are interested in C&C content, you will have a lot of options like many other sites, forums, ModDB profiles, discord channels, Facebook channels, Twitter profiles, WhatsApp groups, etc... anything any person can create. PPM is inside this universe. Each visitor will have its preferences and the higher the variety of content that is offered, the higher the chances that more people will produce more C&C content to feed the community as a whole. Some people prefer Discord, some others feel more comfortable with forums, others may enjoy both or feel more comfortable with something else. It is ok, not an issue. The fact is that no one will ever control the C&C community as a whole or fully centralize it in one place. Not even those who happen to own the C&C brand. If you try to be some sort of leader or control this community, your mind is simply messed up trying to do the impossible and with a strong tendency to act in a toxic way against the rest of the community.

If you are interested in C&C content, you can browse many of these places that produce C&C content, including PPM. Visitors who are interested in C&C usually browse several communities on a daily basis. Things can work in a collaborative way, we do not need to destroy other communities. The higher the variety of options to produce C&C content, the better for the C&C community as a whole.

Forums like PPM rely on user-created content to survive. And our user-created content is mostly forum posts. If people stop posting here, other visitors will not be motivated to post because they will have the impression that nobody will reply, and then, you'll break a cycle. It is much easier to break things than construct them. Bringing the activity back to the forums requires much more effort than making a post saying that it is "highly recommended" to post in Discord than in a forum because the forum will practically be ignored (in short, it is pretty much the same saying that "stop posting in this forum because it is useless and I don't wanna look at it", except that this was not explicitly said, but it is implicitly in the message.   Those who wanna PPM to become a mere museum of posts either have no understanding that it is not sustainable to maintain PPM as a museum of posts because it requires user-created content to be relevant and visited by people or have ill intentions.

I want to clarify that I have no problems promoting discord channels here, including the one mentioned in the first post. It is actually important to the community that visitors know as many C&C content-producing communities as possible. What I am strongly against is the execution of the first post above where the user implicitly denigrates the relevance and usability of this place, scaring away the existing visitors from this forum from posting here. Be aware that this post was a reaction to this topic. This is why I have said that this post is extremely toxic.



Also, if the current DTA team prefers to use Discord channels to communicate, which is their right to do, they do not need to completely abandon this forum. Things can work in a collaborative way. PPM is able to export posts as RSS feeds and Discord is able to fetch these posts, so they can be alerted when visitors post something relevant here. Also, while it is better to have contact with the developers of a project, fans can help each other in a forum.




Kerbiter wrote:
P.S. You also conveniently ignore my requests to lock the Phobos thread because I don't want to maintain it.


You don't need to maintain it if you don't want it, but I will not close it. Although you are the main developer from Phobos, I am aware that Phobos does have other developers that post on PPM forums and also have visitors that can help other visitors.

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^Rampastein
Rampastring


Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Location: Gensokyo

PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2022 11:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee wrote:
Also, if the current DTA team prefers to use Discord channels to communicate, which is their right to do, they do not need to completely abandon this forum. Things can work in a collaborative way. PPM is able to export posts as RSS feeds and Discord is able to fetch these posts, so they can be alerted when visitors post something relevant here. Also, while it is better to have contact with the developers of a project, fans can help each other in a forum.


I never stated that we'd be abandoning PPM and I agree that things can work in a collaborative way, with forums having their own strengths. I think other people, m7 in particular, pointed out most of the benefits of Discord so I won't repeat most of them here. The important thing is simply that our community is active on Discord and so you can get discussion and help even without staff present. Discord is also what I use for communicating with most people that are relevant to my life and it conveniently also allows me to interact with them and the DTA community at the same time - I don't need to visit the DTA Discord separately like with forums.

I didn't have any toxic intentions with this post either; I simply want to avoid situations where someone wanting help is several days without a reply. I'm glad to see that the other people in this topic didn't see it as toxic.

I'd also reinforce that everything I've said here is my personal opinion and it might or might not be shared among the rest of DTA's staff.

The RSS feed sounds useful. Is there a guide somewhere on how to set it up?

-----------------------------------------

Btw, discussion of this topic on Mod Haven and other Discord servers has also revealed a couple of issues with PPM that hurt its usability as a forum, related to the outdated forum software. Simply, many people think it could use a major CSS facelift. The current look is not only dated, but it offers a poor user experience on mobile devices, and unoptimal scaling even on modern desktops (the default font and other content size on this forum is very small, like it was designed for 1024x768 - and most people nowadays have 1080p displays if not even bigger monitors).

Another thing is the search function of the forum which often makes it harder to find things here than in Discord's search - which makes the forum less optimal for archival purposes. Using Google with site:ppmforums.com often helps with this though.

To demonstrate the point, you can compare the experience here on PPM forums to, for example, the CnCNet forums: https://forums.cncnet.org/

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WoodleMyNoodle
Cyborg Soldier


Joined: 09 Apr 2018

PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2022 2:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee wrote:
so I'm sorry if I'll try to be more objective here and not directly reply all of you because I have a life.

And the wall of text below


Easy cop-out to dodge the tougher questions/arguments considering the fact that everyone has a life but okay.

You decide to post a wall of text consisting of empty meaning, considering you're just stating the obvious and pretend like the argument was caused by our mindset in regards to PPM instead of your poor behavior.

Quote:

Bringing the activity back to the forums requires much more effort than making a post saying that it is "highly recommended" to post in Discord than in a forum because the forum will practically be ignored (in short, it is pretty much the same saying that "stop posting in this forum because it is useless and I don't wanna look at it", except that this was not explicitly said, but it is implicitly in the message.


Stating that a discord is more active than this forum is no other than a fact, and considering how people generally want to be able to give support to those who are having trouble as quick as possible, it's an absolutely normal thing to suggest and create a post about. I get that your feelings were hurt by the fact that a different platform is more active/easier to access/easier to reply on, but there was no hidden message saying people should stop posting in this forum.

I have also read the thread that you posted to, correlating that post with this post being "extremely toxic", and I'll have to say that you're delusional to come to that conclusion. I didn't notice any ill will whatsoever, and I can't even be biased as I've never even spoken a single word to Rampa, or you in my entire life.

If people wanted this forum to die out, you wouldn't have gotten a single donation yet I notice that people have been actively supporting this site for years. (Judging from your donate-to-us thread, you're doing pretty well. Much respect to those who donate)

Thing is, there are simply a lot of benefits that Discord has, compared to this site. And perhaps instead of complaining about it, it's time to give the site some updated features/looks to make things easier to begin with.

Even as I type right now, I see that this textbox only uses 1/4th of the width my screen, forcing me to scroll up and down to quality check what I've been typing. However, Rampa already made this point so I won't go further into it. But perhaps it's time to make a thread to ask for suggestions to improve the site? Assuming you have time to update at all and are not stubborn enough to say that the site is perfectly fine in 2022 as is.

Quote:
Also, if the current DTA team prefers to use Discord channels to communicate, which is their right to do, they do not need to completely abandon this forum.


The DTA guys never said they'd completely abandon the forum by the way.

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Kerbiter (cba to login)
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2022 4:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Also may sound like a revelation to you but many users including me don't want to use the forum even for purposes they are good for, because of ztyping atrocious interface from 2003. I am typing this from my phone and PPM is one of the worst experiences I've had in terms of UI/UX of the service. And instead of attacking users for every mention of Discord (and the fact that PPM is dead as a forum because active userbase spends WAY more time at a more convenient platform) you should consider making the PPM platform convenient for the end user. What I see right now is some kind of delusional course of action where you expand onto PPGames and so on, yet NOBODY asked for this, and you think that is going to work.

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MasterHaosis
General


Joined: 01 Nov 2010
Location: Serbia

PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 12:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

When I do not like some place, or I simply cannot find myself there, or when I try to ,,change" it on my own and it does not work, I simply go and move. I do not create chaos during my leaving, and definitively I do not go to place B, and constantly coming to place A to remind everyone why I moved at all, and promote them place B. I simply go.
Tell me, how hard is that? What does stop you? When will some of you finally go from this ,,dead place" to your ,,superior channel" and leave rest of us alone? Will we survive to see that day?
I mean look at this all! We are here! We are not in Discord, we did not come to your place, some of you came back here arguing. Over and over. From time to time. And that is exactly one of reasons why some people want to move away. Because some people on purpose try to derail what is left from here.

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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 5:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

^Rampastein wrote:
I never stated that we'd be abandoning PPM...

...

I didn't have any toxic intentions with this post either; I simply want to avoid situations where someone wanting help is several days without a reply. I'm glad to see that the other people in this topic didn't see it as toxic.


The use of caps in the title, bigger font in the post, and the fact that this topic was created as a response to a user that asked for support here somewhat made me interpret that you seemed to be annoyed (or simply pissed off) that you had to occasionally visit this place to help a lost soul with the mod. And expressions like "we've mostly moved DTA's development efforts to Discord" and "we highly recommend joining there as it's far more active than this forum and you'll also receive help much faster", with some of the keywords underlined opens the interpretation that you wanted those lost souls to move from this place to the Discord channel because the solution here is "far more inferior". The DTA's Discord channel is more active than the DTA forums here and users may receive responses faster.  It's a fact. There is absolutely no problem with that. However, the use of the adjectives I've underlined in the post only helps to emphasize how bad the current forum looks towards the offered solution from your perspective (at least in the way you worded it), and together with terms like "moved" and "highly recommend", it may imply the visitor to interpret that your recommendation is to actually "abandon this useless place and move to Discord". But, of course, you did not express this idea explicitly. However, it was enough for me to think that this post, in the way it was written, seemed to be toxic for the PPM forums.

If you claim that you did not have the intention to express that and not post a toxic topic, I do believe you. I truly do. I just think that the way this post was written was terrible and it could be easily interpreted by the visitors as a message that this forum is being abandoned by you and the DTA team for the reasons mentioned in the paragraph above.


^Rampastein wrote:
I'd also reinforce that everything I've said here is my personal opinion and it might or might not be shared among the rest of DTA's staff.


And yet, you used the terms "we've mostly moved DTA's development", "our most active fans", "we highly recommend". Your words in the first post don't seem to match the expression of your personal opinion. So, sorry if I seem to be nitpicking you, but my intention here is to show that you have to pay more attention to the way you write announcements anywhere, including on DTA's Discord channel.





^Rampastein wrote:
The RSS feed sounds useful. Is there a guide somewhere on how to set it up?


Unfortunately, there is no automatic way to set up it yet. You need to tell me what kind of post you want it to export and I'll generate the RSS feed and provide you a link for it. We can export topics created by any user or by specific users in a forum, posts from a topic, topics with certain approved keywords, topics with admin approval, or a mix of these things. Once I create the feed and send you its link, you need to use a Discord Bot like that MonitoRSS that Mod Haven uses to import the contents of the feed to the channel that you want.




^Rampastein wrote:
Btw, discussion of this topic on Mod Haven and other Discord servers has also revealed a couple of issues with PPM that hurt its usability as a forum, related to the outdated forum software. Simply, many people think it could use a major CSS facelift. The current look is not only dated, but it offers a poor user experience on mobile devices, and unoptimal scaling even on modern desktops (the default font and other content size on this forum is very small, like it was designed for 1024x768 - and most people nowadays have 1080p displays if not even bigger monitors).


This is a known issue that is in the list of things to do. Unfortunately, some of these things are much more complicated than a mere CSS facelift, because these forums were coded for XHTML 4 and uses tables and some other old HTML stuff. So, I will eventually have to convert both templates (Subsilver, which includes Digital Twilight, Cold Steel and TI) and Ptifo themes to HTML5 format. However, it requires much more free time than what I have nowadays.



^Rampastein wrote:
Another thing is the search function of the forum which often makes it harder to find things here than in Discord's search - which makes the forum less optimal for archival purposes. Using Google with site:ppmforums.com often helps with this though.

To demonstrate the point, you can compare the experience here on PPM forums to, for example, the CnCNet forums: https://forums.cncnet.org/


The search feature from phpBB forums is terrible, to say the least. It's something that needs to be recoded from scratch. During these years, I've been slowly developing a keyword system to facilitate the search for specific types of content, however, assigning keywords for the topics from resources, news, etc using a proper standard is proving to be a challenge and requires more effort to make it easier to maintain. I've recently made the ones related to the news post easier to maintain, but I still have a long road to pave on this matter.

For now, the recommendation is really to use Google with site:ppmforums.com for searching.




-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


And some quick replies for other people:


Medalmonkey wrote:
why haven't you made a PPM discord? Get with the times brother


I never wanted to do a discord channel, or a Twitter, Facebook, etc channel for PPM, because PPM was not designed for it. Discord also makes it worse because I do not know how to export its content back to the forums. I'm considering the possibility of creating a Discord bot for PPM to be used in other channels, to allow people to use Discord to reply to certain messages as posts or replies in the forums. I'm still trying to figure out how does Discord bots work, how to export its content to another server, and all security risks for such solution. I'm still in early stages with it.


WoodleMyNoodle wrote:
Easy cop-out to dodge the tougher questions/arguments considering the fact that everyone has a life but okay.

You decide to post a wall of text consisting of empty meaning, considering you're just stating the obvious and pretend like the argument was caused by our mindset in regards to PPM instead of your poor behavior.


I'm taking several hours to write this post. Hours! Hours that I could be using to code my Ph.D. solution that is far more important to my life than replying to people who don't understand that PPM does not pay my bills (it is a hobby that I use my free time with), that I have real-life beyond PPM  and that includes a home to maintain, parents, girlfriend who I want to marry with, friends, other types of entertainments and even more activities online that goes beyond PPM and all tools I've produced for it and even a mod that I want to eventually to return to work on. I wish I had a team like the one from Discord to revamp the look of this forum and implement many more features that I want to add to this place, but I'm doing what is in my range.

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Crimsonum
Seth


Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Location: Fineland

PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 7:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee wrote:
The use of caps in the title, bigger font in the post, and [...]


That's a lot of words with little actual subject. You're essentially listing a lot of excuses for why you misconstrued it as offensive. Nobody else here viewed it that way. I only joked about the large font because it's unconventional to see here, but it does improve readability over the tiny default font size, especially on mobile view.

In the end, like you said, it's a fact that people will receive a response faster on DTA's Discord server than here, for reasons already stated. It's only reasonable and fair for the end user that an announcement like this was made.

Banshee wrote:
During these years, I've been slowly developing a keyword system to facilitate the search for specific types of content, however, assigning keywords for the topics from resources, news, etc using a proper standard is proving to be a challenge and requires more effort to make it easier to maintain.


Frankly I never believed the keyword system could work, it requires extra work from the writer and they may easily skip it. In other words, it's too dependant on the users.

Functional search features on other forums, like CnCNet's, shows it's possible without keywords.

Banshee wrote:
I'm taking several hours to write this post. Hours! Hours that I could be using to code my Ph.D. solution that is far more important to my life than replying to people who don't understand that PPM does not pay my bills (it is a hobby that I use my free time with), that I have real-life beyond PPM  and that includes a home to maintain, parents, girlfriend who I want to marry with, friends, other types of entertainments and even more activities online that goes beyond PPM and all tools I've produced for it and even a mod that I want to eventually to return to work on. I wish I had a team like the one from Discord to revamp the look of this forum and implement many more features that I want to add to this place, but I'm doing what is in my range.


This is quite dishonest and you know it. You can't blame others for time you choose to invest in writing lengthy forum posts. If it didn't occur to you before, everyone else here has a life too.

Secondly, now you complain of having to work on PPM alone yet you've always been reluctant to have collaborations. For example, back in more active forum days, I remember people wanting new/more moderators due to inactive moderators, but you turned down offers from even respectable forum members. Now (well, for several years tbh) you have trouble developing PPM's backend, yet I see no call for assistance on any forum announcement. There are plenty of people here that could help, I'm sure, but in truth you want to keep full control to yourself.

I once checked the past PPM birthday posts and every single time, for the last 10 years or so, you always state the same thing: it's either your master's thesis, doctorate or whatever paper you're working on at the time that consumed all your time that year. Even if it's true, stating it repeatedly makes it come off as an excuse. It's a problem you created for yourself: You could have had other people to stand in for you when you were busy, yet you wanted to keep the reins to yourself. So here we are, with a forum that's hopelessly outdated.

Despite my criticism, I do respect all the time and effort you've invested in PPM over the years. I simply question some choices in management.

- - -

Finally, I recommend splitting this thread.

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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 2:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Crimsonum wrote:
That's a lot of words with little actual subject. You're essentially listing a lot of excuses for why you misconstrued it as offensive.


Crimsonum: I reiterate that this announcement could be written in a more careful way, otherwise it may easily get dangerously "misconstructed" by anyone for the simple fact that the person is transmitting ideas that differ from the ones their consciousness wants to transmit.

Crimsonum wrote:
Frankly I never believed the keyword system could work, it requires extra work from the writer and they may easily skip it. In other words, it's too dependant on the users.


Currently, it is a fair point. It is too dependent on the user. I hope that, with some changes to the user interface, I will be able to overcome a part of this limitation.

Crimsonum wrote:
This is quite dishonest and you know it. You can't blame others for time you choose to invest in writing lengthy forum posts. If it didn't occur to you before, everyone else here has a life too.


Nope, it is not dishonest at all. As an administrator of this place, people do expect my responses and I need to be very careful about how I word my ideas here. I need to ensure that these things are coherent (at least for me). I cannot write things in an irresponsible way and insult those people who happen to be writing things that I don't like. Also, English is not my mother tongue, and my vocabulary is still very limited. Although I constantly try to improve my English skills, it is also an obstacle for me.

Furthermore, you guys have some sort of idea that I have much more free time than what I really have and basically no understanding that when I spend too much time on PPM, I do compromise other real-life priorities. Note, however, that the time I spend working on PPM is my choice at the end of the day.

Crimsonum wrote:
Secondly, now you complain of having to work on PPM alone yet you've always been reluctant to have collaborations. For example, back in more active forum days, I remember people wanting new/more moderators due to inactive moderators, but you turned down offers from even respectable forum members. Now (well, for several years tbh) you have trouble developing PPM's backend, yet I see no call for assistance on any forum announcement. There are plenty of people here that could help, I'm sure, but in truth you want to keep full control to yourself.


I want to have certain control over things that I may consider to be strategic, but the term full control is completely exaggerated. Regarding moderators, it is not a matter of having control, but I agree that I am very selective. I tend to avoid people who I think have a hard time controlling their anger or act harshly on people, regardless of how "respectful" the person is. For instance, I don't want a moderator with the kind of attitude that you see from Kerbiter on this topic.

Regarding the backend, I do have concerns about giving away the code for security matters. And, yea, I have no plans to give full FTP access to the site to anyone also due to security concerns, so in this specific case, if you complain that I want to have "full control", you have a fair point. However, there are parts of the forum code that I can share, including the creation of forum themes is something that I do stimulate people to do (which is why we have the TI theme, which was not created by me). I just don't expect that anyone will want to do the conversion of the code of this forum to HTML5 and recode the CSS either to make it more friendly because they will have a hard time testing it.

However, I've always asked for help on news posting, which anyone could have done by creating topics on the Submit Your News forum and it is hard to get help with it. I've always promoted people's created events and content here. I have absolutely no control over these things and I have no plans to control them at all. This is the kind of help that I always request and it is quite scarce. However, the site urgently needs these things to survive. So, I need to do a lot of effort to keep the news flowing instead of using this time to improve things in terms of infrastructure. For this reason, most of the effort in terms of infrastructure was to improve it to keep the news flowing instead of spending more time on UI and other visible features.


Crimsonum wrote:
I once checked the past PPM birthday posts and every single time, for the last 10 years or so, you always state the same thing: it's either your master's thesis, doctorate or whatever paper you're working on at the time that consumed all your time that year. Even if it's true, stating it repeatedly makes it come off as an excuse.


And it is true, regardless if it sounds like an excuse. Crimsonum, these things have tight deadlines and demand a lot of effort. In Brazil, master's and doctorate degrees do have tight deadlines. It can't be done forever. I couldn't postpone my qualification exam last year anymore and I had to submit a full paper as a requirement to do this qualification exam. To make things worse, I couldn't use my PhD. thesis content in this full paper because I haven't reached the stage where I have results with it. Depending on what you do there, it can really become a lifetime job that is much hard than creating a full-scale mod for any C&C game.


Crimsonum wrote:
Despite my criticism, I do respect all the time and effort you've invested in PPM over the years. I simply question some choices in management.


That's fair.


Crimsonum wrote:
Finally, I recommend splitting this thread.


I agree with you, although I think it should be done after the first post gets edited. But I don't think it is up to me to do that. I understand that it is a task from the DTA staff.

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WoodleMyNoodle
Cyborg Soldier


Joined: 09 Apr 2018

PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 3:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee wrote:
Crimsonum: I reiterate that this announcement could be written in a more careful way, otherwise it may easily get dangerously "misconstructed" by anyone for the simple fact that the person is transmitting ideas that differ from the ones their consciousness wants to transmit.


That only "anyone" is you, really. By anyone looking at this thread objectively, it's perfectly understandable that it's meant in a positive way.
You're just incredibly biased as you feel like your passion is under fire. Which is understandable to a degree, you're just missing an awful lot of self-reflection to actually admit it.



Banshee wrote:
I cannot write things in an irresponsible way and insult those people who happen to be writing things that I don't like.


I am not sure if you realize the irony within..............

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Banshee
Supreme Banshee


Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam)
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Location: Brazil

PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 4:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

You have your point of view, I have mine. Nobody is forced to agree with each other.

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Graion Dilach
Defense Minister


Joined: 22 Nov 2010
Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary

PostPosted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 6:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I had RL commitments to participate in this thread yesterday but as one of the core donators of the recent years I thought I'll share my opinion. Especially considering that some of the people already brought up donations.

Using Discord as "the platform" is unfortunate because it lacks transparency and it is extremely hard to filter out information from the noise. It is good for discussions, but it isn't an efficient way to archive information and it never will be. The community needs a forum and a database to remain relevant and grant open access to information for people who would start out and ModEnc and PPM covers this.

Yes, PPM is a hard-to-manage badly-aged forum platform and  I would have never made the decision myself to stay and fork away phpBB 2. I still don't intend to crucify Banshee just because of that. I will give credit to him that PPM atleast survives, unlike RenProj, the Revora skeleton which remained from C&CGuild, Sleipnirstuff closure, C&CDEN... the list goes on. And I do agree with him that handling over forum authority above a level is a really hard pick, especially when I consider how the community's view on PPM's reputation was during the days I started taking an active role in the community. Hell, DCoder was famously banned because he broke the forum software back then for trolling! And while a lot of things changed in the last decade, it didn't changed for the better.

I also somewhat disagree with the PPGame/other mods commitment Banshee pulled in the recent years but for the completely different reason: this is way too little and too late to gather the actual impact it needs to succeed. That was a promise on something which Banshee knew he has no time to actually commit to, and you need a core concept to build a community around. "Other games" is vague, but concentrating on game X would need actual preparations and interactions with that game. A decade ago I was among the people who got invitation to a private community formed upon SoulCaliburUniverse's closure. SCU was a casual-friendly fan forum, which was killed when the lack of news between SC4 and SC5 let forumers to roam freely (some of us outright twisted the board into roleplaying a pirate ship fueled on Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny... those were the days). Oasis was basically a friends-together forum which only worked for a few years because we had too little in common and we didn't consider growing and the administrator wasn't committed enough to provide a direction. Oasis died silently in a few years. I did consider starting a thread on my achievements in the Infinity Engine modding communities as an example of showcasing how my C&C mindset and skillset fares there, but considering that my reasons behind leaving the community were all personal, I do not think I want the attention.

I mean, my disillusionment is strong enough with the community that I can easily see what triggered Banshee's initial post and I can agree with that. There were absolutely zero need for the huge font although I would say taht this probably would have worked better as a ModDB announcement mirrored (also, your Discord button on ModDB feels really much as an afterthought).

Kerbiter's attitude is amusing though, I assumed after all these years with leading Mod Haven and Phobos actually gave him leadership skills, but he's still a kid. A bright one, I give him that, but a kid nonetheless. Never treat Wisdom and Charisma as your dump stat at the same time.

TLDR: I have one reason to back PPM - and that is that this is the last active transparent bastion of the TS/RA2 modding scene. It's not about TI, DTA, Zombapro or any other name-it project which has a subforum and/or a site here... it's only about to ensure that the publicly and transparently available information remains publicly and transparently available; and Discord does not provide the transparency required. And I have more than enough respect for Banshee despite the regular-suspensions back then or the actual fact that I had set up a backup account for ban evasion eight years ago(!) that I am more than willing to keep up with Banshee's naive and somewhat-foolish goals just to ensure that everything else remains available. If people don't see the value in that then... that sucks, but I shrugged off more than all that by now.

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"If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
=======================
Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
=======================
WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more...

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Allied General
General


Joined: 19 Mar 2004
Location: United Kingdom

PostPosted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 11:49 am    Post subject: Re: DTA DISCORD SERVER Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

^Rampastein wrote:
Over the past few years we've mostly moved DTA's development efforts to Discord, and our most active fans are there as well.

If you're looking for discussion, technical support, help with modding, other people to play with or anything else, we highly recommend joining there as it's far more active than this forum and so you'll also receive help much faster.



Join the official DTA Discord server at
https://discord.gg/tgUnvd8


Thanks for sharing, looking forever to developments for DTA and the client which can be shared on forums and modding channels where relevant.

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drive
Grenadier


Joined: 11 May 2013
Location: In a moving Trompete.

PostPosted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Sorry but until now I though DTA was dead.

Got Developer version of DTA see it got some updates cant find any information what gets updated thats all. (thought that its rampa playing around with code only)

Allways laughed hard when I read Rampastring saying DTA had much work in the background happening, even this mostly got written on Moddb when it was Mod of the year voting time.

But whatever, I will play dead just like the DTA ppmsite forum does.

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Zorbung
Soldier


Joined: 04 Jun 2021

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2022 12:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I don't think the RA2 community is rotten to the core as some have said in other posts outside this thread, it's just lacking a strong leadership.

The few kings that influence the community are lone wolves who divide the community even though they each offer some specific quality. I see AlexB (king of patches) with his strong Ares which can't be ignored by any serious modders, Kerbiter (king of online) with CnCNet and Phobos giving bread to the masses, Banshee (king of modding) with his ppmforums as a long-time modding base which will always stand vital for newcomers, Olaf (king of tools) with his primal tools (and the less known XWIS) that have greatly influenced the RA2/YR modding community, and the mysterious Renegade (king of documentation), of which I personally don't know much about, with his ModEnc that acts as an invaluable source of information, where many talented contributors have left their mark.

Right now Kerbiter has the upper hand with a strong playerbase on CnCNet but those being mostly just leaches who just come and play and can hardly be considered community as they do not contribute in any way, and also a real-time presence on Mod Heaven discord, which is more of a social gathering and less of a good modding environment.

It's a pity we don't have a true leader to bring all this amazing quality together in a way or another, and all we can do as modders is pick the best of each world, and watch useless threads like this where kings and followers bash each other for no reason from time to time...

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^Rampastein
Rampastring


Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Location: Gensokyo

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2022 1:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Well, I'm finally spending the energy to respond to what was / is going on here.

The drama here resulted in making the post more effective and brought in an influx of new users to DTA's Discord server.

Banshee wrote:
The use of caps in the title, bigger font in the post ...

I did this because of the aforementioned issue that everything on these forums is tiny by modern standards.

As for the rest in the paragraph, despite that it might not be obvious at times, I also have a life, and wrote the initial announcement quickly during a short break from work. I didn't spend a lot of time formulating it, rather my thought at the time was that I wanted to get something out quickly to tell visitors that DTA's community is more active on Discord. I can re-formulate it later to be less hasty, although I still want to the make the point clear.

Banshee wrote:
And yet, you used the terms "we've mostly moved DTA's development", "our most active fans", "we highly recommend". Your words in the first post don't seem to match the expression of your personal opinion.

I was referring to everything that I had written in my previous post; the post that you replied to. Not to the announcement. Although, the rest of the active staff seemed to agree with me later on.

We can discuss the RSS feed separately if we can find the time to set it up.

drive wrote:
Sorry but until now I though DTA was dead.

You haven't been following even this forum much then. We released two major updates last year, version 8 in August and version 9 in December, both with significant changes and additions. We posted announcements to ModDB, which PPM mirrored. We're often having online games with 10+ players in the lobby. And work on DTA has still continued past version 9 and we have multiple additions to reveal and release this year, from new map assets to playable content (maps and missions) to a new map editor.

Zorbung wrote:
I don't think the RA2 community is rotten to the core as some have said in other posts outside this thread, it's just lacking a strong leadership. ...

DTA is a TS mod, so I'm not sure how relevant the RA2 community is here, despite some overlap. Your post is also wrong in multiple different ways. I first thought I'd let it be, but I'll channel my inner teacher-by-profession and point out a few:

- AlexB owns Ares. I guess a few years ago he could've still been considered "King", but nowadays there's also other patching projects for YR, most notably Phobos.

- Kerbiter doesn't own CnCNet. He's an important contributor, but far from the only one, and, while I don't mean to dismiss his work and consider him a friend, he's far from the biggest contributors. There is no single "king" in the CnCNet staff. It's a loose organization/group of people with specific members handling their own specialties, with no one controlling the entire organization.

- Olaf and Renegade haven't been active in the community in over a decade. There's also various reasons why they can't be considered "kings".

- There is no competition or "clash of kings" between all the people you mentioned.

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Zorbung
Soldier


Joined: 04 Jun 2021

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2022 5:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

@Rampa
Being an outsider I don't claim to know all the details about the community, my post was just a snapshot of how I see things at the moment, but maybe some people being insiders for too long can no longer see the bigger picture either.


As for the original post, if we're at exchanging teachings, it DOES seem toxic to me. If I can reword it a bit for you:

"Our place is better than this, don't waste your time here and come to us instead. Click here."

It was natural to ruffle some feathers. My point is, if you're not looking for drama then don't start the first episode.

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^Rampastein
Rampastring


Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Location: Gensokyo

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2022 6:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Zorbung wrote:
Being an outsider I don't claim to know all the details about the community, my post was just a snapshot of how I see things at the moment, but maybe some people being insiders for too long can no longer see the bigger picture either.


I suggest you educate yourself then before pushing such labels on people. I've belonged to the CnCNet staff since 2011, pretty sure I have a good picture of how our own staff is organized. Likewise, I know more or less all the active programmers in the TS&RA2 communities and interact with them often, so I can confidently state that Olaf and Renegade not having been active in over a decade is a fact.

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Kerbiter
Cyborg Soldier


Joined: 05 Jun 2018

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2022 6:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Straying in just to say I fully support Rampastring's statements including the ones about myself. And if you consider my admin role at CnCNet the "crown" then you must know that it doesn't differ from any other CnCNet developer roles except from the ability to add more developers. I was just asking Tore too much about giving developer roles to different contributors around the community so we agreed to give me the role just so that I can manage adding new contributors myself without needing to always bother him.

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Using MagicaVoxel to create voxel models :: Phobos YR Engine Extension

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Zorbung
Soldier


Joined: 04 Jun 2021

PostPosted: Sun Feb 27, 2022 1:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

@Rampastein

Edit: I think there's a misunderstanding here... People spending too much time on social media tend to be very ad litteram and miss the point while I was simply being metaphorical which added fuel to the fire.

By kings I didn't mean rulers or masters, but individuals with enough free time/resources/passion/charisma that have managed to bring people together or have left a strong mark on the community, in a way or another. There are probably more kings than my list. It doesn't matter if they're active or not. Under these terms, DeeZire can also be considered a "founder king" in my opinion. I hope I made myself more clear this time.

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MasterHaosis
General


Joined: 01 Nov 2010
Location: Serbia

PostPosted: Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Zorbung, well you summed pretty much some of the things here. I like your observations

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Bittah Commander
Defense Minister


Joined: 21 May 2003
Location: The Netherlands

PostPosted: Sat Apr 23, 2022 11:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Banshee wrote:
I never wanted to do a discord channel, or a Twitter, Facebook, etc channel for PPM, because PPM was not designed for it. Discord also makes it worse because I do not know how to export its content back to the forums. I'm considering the possibility of creating a Discord bot for PPM to be used in other channels, to allow people to use Discord to reply to certain messages as posts or replies in the forums. I'm still trying to figure out how does Discord bots work, howa to export its content to another server, and all security risks for such solution. I'm still in early stages with it.

Until you can get around to creating a Discord bot that can repost discord messages as forum posts, I think that even creating a read-only PPM discord that only reposts every new forum post as a Discord message would already be very beneficial to improve the time it takes people to respond to forum posts.
Discord has the benefit that it doesn't require people to go out of their way to specifically check whether there are new messages in any of the channels they follow: when there are new messages it just displays a red dot over Discord's icon, which prompts me to open Discord when I have the time, view the new message that has been posted and then immediately reply. With a read-only PPM Discord we'd similarly get an instant visual indicator when a new message is posted, we'd be able to read it directly on discord with a more high-res friendly and mobile-friendly font and we'd be able to immediately reply (ideally via a link in the message that takes you directly to the post) - instead of replying when we happen to be going out of our way to visit PPM to see whether there's any new messages (which at least for me is easy to forget because of how used to Discord's convenience I've gotten and because of how often there are no new messages when I do check).

I believe that people have already gotten used to the fact that new messages and replies at PPM come very slow, which causes people to check the forums less frequently, which makes PPM's activity even slower and so on, in a continuous downward spiral. So while setting up an RSS feed and Discord bot that mirrors PPM messages for DTA specifically would certainly get us to reply to messages here quicker, doing it for the forums as a whole in an official PPM Discord could already do a lot for ending this downward spiral (even more so when you eventually also make it possible to post forum messages via Discord).

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