dhiren.za.net

A long time ago, there was a forum that was run by a bunch of dicks. aCe decided to start his own forum which would theoretically not be run by dicks.
aCe recruited The Smack to run the new forum with him. This explains why smack’s user id is lower than ace’s.

Anyways, ace and smack were two admins of the site, and it began to grow. Unfortunately, as it grew, there were disagreements in the way the site should be run.
Smack wanted the forum to be more fun and relaxed, ace wanted to be more strict on issues like spam and “worthless” posts.
Smack wanted the forum to be friendly to all types of people, ace seemingly wanted to make it a tech forum first and foremost, with other topics being secondary.

After a while, these disagreements became stronger, with the end result being that ace removed smack’s admin permissions.
I’m trying to recall exactly what happened that lead to this... it was a combination of the disagreement (sometimes in public) in how the site should be run, and because smack ‘misused’ his admin powers, by, amongst other things, creating new user groups for members. It also explains why my member title somewhat ironically reads ‘I LOVE YOU DHIREN YOU ARE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE’.

So, as a bit of history, ace and smack were both admins, ace didn’t like the way smack wanted to run the site, so he removed smack as an admin.

Once this happened, smack (and myself, and a couple of others) became more vocal in our criticisms of the way the site was run. Instead of being a fun place to hang out and relax, it was run in a very strict manner.
However, the strictness was selectively applied. Ace still wanted the focus of the site to be on the tech community, rather than a general community. And as such, the more techy posters were generally favoured.
An example of this was removing the entire ‘spam-it’ forum from the ‘view new posts’ list, because the tech posters were all upset that these useless spam topics were showing up amongst the serious business of hardware discussions.

Basically the reason why ace and smack don’t get along is because they’re both stubborn, and both have different views on how the site is run.

Unfortunately, since ace is the one with the admin powers, he is able to choose staff that also have similar views on how the site is run.

This means that whenever people make posts that are critical of the way the site is run, they’re easily locked, edited or deleted entirely.

I have said over and over again that just because you disagree with someone who is critical of you, that doesn’t mean you should administer your mod powers to block that criticism.
This is constantly ignored by the staff, and even appears to be accepted by the members... for example Oj0 asking for the thread to be locked rather than deleted... the thread should not have to be locked at all, but it’s accepted as a given that the admins will stop the conversation at some point.
This is another thing that smack and myself disagree with the staff over. Whenever anything “controversial” comes up, its locked or deleted or edited away. This means that issues that clearly exist are never ever resolved, but the staff just brushes it under the carpet and carries on hoping that everything runs smoothly. Then they make the comment that ‘surely we must be doing something right, because there are a lot more posters who aren’t complaining’. That does nothing to actually address any of the issues that we bring up tho – its just diverting attention from the issues, and trying to downplay them as nothings. But that doesn’t address the fact that the issues are there.

Then of course, there’s the hypocrisy in how the site is run.
An example would be project fred. Project fred is a program i wrote which counts the keystrokes and mouseclicks that you make at your pc. Entirely pointless but fun nonetheless. You may have seen some fred signatures under peoples posts.
Anyways, fred had run for a while a few years ago, on the old forum run by a bunch of dicks, and it had a bit of a following. Then one day i decided to revive the project, and hunter posted a link to it on systemshock, because (modesty be damned) it’s a fun pointless thing which might interest a bunch of people on the forums. Hunter was told that posting the fred link was “advertising”, which is against the rules. Now, there are no adverts on the fred site. There is nothing there which can benefit or profit me in any way whatsoever. I do not run a forum on the fred site. It’s just a cool program. But, a link to fred was deemed ‘advertising’ and hunter had to delete his topic. The hypocrisy comes in that there are literally thousands of links to other cool sites or programs on the forum, some of which are actually advertising things, but those don’t get touched at all. The fact that the fred project is linked to me, a ‘troublecauser’ is the only reason why a link to fred is advertising, but a link to maddox’s site, which incidentally also contains an online store etc, and which directly profits Maddox, is not advertising at all.
he then blocked the fred signature images, because they had the fred url in them. Regardless of the fact that there are hundreds of forum members who have url’s to other sites in their signatures. Ace claims that all these users asked for permission before adding their links to their sigs, but i find this incredibly difficult to believe. It’s just selectively blocking fred because it is associated with me, a trouble-causer.

Another bit of hypocrisy also involved me. As you guys may know, the site is very strict when it comes to piracy, or discussions around piracy. In fact, a thread about moving recorded movies off a dstv pvr’s hdd to a computer hdd got quite interesting because it was ‘discussing piracy’ somehow.
Then, we have a forum member with an ati logo in his avatar. This forum member was looking for software to split an mp3 album he had downloaded as one big mp3 into individual tracks. Millennia asked him how he had obtained the mp3 album in the first place, and received a snarky reply indicating that he had downloaded it. I then called said pirate a retard, for admitting on the forum that he downloaded the album illegally. I then received a number of requests from mods to edit my post and not be nasty to this forum member. All the mods were on his side, because he’s a techy poster... they completely ignored the fact that he was admitting on the forum that he had pirated the album. Eventually i had my post edited to remove the fact that i called him a retard, because he was still offended by it. Funny that all other piracy discussions have different endings.

So yeah, another reason for the animosity between smack and ace is that smack doesn’t like the fact that the site is run by hypocrites. in fact, a while back, kitty (who is ace's fiancee) and tech phil had a bit of a run in with each other. rather than ban or punish tech phil for being... well... tech phil... he told kitty to rather stop posting instead.

Lets see, what else did smack say should go in here...

Ah yes.

The forum is public. All the gripes that we have regarding the way the site is run, is because of things that happen to posts made in the public forums. The issues that lead up to things happening all happen in public. Yet, in order to resolve anything, we get told we must take it private. Why is this? We’re commenting on issues that are happening in public, but because we’re being critical of the way things are run, we get told to handle them in private, to save you, the good citizens, from seeing us make our arguments as to why things should be different.

Smack’s biggest gripe is that ace says he’s ‘trying to set things right’ with him in private, yet all the things that led up to things needing to be set right happened in public. Ace has pm’d smack to apologize for any wrongs that he might have caused, but there’s no use in a private apology to a public issue. Ace claims the moral high ground for having apologised for stuff, but it doesn’t count because nobody else sees the apology, so ace maintains the perception of not being in the wrong.

Also, ace cannot handle being wrong about anything. Ever.

This has been a factual and unbiased explanation of why ace is a dick.

I’m posting it on the forum, where, instead of debating the issues that i’ve raised, and justifying/defending his actions, this topic will most likely be deleted. Because that’s how things are dealt with on systemshock. If you don’t like it, you can get the hell out. No correspondence will be entered into. After ace banned the smack, smack posted in the support forum as a guest, asking why he was banned. Rather than address the issue, ace decided to remove the ability for guests to post in the support forum. Yes, the forum that said ‘guests can post here’. Then, a while later, after more disagreements, rather than face the backlash that he’d receive for banning the smack again, ace just suspended his posting rights, so that you, the public, would think that smack just gave up and left. The truth is that ace’s “3 day posting suspension” was never lifted, even after it was pointed out to him that the 3 days were up. So he was banned, but without the ‘banned’ member title that would have caused forum members to ask why he was banned.

Quite nifty hey?