| Article Index |
|---|
| Why I Left Tapestries, and Why You Should Too |
| So what else is wrong? |
| Appendix A |
| Appendix B |
| Appendix C |
| All Pages |
I'm sure some of you reading this doing a search for "Victor Koopa" because you knew me on Tapestries are wondering where I went, and why. Maybe you heard something about me being banned or punished or some such, and you'd like to re-establish contact with me. Maybe you're just one of those folks that want to tell me what a horrible, evil person I am. No matter. In this depressingly long-winded missive, I plan on giving some history, how things went down from my perspective, why everyone else is wrong, and why Tapestries is a flaming wreck. I guarantee posting this is going to enrage the staff over there; so be it. Serious business follows, with an obvious bias for me. There's always the comments box if you're none too happy with the content (or maybe if you are). As a special bonus: I won't Godwin this thing.
First, some back story
I think most people reading this know what Tapestries MUCK is, but for those uninitiated, the short version is this: it's an all-furry (okay, some elves and such that pretend they're not human at all), text-based chat/role-playing experience. A MUCK (or any MU* , really) differs from IRC in that characters can have descriptions and such, you go through buildings and rooms that have descriptions instead of channels, and the "feel" is more like an old style text adventure game. Tapestries (or "Taps") focuses on the mainstay of furry: cybersexz0ring (it's technical). I'll give them credit for exploiting the "main point of the furry fandom" (as someone else so famously put it). It's a refreshing sort of honesty. NB: I'm not opposed to the practice, though I have my limits. Taps purports to pride itself on its openness, tolerance, and privacy. Their actions, in my experience, espouse quite a bit of the opposite. I'll be exploring that in this article.
I got my (second) start on Taps around 2003; I had an earlier stint in the mid 90s where I didn't do all that much. Ostensibly, this new foray was to have yet another place to irritate my partner (IM was already working well, but I'm always looking for more ways). It took me a little while to take a cotton to it, but once I did, I was pretty well addicted. Realizing that it'd be a good outlet for my (perhaps unhealthy) crush on koopas (the big kind), I made up one of my own.
Generally, I was fairly unremarkable. As most everyone else did, I had the spots I would haunt, my own personal circle of friends, and what have you. I had a penchant for different forms and outfits for those forms, having developed a little script to change said outfits (which involved changing a character detail and a description bit, but that's technical jargon not really needed here). I was generally the quiet one in the corner, rarely participating all that much in public, though I did try to host an event from time to time. Most of these didn't go very far, admittedly, but it was something.
Around December 2007, I started pondering a mind control and hypnosis-themed place, but there were a few things about the Tapestries public building process that bugged me. Long waits I could deal with, applications I could deal with, but there were directives that I really couldn't agree with. Primarily, this was the directive that you have to let anyone and everyone in. This includes people playing as toddlers and teenagers, a demographic I have and had a negative desire to cater to. It's rather disconcerting to have supposedly all-adult and all-IC places forced to let in children. Then there's the adult children who any decent person would shoot in the face within fifteen seconds of contact. Unfortunately, furdom naturally attracts this sort of person. For example: Coming into a bar and yelling "hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi!!" is shotgun-blast-to-the-face-worthy to most folks, but an attractive "feature" to all too many furries (editor's note: I love me some hyphens).
As you can probably tell from this site and the exposition thus far, I like to think I'm a creative person. Before The Pendulum came to be, I was tinkering around with another building called "WildCard". The intent was to have a games-themed area. I had a few novel ideas for MUCK-centered games, including one I was going to call "Tiki". However, the other side to my creativity is my terrible malaise, and after laying out the rooms, I gave up on it after realizing the work involved. Nevertheless, because nearly every other location on the MUCK were either boring, unpopulated, overpopulated, populated by the same people on a constant basis leading to impenetrable social strata, or unappealing for some other reason, I still wanted a place that I could actually enjoy with friends and people who might be worth making friends out of, plus exercising a little coding skill. Not being someone to wait around for someone else to do that, I pondered how I could do it myself.
As some of you know, Taps is incredibly builder unfriendly (at least, policy-wise). At some point in my searching however, I wandered across a passage on the Taps wiki that stated that private clubs were okay if they met certain conditions (and for the life of me, I wish I saved that page, but I failed to do so). Realizing I could easily meet all of them, I began building "The Pendulum" off in my little space.
At the time of building, I had one alt (alternate character), Sagisatta (aka the shinydrag), who at the moment was just getting started. I figured I'd put The Pendulum in his name to give him a home, a reason for being, and to also satisfy my organization streak (I also figured if I ever did decide to go public, it'd make things a little easier, too). Victor could've assumed the quota load (each object owned by a character on a MUCK eats up one quota object; most characters have 40 base quota), but I decided against it. Jokingly, I included in Sagi's cinfo that he was a "quota sponge" and an alt of mine. The former I mentioned because I was being mildly self-deprecating in a sense; I certainly knew the rules about quota. The latter I mentioned because I don't like the common practice of using alts to get around people's social walls. I connected the 'office' of The Pendulum to Victor's home, and had it locked and cloaked so only I could use it. It was impossible for people to access the place without summoning them over and having them learn the teleport pattern.
For those of you who visited, you likely remember at least some of what it had. Unlike 99% of the public spots, I actually gave a damn. This meant the layout of the place didn't want to make you think a choose your own adventure book would be more fun. It meant there were lots of little details, like exit descriptions, lots of room details, bits of semi-randomness (for example, you could look at the windows when outside, then look at flyers and see a random message), and species and gender notifications on both entrance and exit (done nowhere else) so you didn't have to look them up each and every time. It meant there were "holodeck" rooms with over twenty five different modes which could lock and hide from the whereare system. It meant I was actually there in some form most of the time, with the intent of chatting and enjoying myself, not lording over people (I can't see the appeal in babysitting others). We played simple little games, people got tranced, good times were had by most everyone coming over to visit. I even worked out a c-vixtails (currency) substitute called Pendulum Points I was going to use for games I was working on. Thankfully, we were generally drama-free.
I figured I'd advertise on the various boards around the MUCK after I banged out the 20th room mode for the holorooms, looking for people to have fun with or indulge my nascent voyeurism (or at least, that was the idea). As I never saw any notices or warnings not to post such things, I figured it was alright; after all, people advertise their real life ventures on them all the time asking for real life money.
The place ran for a good six months, and I would usually spend time finding people and seeing if they were interested, coding upgrades and gimmicks, or hanging out at the place (having the two characters made this much easier). We'd chat, play games, have scenes from time to time, all good fun. I was kind of hoping to watch people have scenes, maybe improve my own typesexing technique and style, but I didn't get that much. It wasn't a huge draw even with all the networking I did, perhaps on the order of five to eight people on nights and weekends, but this was about the right size for an interactive crowd (I've noted the larger the space, the fewer people actually try standing out). All in all, I was pretty happy, and felt I had a better reason to be there than just "oh hai, let's fuck".
Then July 9th came.
This was a character purge day. Unused characters and building were being cleared out. Nothing to worry about, or so I thought. After getting back from lunch, I noted WhiteWizard (the head owner of Taps) in the main room, and I said hello. He asked if I was an owner, and told me the place would be summarily deleted for breaking the building code. That's where the whole mess started.
Things go poorly
Little ol' me, thinking that "hey, I built this as a private club per specifications, so it should be okay" apparently incensed the hell out of someone, and now White was on the doorstep with a bulldozer. It's rather impossible to relate how much terror went to my heart after realizing that six months of networking with people and the coding work I'd done was about to be lost. Once again, I wish I saved the logs, but I was a little too distracted. Generally this happens when you have something you're really (probably overly) attached to threatened with instant annihilation. To say this is a difficult thing to relate in mere words is a gross understatement.
White told me that public advertising was verboten, a stricture I'd never come across. I offered to remove the offending advertisements, but this was not enough; somehow I'd poisoned the minds of everyone on the MUCK. With his repeated insistance TP was a public building violation, I replied that TP was a private club, figuring it was covered under the stipulations. I was hoping to quote the Taps wiki to that effect, but as before, my head wasn't exactly clear (and I wasn't in the best position to look at the time), so I didn't get the chance. Being told something to the effect "it's unauthorized public building because I say so, ungh", White obliterated not only TP, but everything I had with Victor, and took away both character's builder bits (the flag that allows a character to create rooms and exits). I found myself at "player start", where I haven't bothered leaving since. In a state of shock, I weakly IMed a few people, including my partner, who contacted White after I simply quit.
Said partner asked why I wasn't given any time to archive my work (thankfully, most of my stuff was archived in text files I used as scripts, but White did not know this), or why I was not given any chance to bring the place into compliance. White responded by angrily 'yelling' at him that using alts wasn't going to work at first (semi-understandable, since we were using the same net connection, but still poor behavior), then after it was made clear he wasn't an alt, answered almost none of the questions to any satisfaction before ignoring him.
Expectedly, that same day, the wiki was updated to excise those four conditions and "clarify the policy", and I haven't been able to find them since. I believe this is tacit agreement that they knew they had policy that would support my case, but chose to hastily remove it.
Initial letters
After some long talks with some people, and some time to distance myself, I decided to write a couple letters -- one to my friends and acquaintences, and another to the staff. I put these letters up in a private, non-web-linked directory (so in effect, you would need the precise address to read them). I linked the letter to the former to the letter I sent to the staff, since one tells one's "peeps" these things. Making up scripts to page mail both groups, I logged in after a period of revisions (the perfectionist in me lives, despite my best efforts), and sent a link to the "Goodbye" letter to the former, and a link to the "To the Taps Staff" letter to the latter group. Since I have nearly zero respect for the staff at this point, I've posted those in separate pages that are accessible to the public, though with a few modifications for privacy (i.e. you ain't gettin mah e-mail y'spammer hos).
Because I kept remembering people that I forgot to to get in the initial salvo, I logged on a few more times, and was greeted with a response from White saying I should've e-mailed him the letter instead of posting it, and that he would not read it. I told him it wasn't in a "widely publically available" spot, which to me, was true -- I hadn't posted it on LiveJournal, some furry forum, or what have you where just anyone could read it (and they certainly couldn't comment on it). I also didn't have his e-mail address, and didn't feel the need to find it (he wronged me, after all). I asked him to e-mail me, repeatedly, giving him an address to use. No such mail came.
As a result, my IM contact list easily tripled in size, and the support was very appreciated. As you might expect, commentary about how TP was awesome, they were sad to see me go, and White being an ass was the order of the day. Probably the most "well-phrased" (to use a euphamism) comment was "White's great at technical stuff, but socially inept". I noted how sad it must be to run something where so many people dislike and distrust you.
During this time, some of my friends decided that this was the last straw for them as well, and they killed off their own characters. My partner started trying to put together a MUCK of our own, which I built a city grid for and started recreating TP, but MUCKs weren't doing it for me anymore. I started visiting IRC networks in the meantime, and registered this domain soon afterward.
Forum futility
I guess enough people were upset over the issue that they decided to pester White, who in turn started a thread over on the Tapestries Forums (warning: massively tl;dr) that ostensibly was to answer questions about why it was deleted, and such. To sum up, it wasn't really an attempt to converse; it predictably ended up being a massive pity party for the staff and their supporters. However, it was invaluable for showing their true character: that of insular, cowardly, dishonest twits.
What I took away from the experience there:
- A reminder that White has a delicious, creamy center of passive-aggressiveness/raw arrogance, underneath a thin candy veneer of civility. When confronted, as done when my partner questioned him, as done when I asked him to e-mail his response to my letters, and when I first posted to the Taps forum, he ran screaming, firing weak sauce parting shots.
- White was logging at least me, if not everyone else. He quoted the exact amount of people I contacted, as well as links to the letters I posted (he was only given the link to the staff letter, so clearly, he was watching me). Yes, it was more likely than not a check to make sure an "unruly troublemaker" wasn't getting out of line, but I like to think it was more about a casual disregard for his own value of privacy. Know this folks: Do NOT exchange sensitive content over Taps. You ARE being logged, make no doubt about it.
- Arguing with "true believers" is frustrating and likely pointless, as they think posting the same thing over and over makes for convincing argumentation. If that doesn't, the age-old mystical technique of "making shit up" works just as well. If called on that, return to step one. Repeat until victory.
- Dilemma is a fantastic rhetorical tool, but only if your critics are smart and honest enough to follow along.
- People calling for empathy should probably not use a phrase like "you got what you deserved" earlier in the thread.
As far as specific accusations, see appendix A; this is a tedious exercise in itself that I doubt most care to read.
Why The Pendulum was really killed
This brings us to the wild conjecture portion of our program, which makes for the best material. I came to know a lot of people who had their own personal building that would easily be considered outlawed (but for their benefit, and because I now have no respect for the staff, I choose not to enlighten them as to those off-the-grid locations), and curiously enough, no one called for their destruction. It should be trivially easy to find such building and destroy it, as most should share some common features (again, won't say what those are). Because the staff and supporters of White (and White himself) can't be bothered with little things like being honest, and because I love making myself out to be bigger and better than I really am, I've got better theories about why I was treated the way I was.
Number one (and part of this has been admitted to), a select few, perhaps just one, public building owners decided to throw a hissy fit that I was too successful. How 5-8 people at peak times was "too successful" I'm not sure. Normally this would be yet another whining fur among thousands, but this one just happened to be real buddy-buddy with the staff. I have some idea of who this might've been, though it's not worth printing here.
Number two is that because I was so against kids in adult situations, this incensed the pedo-loving staff and their friends. This was (coincidentally) supported by the approval of a new "kid-friendly" (worst euphamism ever) building not long after the removal of my place.
Number three is that my spot represented a loss of control for the staff, something they appear to have an exceedingly low tolerance of given the flap about the letters and White's extensive passive-aggressive behavior.
Number four is that my building was so awesome and so successful, that it was treated like a sandcastle that the beach bullies just had to kick over in a fit of jealousy. This just in: my ego just ballooned to the size of Siberia. Take shelter immediately.
What could've been done instead
This whole mess could've been handled so much better, with everyone coming out ahead. There could've been some actual discussion to start, instead of "Hi! I'm here to kill your stuff and give you the illusion I can be reasoned with!" Someone could've been assigned to examine the place and myself to see if we were fit for public consumption. The rules could've been reviewed to be sure they made sense. My building could've been put on probation until I completed the application process, then the MUCK would have an actively developed spot that people could (and did) enjoy (true, I didn't want to go public primarily because of the policy regarding underage folks, but I'd rather deal with that than have my work trashed outright). It could've been left alone with the admonition not to post about it on the public boards. Instead: "RAAAAAHHH ADMIN SMASH". Aces. No wonder I received so many "White's a [insert epithet here]
What the admin don't grasp is that most people don't care what database number they typescrew in. To quote a piece of wisdom someone gave me on the subject: "No one really goes and breaks it down to the elemental items... People go there to RP and/or fuck via text based systems. Who cares where they do it?" I still have yet to see how my building threatened the users or mission of the MUCK. To me it seems quite the contrary; TP enhanced them both.
How to save a MUCK
I'm not much for whining and bitching without presenting a solution to the problems. Many of these solutions are again, over in the forum thread.
I'm pretty sure the staff would like to not have such a high concentration of people not connected to the main grid based on the segmentation argument; during my time there, I noted counts of people in non-mainland building to make up one-third to one-half of the online population. A sizeable chunk of the players on Taps find the existing building either unappealing or uninteresting for any number of reasons. That should be profoundly alarming.
There's a rather easy solution that could be implemented. Don't issue builder bits, and revoke existing ones. Make hotels, apartment complexes, subdivisions, portals, seaports, etc. that auto-generate a one to three room home for a player (they can only have one between them all) and link them to it. Give them the ability to desc the room and the exits, and make the room morphable and lockable. This way people can have their private gathering spaces, change them as needed, and even remain linked to the grid to show up in LC counts. On top of that people can be reduced to 10 or 15 quota easily. This sort of thing was being done in 1995 on MUSHes, so don't tell me it can't be done.
For example, character Xyz wants an apartment home. Xyz goes over to a desired apartment complex setup, enters "homesetup", and they're automatically setup with three rooms to their name, and optionally teleported there. The "foyer" is linked to the apartment complex. From there, Xyz can use a "roomsetup" bit to enter the initial description for the room, and the exits leading out and to the next room. Lather, rinse, and repeat for the other rooms. If Xyz wants the room to morph or be multi-purpose, a "roommorph" command can be implemented that adds, edits , deletes, or changes to a different mode. They can also have an "LChide" and a "WAhide" command to hide or show their status to the location count and whereare commands, respectively, and a "roomlock" command to keep people out. Also, if Xyz tries to go to say, a seaport and get a home there, that person will be denied, or allowed to relink their home. This system also makes quota sharing for rooms impossible.
Yes, people with fifty room palaces (a real quota violation, BTW) will complain, but they can have their rooms simulated with room morphs. Yes, there is significant legacy material, but a gradual phase in process should alleviate that. Give people tutorials and multiple warnings that it's going to happen, then get to deleting. What's being done now is to give players all the tools and materials they need to make their off-the-grid spots, then telling them "don't do that". Guess what everyone does? If you guessed "they build their spots anyway", you win the prize!
Given that I don't think Taps has people committed to fixing the framework (Tapestries 2 has been "in development" for long over five years), we'll probably have to settle for Band-Aid fixes. Amending the policies is something that has to be done, including warning people away (in very large bold type print) from using certain tools or functions of said tools (eg: teleport patterns, the bell, and other features intended for communities).
As far as the problem of abusive administrators -- I don't know. The ones I've seen in furdom are either outright bad to tolerable; rarely do I see one that's exceptional (granted, I don't go out of my way to look). Even ones that aren't abusive make a mistake now and then (FWIW, I wanted to believe that was the case here, but it clearly wasn't), and bad reputations form fast and last long. I guess the best generalized defense is a set of good values that are actually practiced, though that's an issue meriting it's own article. Maybe an ombudsman team needs to be formed, or a player's union sort of thing.
What now?
Now that this bit of ugliness has been expunged, I don't plan on sitting back too long -- I've been looking into alternatives to MU*s that aren't rooted in the 70s and aren't awful like Second Life. I know I've told a lot of folks about the LionsBlade project, though as of this writing I'm still trying to make that work (though the reader is advised to use their text find function and search for "malaise" in case they missed it). The short form is that I think a portal/wiki plus Jabber server plus LDAP backend equals win, but we'll see.
I'm still wondering why Taps and its crew don't have Encyclopedia Dramatica articles, though I'm not one to write them.
