I feel this thread has run its course. Cerium is probably never going to come back and what is there left to talk about that hasn't already been discussed over and over.
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ResetEra Ownership Update
- Thread starter Cerium
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I have nothing to do with MOBA Network and they can't legally access or use any of our data. Also their contact form is so broken that you can't even access it.
Just seems like you'd be better off asking the company that owns the forum now questions around what DPO they have, rather than the volunteer moderators of the forum.
I don't know what charities Cerium pays to, and I'm not really sure that's any of my business.
But as for helping staff out with substantial amount of money for financial hardships, that's something I can confirm that he has done. Even after leaving he's made it clear we can come to him in times of need. He's helped me out in non financial ways too, like recently helping me out with my university application for my nursing degree (which I thankfully did get accepted into with his help). And whether or not he gave mods a bonus, that's up to them to share. Looking at this thread we've already had people calling them paid shills and all kinds of nefarious shit, so I don't blame them for wanting to keep that close to their chest if it were the case. *Shrug* I won't say more than that as it's not my place to.
I just see pretty much no incentive for staff or members to stay on board with the move after the ownership transfers, especially with how cheap it is to set up a new forum that would be community owned.
You could even do it via donations to get the initial cost.
You could even do it via donations to get the initial cost.
We don't need you to figure out on our behalf what we've been telling you ourselves for 4 days.
Respectfully.
So we reached the point of discussing "presumed whiteness" and levels of blackness of the users. Okay then…
I was thinking about this and there is a thing for open-source projects called Open Collective that would make it really easy for a community-owned and more transparent alternative to eventually exist should it be needed.
I don't know how it would translate to a website exactly. But it's interesting nonetheless.
Era should be able to state whether or not the data has been transferred or if the new owner gained any access to the data. But considering that the OTs from that one guy got restored against his own will - by using the TOS as a basis for that decision and completely ignoring the laws now in force - I guess the now applicable data protection laws aren't important enough for this thread.
Also this was just one example of many. We could go into details how the MOBA Network states that they are looking to enforce a subscription model or how they are embossing editorial information into their forums or how they are using an external agency for the ads (aka noone can change a thing if there's bad ads) or how Era will cross-subsidise other racist / bigot forums. The list goes on and on and is burried somewhere between all the spam. And I disagree that most people heard that part of the news. The official press release - that is talking actual numbers and planned changes - hasn't even been pinned.
User Banned (Permanent): Troll account
All the admin staff and some users in here are some of the most cracked out crackers with mayonnaise jizzed all over it i have ever seen. You're all an embarrassment to anyone who enjoys games!
I like the people here. There's a good number of users and staff that I have positive interactions with. There's several subcommunities here that I will dearly miss, so that's why I'm still here. I don't know how simpler the reason why people might want to stay can be. Why would we want to move on when nothing is affecting us? This whole thread is just making a mountain out of a molehill.
Just looking quickly, destiny item manager is on there and that's basically a website (web app, more accurately.)
You can see there where the money goes in and the money goes out.
Destiny Item Manager · Expenses - Open Collective
opencollective.com
Transparency! I think I like this kinda thing more than opaque subscription fees and It's kinda interesting DIM only costs ~100 bucks a month to host. It's such an integral part of playing destiny.
This is actually really awesome. I like this so much better than the shady opaqueness a lot of web projects operate on where "expenses" are a nebulous ill defined thing the owner relies on the masses not knowing about so they can make an easy buck.
The community doesn't have to stick around and line the pockets of a completely opaque corp that may not have their best interests at heart. I myself try not to use facebook, twitter, instragram and other websites run by shitty companies because i don't like feeding my free time and effort into lining the pockets of awful billionares.
The resetera name is ultimately meaningless, the real value in this website is the members and staff team running the show.
If the community coordinated, they could be running the site through something like opencollective, potentially eliminating the need for invasive ads at all, or even allowing moderators to pay themselves a modest salary if there's donations left over. Even things like the aforementioned paying for skins or web dev could be done through the opencollective account - god knows there's enough gamedev and webdev adjacent people in the community.
All in the open where no one can lie or manipulate the community and leave them feeling ripped off like some of the people that bought Era Clear.
I just think a buyout is a good time to reassess what we're doing here.
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The bolded never occured to me, and makes me feel a bit dodgy for even lurking here now. :/
This!
And I agree that GDPR needs to be addressed ASAP. Mods should (at this point) have a clear instructions from previous and/or current owners and pass the info to us.
Is our personal data (including emails) handed over already?
If not, what steps do we need to take to permanently erase the said data?
Give us a clear and precise answer from the GDPR official in charge at this stage ffs instead of handing tags, arguing and deflecting. It shouldn't be that hard, talk to Cerium!
Looks like someone wants Dobson Bugutt under their name!
Yeah I guess part of my post was directed at those who do seem angry and want the money to go somewhere else.
At a certain point, it seems like a difficult venture to run at cost when you consider page views and advertising revenue. I'm not close enough to the current state of the board to know if there are major tech features being requested and ignored or server outages that could be invested in but comparing to some of the alternatives this forum software and design does seem well thought and a cut above what it could have been.
Training is a good call on a form of reinvestment that benefits staff. From what I've read, the majority of staff are not interested in direct payment and some posts have been patronising about this.
This thread from 2017 is interesting as the discussion is so similar
Resetera revenue should go back to the community and gaming charity causes
NeoGAF was the most popular video game forum. I suspect that era is over now. One of my concerns, and many, many other members' concerns with that forum is how the owner financially managed it. It became user hostile with viglinks, intrusive ads, and hijack your browser mobile ads. More...
www.resetera.com
I do think gaming charities would be a good way to funnel revenue from a site like this once costs and labour were covered.
100% agree here, was definitely not trying to diminish or undervalue the contributions of the moderation team in that post. With a volunteer system, the moderators themselves are just users who help curate and direct the discussion. They fill a difficult and critical function. I just don't think it's fair to use them as a prop to yel about compensation when they themselves are not asking for it.
Do streaming sites have paid systems for moderation? Many twitch mods appear to be unpaid volunteers, even for streamers making $$$.
This site clearly did not spring up from nothing, and was entirely reactionary to a different form of ownership issue.
Unfortunately it seems like this discussion was stifled through locked threads early on, hard to say if that was malicious or not. The 2019 thread about ownership doesn't look good.
Is it too late to reform how it works here now? I think by the book it will be. The best model seems like it would bare a closer resemblance to a non profit or a co-op which is at odds with a publically traded company.
At the end of the day, the users will decide how this site ends up. I just hope that if people are jumping ship, they consider what the new world will look like and what action has been taken to address issues people care about.
Okay, I've got to say...
I have barely looked at this thread, because the tag spam, the off-topicness of cracker and all that shit... I have a life, yeah? I don't want to spend the time navigating pointless shitposting that, were it in any other thread, would have people banned (at the very least threadbanned, if not site-wide banned). And I absolutely acknowledge I may be in the minority... But at the same time, do you (and by this I mean not so much you personally, but other mods/admins as well) know the reasons for those people who don't engage in the thread? Because I've certainly visited the thread more than a couple of times, noted the random (off-topic) nature of the discussions, and just shrugged and said fuck it.
Maybe this says to you (and other mods/admins) that I don't care about the discussion. But equally I'd say that allowing the only place where this can be discussed devolve into shit for pages says to me that the staff (and the OP!) don't care about having a discussion that stays on-track.
And whilst this all sounds rather angry and grrrr, I'll say I'm not actually feeling aggressive, just resigned to the state of things.
And I'll also say I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, I just wanted to give my opinion on how the shitposts have affected engagement on the topic.
Yes, just as long as you don't do it in spite to deprive the community of their OTs.
I mean, you can do it in spite, just don't brag about it. Because if that person had just calmly requested removal of all posts, it probably would've happened.
This is false; a Right to be Forgotten request in this forum works by removing your user info and anonymising your username; your post history is not removed.
EDIT: Also, there's potentially a GDPR-problematic aspect here: it was mentioned that if you delete your data you need to let moderators know when signing up (despite this not being in the ToS).
How exactly does this work with GDPR? If a user requests their data to be deleted, you need to remove the personal data associated with that user. If the user then signs up again, there should not be any record of their previous account to link the new signup back to the original accounts if it's Right to be Forgotten compliant unless I'm missing something here. Is there a retained store of individually identifiable info even if a user requests their data to be removed?
That begs the question if there are any software tools in place for the mods to automatically scrub every post an user has made off the site.
I don't think that matters a person's social media accounts and their posts there are considered personal data under GDPR period but usually anonymizing them should be enough.
This has been brought up a couple times and right now we don't think so. Only reason it's up in the air is cause of how people are interpreting the law. Some mods and users have made a case that making your posts anonymous and removing any person info someone posted when asked is all you need to be covered by the law. Which is what era already does. There was a provision in the law that mentioned content could be kept if it otherwise would break the flow of the info on the website, which deleting whole posts would do.
Fwiw every, on other forum I've been involved with, users who have requested account deletion have been allowed to edit their post history to remove any content they see fit. You can't do anything about anyone quoting your posts, of course. If Era are doing to go down the route of not allowing users to remove posts when they leave the site then it should just make people more wary about posting in the first place.
As it's been explained:
This is the first time the community has largely appeared to be in the staff's favor... literally ever. Just weeks ago tons of members were calling us out-of-touch morons deliberately trying to drive a gaming community away, and arguing down anyone who defended us during the kerfuffle. Just as well, no one has cared about our compensation before now, even with the knowledge that Era Clear is a thing, and the fact that we've admitted plenty of times that we're complete volunteers.
What this comes across to us is a roundabout way to attack Cerium's character by positioning him as some asshole who tricked us. "How dare he run off with so much money! You poor mods; oh so taken advantage of!" Rings hollow, especially since some of the same usernames here trying to knight for us are some of the same people always making our jobs harder.
That's originally why I started that tip jar- to force people's hand and tell them to make the difference for the people who served their community. I even gave it all away to charity. And guess what? Some members got mad as hell, and refusal to pay basically came down to "No, no, no, we want you paid, but we don't want to do it; fuck that." Some chucklehead last night even drudged it up a day later to try and make me out like I did anything wrong. And after that I was further trolled by folks who I know good and well would've ran off with the money to buy useless gaming shit if they were in my position.
And the cherry on top of this nonsense? Staff have said they understand why people might feel that way in an ahistorical vacuum (but ultimately compensation is our business to work out), but said the thing we want most is for people to just treat us better. Don't take big announcements like this as a call to arms. Be about appreciating us all the time. Do you think the majority have listened?
Lol.
This is all theater.
This is literally all theater.
We honestly don't feel people truly care like that. I mean, thanks I guess, for thinking I should be paid a salary for you to call me a fascist when I ban someone popular or lock the wrong thread, versus getting called a fascist for free. Really feeling the love.
I imagined it more like this given the state of the thread when i went to bed
This is a lot of things unrelated to what I was saying lol. You wanted to know information around things like the DPO and speaking to the legality of MOBA accessing data now that they've bought the forum. So it seems like reaching out to MOBA with these questions, as the entity that now owns the forum and for which you have concerns about, to understand their position and commitment toward GDPR might get you the answers you want.
More like don't volunteer to be a OP for a community if that can be a problem for you.
Again: I have no affiliation with MOBA Network or whatsoever. It's not my task to ask a "random" company if they happen to own my personal data.
Era should be able to answer if the data was sold and in the hands of another company without us beeing asked for consent or if that's not the case.
Another issue is that even if you remove your user info and have your nickname anonymized like "Deleted member 3010" - if anyone has ever quoted you then there will be your original nickname in that quote. The quote says "XYZ said [...]" and once you click on it you jump to the post of "Deleted member 3010". Following that logic every single post of your post history is traceable back to the original user name.
It's not a random company. It's literally the company you wanted to know the DPO details for and have concerns around how they may or may not use your data. If you want to know several of the things you've asked about I'm saying it's probably a good idea to reach out to them as well, since they might be able to provide you with a direct and detailed response.
Then perhaps one of the many admins that have poked their head into this thread in the time since people started raising questions about GDPR can say something to that effect rather than (seemingly) ignoring it.
But Era doesn't even do that. Take a look at the post history of any deleted user and you can find out who they were in less than 5 minutes, because their user names are retained any time they were quoted.
One thing I've been wondering about is how the quote system here doesn't actually allow for users to be forgotten.
For example you can see a now deleted account here requesting deletion but the admin responding shows the person's username in their quote so every comment under that deletion number across the site can be attributed to that user. That doesn't seem like it complies with the right to be forgotten.
Equally old screencaps across twitter and the internet attribute posts to a specific user and the content can just be searched to connect the old user with a deleted member number. It seems it would be very difficult to actually provide anonymity without deleting their content.
I think for some (like me, as I have been clear), it's about the owners paying you, not just you getting paid. It's kind of like being forced to tip a restaurant worker in the US because labour laws suck so much that owners can pay them below minimum wage. The solution isn't to do a "gotcha" and force people to tip you, it's to force the employer to actually pay you according to the labour being done, and in respect for what you are worth. Someone can want you to get paid without wanting to have to pay you personally in the form of a tip.
Does a user have the right to request their forum posts deleted?
Forum posts and similar stuff: chat messages from chatlogs, etc. According to https://eugdprcompliant.com/personal-data/ , a person's social media accounts and their posts there are considered per...
law.stackexchange.com
This seems to cover the removal of forum posts and some of the concern around usernames being included in the posts of others.
if this circle keeps on going then my bet for this going on for 200 pages at 50pp will be at risk. can you guys come to a common ground at like page 180?
thanks.
I get your concern but I think this something you should have known going into making the OP. The internet is a public domain, nothing is truly ever lost here. either it's saved some deep data bank, or screenshoted on some private server.
thanks.
I get your concern but I think this something you should have known going into making the OP. The internet is a public domain, nothing is truly ever lost here. either it's saved some deep data bank, or screenshoted on some private server.
Uh yes unironically? Do you not understand the difference between begging for tips from users and being compensated by the guy pulling 500k a year from the site?
Again, no one cared about our compensation until now. You all knew Era Clear was a thing. You also knew we were volunteers. This should not have come out of left field for you, (and if it did, wow at people effectively acting like Karens to employed labor all the time!) You only care now that you see the sum the site sold for, all the while not knowing exactly what Ceri has done for us behind the scenes anyway because you don't actually know anything about him at all. (All I'll say is that Cerium has interfered on my behalf to the point that he prevented me from randomly disappearing from Era altogether due to hardship.)
Again, we don't believe this argument is out of genuine concern. That doesn't mean you don't have an argument, of course! But we don't think you guys love us like you are acting now. If you did, you would've shown it before now. Take this as a lesson to just appreciate us in the future.
This is just not true. I'm sorry that the relationship between staff and users has broken down, I am trying to understand the apprehension from your side. But it's simply not true that this has never been talked about before, that nobody cares, or that there's never been a time that most people supported staff.
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