Portions of yiffnet down

While I can appreciate Harik getting tired of all the BS, his response to ONE foul-mouthed SOB seems thin-skinned and immature. A better solution would have been to ban both Sibe and the idiot instead. Yes, Harik doesn't have to do ANY of what he does. But when you take on a mantle of responsibility, people expect you to behave responsibly!

I wish Harik well in whatever his future endevours may be. But I look forward to a future Yiffnet where twits CAN be banned without certain admins overriding the bans all the time. If this has taught the admins anything, it's that not everybody cares about our community.

We _will_ rebuild Yiffnet, one way or another.

I read the closing notices on both sites, and while I can appreciate that being an admin is a hard job, the attitude the Yiffnet admins have taken about this is selfish and irresponsible.

As someone who more-or-less lurked on Yiffnet for a year and change, I've seen some of what happens. I've seen the stupid people and the legitimate whiners (Sibe definitely falls into both categories, btw), but I've also seen abuse of power and arrogance on the part of some of the server admins that rivals that of Dalvenjah and his motley crew over on DALnet. I've seen people kicked from #furry for no reason whatsoever, as if it was a private club. I've seen people (including myself) insulted and yelled at to their faces by the ops. About the only thing I hadn't seen is a ego trip on the scale of Dal's infamous "accidental" AKILL of all of DALnet back in 1998 -- and this easily tops this.

Admins: Yes, I know it's your space. I know it's your time and money invested. But even with a free service, it's important to keep the users happy, or Bad Things will happen. Shutting down all the servers and washing your hands of the whole thing is the wrong thing to do, in this case. Sibe wasn't even the problem this time, not directly -- you just didn't want to listen to your users. It would have been much better if you could have told people to calm down and let the admins do their work, rather than cussing people out and shutting down your servers in a temper tantrum.

This isn't about technical skills. This isn't about whether you can configure ircd, manage server routings, or anything on the infrastructure...it's about how you treat users. The network #watertower and its related channels moved to was formed because of issues just like this on DALnet (eventually). If this uncaring attitude keeps up, then fine, let Yiffnet burn. Your users will find (and most likely found!) a new place to go, and you can live your life free of the people you seem to dislike so much. Fair enough?

I think so, and I think most of the little people (the people who don't care what people bitch about in #furry) will agree.

-lee

Dan ended his closure notification by saying "someone ELSE is paying for YOU", and like most truths that haven't been erected in 12-foot neon flashing letters, the crushing majority of whiners act like it was never written.

The people who paid to run the service you used have been heckled by back-seat drivers and armchair admins since Yiffnet began in September 1995. Sibe is not new. Sibe is just this week's flavor. There isn't a week where somebody isn't trying to reach an admin with some kind of grievance or another.

Nothing any admin has ever done has ever satisfied everybody.

It bears repeating.

NOTHING that ANY admin has ever done has EVER satisfied everybody. There was ALWAYS another whiner ready to follow the last. All voices of thanks and appreciation were drowned in tsunamis of ingratitude.

Near the end of Yiffnet, one of the admins (not Dan) decided to give up and started doing everything that the uneducated, ignorant armchair admins were damanding be done. He k-lined (blocked) all of the IP ranges used by the people in the #yiffnetbeats channel. The result was more chaos, as many users, many who were demanding to know why the channel wasn't closed yet (a channel on IRC is created when it's joined, and there are about 40^16th possible channel names that can be created) or why Naughty User X wasn't banned yet (all admins on all servers must ban all of the possible IP addresses the Bad Guy could connect with--a range of IP addresses which co-incides with 99% of YiffNet's legitimate users) found themselves locked out of that server and proceded to make even more complaints.

Absolutely none of them offered a valid or reasonable suggestion.

Absolutely none of them offered to help.

Absolutely none of them had any idea of how IRC, or even the Internet, worked, and everything they demanded smacked of such ignorance.

Absolutely all of them were expecting someone else to Do Something (TM) (Copyright 2001, Yiffnet Whiners Cabal) (pat. pend.) so they could go on making use of the network someone else was paying for them to use.

Imagine someone who's taken this shit for six years and is already under stress from non-IRC related issues. Do you think he's going to be nice when whining complaint #452,525,562,257,928,782,104 arrives in e-mail or private message?

I guess he could grit his teeth and be sufficiently nice to you. Then again, this is the umpteenth time he's had it. The suggestion was pretty stupid ("Ban him!", "Close the channel!", and always, when asked "How?", it still fails to dawn on them that perhaps it's far, far easier said than done). And the whiner _was_ being rather presumptuous to expect the admins live to serve them and have copious amounts of free time to install Yet Another Server Patch. So, surprise surprise, a "F**k you" gets sent in reply instead, and the whiner cranks the handle on his indignance, goes posting all about it on alt.fan.furry, and everybody else nods their heads and says How It Should Have Been Done and Oh That Admin Has Always Been Like This.

And absolutely nobody ever gave a damn about how the admin felt.

Guess what? He's been depressed and stressed out for a long time now, and his friends (that would include me), have noticed it in Real Life.

Many of the whiners who've finally grasped the truth of Yiffnet's existance have followed up with an old refrain; "well if they can't operate the server properly, then they shouldn't be running one at all."

Maybe that's not such a bad idea.