Has anyone been following the TIB list? I know this is a little OT, but it is for the benefit of TI-Games. If anyone can decipher old Apple II asm, please either contact me, or post a message. I have an old chess program for my Apple IIc; and it is very good, considering that the machine runs only at 2mhz. Some of us are trying to figure out how to right a chess AI, and if we could use that old apple program as a reference, it would help immensely.

Josh Cunningham

Well, my first comment is in response to your question, my second, I will tell later on. Apple II assembly is very old and I'm not sure that you will be able to do much with it, however, I think that you might want to talk to the people who made an Apple II emulator for the Macintosh. They were able to make some custom programs for it so I'm sure they can help you a little. To contact them, go to www.emulation.net, and scroll until you see a list of platforms. There should be like Apple II, Apple IIE, all that stuff. Just click on the one you want and explore the page and see if there are some links to info about who made the emulator. Now, for my second comment. If anyone has really been keeping a close eye on this news item and the comments being posted, not to mention others, all of Bryan Rabeler's comments have been erased with no good cause, other than they're comments that go against the grain of what ticalc.org likes. These message boards are supposed to be open to discussion and as long as his comments were not flames or had abusive language, I think there is absolutely no morality in deleting his messages. Now on a different post, I did get a little angry with someone and used a tiny itsy bit of foul language and my message was erased. I do not have a problem with that. However. When you delete messages with no violations other than not being what you want it to say (or because it's from someone you hate for some reason) it is absolutely immoral and I think that ticalc.org very seriously needs to rethink the way it treats its viewers. And yes I know about that "Having an account on ticalc.org is a privilege" spiel, well guess what buddy, what would happen if we all terminated our accounts and never visited the site again? I'm sure you're smart enough to understand the level of the issue I'm talking about. We, the viewers, keep you alive. Without us, you would have no point to continue. Telling us that it is a privilege to use your site only makes you look like dictators and I for one will not stand for this. Basically, I present an ultimatum, either you give me a good reason why you have become such jerks and try to fix it, or I request that you terminate my account. Understood?

And if anyone thinks that I'm a complete jerk for doing this, I really don't care because when an individual goes against society, there's always going to be followers and there's always going to be those persecuting them.

-Patrick Wilson

I personally usually let Bryan's comments alone; it is the other members who delete the majority of them (and that's partly due to the fact that I'm not online until about 06:30 GMT.

Often, Bryan disseminates lies, saying that we do not check our files before they are added to our archives (I personally know this not to be true). He (1) cannot know whether we check files, and (2) is simply wrong in assuming that we do not check them.

He also often likes to try and cause trouble--such as suggesting that the reason we posted a buggy version of SF2 for the TI-89/92 Plus was that we did not check it. (It is buggy because it is beta, and was submitted). Then after someone claimed the author said we posted it without his permission, Brian claimed that if we had bothered to check the file, we'd have known we didn't want it posted.

Quite frankly, I downloaded the file (and don't run it because it doesn't work with ASM 1.05 on my calc), and it sure looks like it was intended for distribution. Also, if the author (1) knows we have the file and (2) doesn't want it hosted, he needs to mail filearchive@ticalc.org and let us know (we won't take off files because someone says we need to; the author needs to tell us himself).

Now I like Bryan, and I don't mind that he doesn't always agree with our policies, but he often says things that are not true. Somethings, in addition, are just lies or things he has no way of knowing. Those are the comments that a staff member will respond to or delete (depending on the severity of the violation).

Slander is against ticalc.org policies, and such messages including slander will be deleted, as are other messages found in violation of policy by the staff.

I do not just assume you don't check files before they are added, I _know_ they are not being checked.

Prime example: about a week or two ago, a ZIP file was posted that contained unauthorized releases of PlusShell, Doors OS, Virtual TI Emulator, and two TI-89 ROM images. Now, if one were to just look at the ZIP contents, they would have noticed this. (You would have to be blind to not notice all the "PlusShell" and "Doors OS" directories.) I can bring up other examples if you wish.. but please do not say that I am lying, because I'm not. Every single comment relating to this issue has been deleted - very convienent don't you think?

I find it funny how you think every comment I post is simply to "cause trouble". It seems like your fellow staff members think this is a war or something. If I say something that you don't think is true, can't you simply reply and say thats not true, instead of deleting an entire thread? Don't you think that would be a more professional way of handling the situation?

Again, its a known fact that SF2 v1.00 is not an official release. I believe it was brought up on the mailing lists or whatever - but you guys should have known about it. And I just think its ironic that such an unauthorized release won the POTM award.

However, it appears to me that you guys are trying to shift the burden of correcting errors onto the program authors. Saying that you guys can't be blamed if you post unauthorized versions and such. By the very nature of your file submission process, it is _very_ esay to submit false files. I doubt authors have the time to check your page daily to make sure their programs are still OK.

Again, I think you are blowing this way out of proportion. It appears to me you think all my comments are an "attack on the foundation of ticalc.org's principles" and such, and therefore must be disposed of immediately.

None of my comments involved slander of a personal nature. And I think you are misinterpreting this "slander against the site" thing. If you guys can't take critisism in a positive way, I think you guys have some real problems.

Are people not free to say that they don't like something anymore? Do you take every comment that sounds even somewhat negative as an "attack against the state"? Last time I checked, that was called communism. Maybe the pigs need to roll around in the mud somemore and think up a different strategy...

Two files that didn't get thorough examinations aren't an indication that we don't check _anything_. As Nathan pointed out, nothing in the SF2 archive itself said the program wasn't for distribution; we won't remove an otherwise legitimate-looking program until we hear one way or the other from the author. With fake programs, the packager usually goes to some degree of trouble to make the program appear different. We cannot spend half an hour with each program and assume that every one is a fake; this doesn't mean we don't check everything, but that we give files a _reasonable_ once-over and occasionally have to come back and remove them later.

Nevertheless, as you aren't part of our staff, you are in no position to do anything but make assumptions about how we process files. And basing your claims on assumptions, even given a small number of examples, is inherently a bad idea.

As for criticism, it's definitely an important device that we recognize as critical to running a quality site. But what you should do is email us directly with suggestions or comments. When you post them publicly, it's rude -- like waiting until the whole family is at the dinner table and then asking your sister why she got an "F" on her history test. Public criticism means one thing: you're trying to get other people to see it your way, and we are tired of arguing in public every time you see something you don't like. Send it to us directly and you'll see a much better response. You will also show us you respect our desire to do things right instead of indicating you don't have enough faith in us to fix something unless everybody knows about it.

Chris

Checking one out of every 10 files doesn't mean you check _every_ program either.

Frankly, I don't see why bringing up a programs's legitimacy is a bad thing when it just won your POTM award. People expect the process to be fair, and they should know when and if its not. I don't think thats too much to ask.

Responding to your points in order:

a) Developer's Kit 89 was posted and contained no originaly content.
I agree with you on this, that file should've never hit the site. In fact, I did look through the zip file, and decided to post it. This was purely my fault, a bad judgement call on my part. That's why I removed it 3 hours later. I know that seems like a long time, but considering there are other parts of my life than ticalc.org, it's the best I can do. I am human too, and I make mistakes, this was one of them. I apologize for that.

b) We think every comment you post is to cause trouble.
Quite the contrary, farther down on this page is a comment by you that is fully level-headed and unbiased.

c) SF2 v1.00 is not an offical release, and everyone knows it.
Well, I was not informed. As I have said in the past, I really don't have the time to keep updated on what goes on the mailing lists. With school and other activities, the 2 plus hours I devote to ticalc.org a day (during the week) are about the best I can do. In case anyone doesn't know this, junior year is a pain.
As always, if an author were to email me, I would remove the file upon check that he really was the author (elapsed time: 40 seconds). On the other hand, if I'm supposed to use my psychic powers to figure it out, it may take far longer (read: infinite time).

d) We think all your comments an "attack on the foundation of ticalc.org's principles."
Quite the contrary, a few of your comments are wonderfully informative. On the other hand, quite a few are hugely off topic and hate-filled.

e) None of your comments involve slander of a personal nature.
I'm not sure about that one Bryan, you have in the past questioned my integrity, which is very personal, in my humble opinion. And no, I don't have any examples of such, as I tend to delete personal attacks, be they on the comment board or via email. On the other hand, if you could back up a personal attack with facts, then I might be interested.

f) We consider every even partially negative comment an "attack on the state". That is communism.
Actually, that isn't communism, that's fascism or Russian communism. But I suppose that's beside the point. In my opinion, there are two types of arguing/complaints: normal and angry. When you argue with someone normally, you are relaxed and present well constructed points that stand to reason. When you argue something angrily, you scream at them. Comments that don't scream are ok, in my opinon (possibly not the opinion of the rest of the staff, I don't know for sure.)

In closing Bryan, to deny that you have been on some sort of mission to find any and all possible fault in ticalc.org or it's staff since you were relieved of your duties at ticalc.org is a lie. Nary a day goes by when I don't find a wholly negative, baseless comment by you, or get an email from you complaining about one thing or another. Frankly, I welcome criticism, assuming that it is constructive. Mere flames (which in my opinon make up a great deal of our correspondence) are not helpful to anyone. I find it difficult to believe that someone of you're calibre and intelligence can spend so much time merely looking for fault. And yet I see examples of the trait on a daily basis. I mean this not as a personal attack, but maybe as a statement of concern.
When I first joined the ticalc.org staff, I truly enjoyed what I did. Over the past months, continual criticism from you and others has worn at my gumption. Sometimes it seems to me that no one appreciates what we do here, and yet then I visit the web server stats and notice that we have transferred 3.5 gigbytes of http data in the past 7 days. It's obvious that someone out there must find what I and the rest of the staff do useful, but it seems there are a select few who, instead of finding a site they like better, decide to do very little other than criticize ticalc.org. I can't understand how a site serving up 79,000 pages per day (over the past week) can seem to be so unpopular and horrible, and yet that is the impression that I get.

By the way, if you wish to further this conversation, contact me via email, as I don't like troubling other users with comments as long and off-topic as this one.

--
Phil

I'm sorry, I mispoke. The above number for pages per day should be 74,000, not 79,000.
Thankyou,
Phil

In your comment you accuse me of lying. You are doing the very thing that you complain that I am doing. Please stop that. Thanks.

Really? I must not have noticed. Please tell me where, so I may respond.
It's too bad you appear to have no response to my other points, I am interested in your opinions.

--
Phil

I really don't have time to write my own essay to refute each individual point you made. Basically because you made such wide generalizations that it would take forever to explain things to you. I don't have the time for that. And I know you don't either.

I'd like to add that I have personally been unhappy with the judgment of some other staff members from time to time in choosing which comments to delete. We're going to do a better job in the near future of both being more specific in the comment guidelines and being more careful in enforcing them.

However, I strongly agree with Nick that Bryan's comments are quite often a special case. He's usually not just stating his personal opinion, but trying to point out any- and everything he finds that might make us look bad. (For those out of the loop, Bryan was ejected from our staff several months, and he has not taken it well.) This boils down to slander when (as is usually the case) his claims are unsubstantiated, and there's no reason we should let anyone insult us in public in our own site. It would be inappropriate for us to leave such comments out for everyone to read, since we want to protect our reputation and avoid spreading misinformation. We are happy to take feedback, even harsh criticism, but blatant insults in our public forums are just plain rude.

I'm not saying all of Bryan's posts are like this, and undoubtedly some of his stuff has been deleted unfairly. But ultimately it's our judgment on what belongs in our news forums, and let's be realistic here -- anyone over 13 knows the difference between a constructive contribution and something that's likely to tick someone off. It's important for us to balance "free speech" and a reasonable standard of intelligent discussion, and I believe the majority of our users would rather have it weighted toward the latter.

Chris

I meant to agree with Nathan up there, btw. Sorry!

I think you mean Nathan not Nick, right?

So you are discriminating against my comments because I happen to be a former staff member (one that you frankly "used" in the last few months I might add)? I don't think thats very nice or moral..

Again, it appears you think these message boards are your own personal property and you must protect them with your life or something. Sure, you do have the legal right to do that, and thats what you are doing.

However, that is not acting like a professional website. These message boards, I assume, are supposed to be a reasonable cross-section of the views of the TI community. When you delete comments like you are doing, you are basically trying to tilt the opinions on the message boards in your favor. Sure its legal, but its not nice.

And Chris, most (if not all) of my comments were and are not lies. If you think something is a lie, simply reply and say that its not true. Deleting the entire thread isn't the right way to go about doing it. You don't kill someone just because they are spreading rumors about you. Believe it or not, we can have an intelligent discussion about something.

And from the tone of your comment, it appears you are taking this way too personal.

At any rate, I agree with Nathan, so either way you're right.
As for taking it personally, IT'S (partially) HIS SITE!! He *expletive* well has a right to take it personally, Bryan. If you end up bashing a site that we work for hours on end to maintain, you should know that we're going to be genuinely hurt. Of all the people, I wouldn't expect _you_ to assume that we would simply take people who publicly slander our site inconsequentially.
Finally, regarding the lies, who is someone going to believe more: the accuser or the accused?

--BlueCalx

Taking things personally and going out and deleting comments because of it is not acting very professionally.

We do not discriminate against your comments because you're former staff; we "discriminate against" your comments because among all of our users, you're the one posting the most objectionable comments, in our judgment. If you were somebody else and posted the same stuff, they'd get the same treatment.

The goal of our message boards is to allow people to discuss news items. We allow for some leeway in off-topic discussion, so long as it's well-meaning. We have not opened up our comment boards as a free-for-all where anyone may spout off about any complaints they have about anything. It's perfectly fine if you reply to an article about a new program and say "This program sucks because x, y, and z." But every article is not an open invitation for people to debate what they like and don't like about this site.

It's a hard decision whether to delete something we find to be untrue or to respond and argue the case. Past experience has shown that arguing only makes matters worse -- I don't believe you're out to "get the facts straight" on the issues you bring up, but to criticize us in public. If that's true, you'll never be satisfied no matter what response we give, and that's what I've witnessed so far.

If I had to sum this all up, I'd say this: Send your criticism to us in private. We want to have a chance to respond to your claims, but doing so in public just makes things get out of control and fosters an unhappy environment.

Our upcoming revision to the comment guidelines will include this rule. It's something that should go without saying, but we'll put it down in writing regardless. Until then, you've been informed, and if you stick to that I assure you less comments will disappear.

Chris

Chris, the thread about SF2 that was deleted was not off-topic. Other threads were not off-topic either. I never said the comment boards should be a free-for-all. That of course wouldn't be reasonable. But I believe this moderation thing has gone too far, its almost communism.

Again, from the tone of your comment, you are assuming many things about me and ny comments. I thought you said assuming things is wrong? I don't think you should assume those things against me.

There are many more criteria for comments being acceptable or not besides whether or not they're off-topic. We seek to have things that are constructive. Your posts rarely are. We feel that people simply don't want to hear the ramblings of your personal vendetta. What is your motivation for pointing out things you see that are "wrong for the site?" The obvious and true answer to that is you are seeking to make us look bad. Problems and criticism about the site should go to us directly via email. But you don't want the problems to be fixed. All you want is to make our public image go down. You are criticizing our motivation with a an alterior motive behind your back. This is what is normally known as hypocracy.

Furthermore, you say in your previous comments that we are trying to tilt the scale of comments in favor of what we think is best by deleting comments. This is simply not true. Besides, what you are trying to do is tilt the scales in favor of distruth.

Finally, you claim that Chris is making assumptions about your comments. This is definitely not true. All the staff has read your comments, and they can be summarized fairly to be nothing more than rants of our site. There are exceptions, and Chris definitely made note of them.

We have asked you several times to conduct these types of conversations with us privately in email, but you continue to not listen. This is not very reasonable of you. Any professional site would act the same as we do in regards to comments.

I would also like to say something that appears to have gotten lost. In my original comment, I said Bryan "often" tries to cause trouble. I didn't say that every one of his posts are slanderous. As other staff members have pointed out, he has a very nice, well-stated comment in this very article.

I have not agreed with all of the deletions of Bryan's comments in the past. I would have let some stand. But we cannot always give a rebuttal to these things; particularly when they are fanciful and based merely on opinion.

I like that we have a thread of long point/counterpoint replies here (and I'm happy the staff backed me up in my original long message). While off-topic, it is significant enough that I won't delete it. ;) I think that none of the staff members have taken anything too personally, and other than an unnecessary comment or two (us pigs should roll around in the mud some more? Come on, hasn't the Animal Farm analogy been done to death?), Bryan has also been rather reasonable.

Um, I'd probably say more, but I'm going to answer helpmail now. I will ask how Bryan KNOWS we don't check any of our files when he doesn't work here? I know we check at least SOME of our files because I checked ZAC personally (and all the program news items have also been checked--so there).

Flea Races just posted today was originally in the TI-89 BASIC section. It of course, as it is now, supposed to be in the TI-83 BASIC section. Just another example. I never said you didn't test any files ever at any time since time began. I merely said a lot of files were not being tested before posted.

And I would like to say I don't appreciate this onslaut of essay comments by staff members comdemning my comments/actions/etc.

A direct quote from you up above: "I do not just assume you don't check files before they are added, I _know_ they are not being checked."

Nowhere in there do you indicate that you think this is a conditional thing. You didn't say "don't check SOME files." So I'm not sure where you "merely said a lot of files were not being tested before posted."

And hey, if you don't like criticism coming out in public, perhaps you understand how we feel time after time when you shoot down our site and staff in the message boards. At least we're presenting well-formed arguments instead of unsubstantiated two-sentence jabs.

Chris

Chris - I never said that you guys never check any files, ever. Sure, you guys have at least checked a couple in the last 6 months. :)

I'd like to point out that, as a member of the human race, I make mistakes. The best I can do is fix them as quickly as possible. This is why there is a filearchive@ticalc.org mail alias that points to me.

--
Phil

Do you blame everything on the human race?

My personal vandetta? Sorry, I don't have one. And you are getting off-topic again. This thread is about the "vandetta" of deleting comments that shouldn't be deleted. Don't try and change the subject.

After reading your comment and Phil's lengthy sermon, you guys all are trying to say the same thing. You assume that every comment I post is in some way out to make you guys look bad and every comment is not constructive, etc., etc., and more etc.

Please do not judge my motives or anyone elses. Again, this is getting off-topic. All I am asking (and Patrick was asking in the comment at the top of this tread) is that you act move professionally and stop deleting whole threads for no reason.

I am not going to respond to every point you tried to make, because they are wide generalizations. And I think your comment could also be categorized as a "slander" and "flame" against me. That does not make you look very good. According to your own rules, your comment should be deleted.