Friday, April 22, 2011

Banhammered

Not me.

Thanks to Herculine for pointing out to me that EARACHE42 has been banned from the Nexus network.

Most players of Fallout 3 will be at least passingly familiar with EARACHE42's work. He authored not only Ling's Finer Things - a collection of Type 3 compatible clothing and accessories - but Ling's Pretty Things and Ling's Coiffure - cosmetic resources of more than a bit of excellence. He also authored eXCALIBR - an improvement to the Community Ammunition Library, or CALIBR as it's most often known; eXCALIBR was an interesting addition that allowed projectiles to do more realistic things like shoot through chain-link fences (something that projectiles in the base game can't do by default). There were also a few mods to go with eXCALIBR that added new weapons, vendors, and quests to the game.

I can't claim that I know EARACHE42 well. We have only talked a few times; mostly about his interest in including my modifications of Ren's hairs (that had the alpha adjusted to not clip with eyewear) in later versions of Ling's. I assented of course, though I don't know if he ever did it or not.

He earned a bit of ire from me last year in the course of releasing several of the eXCALIBR mods without testing them first; but we all make mistakes.

He always struck me as a decent enough person, and did make attempts to fix any issues that were reported with his mods.

As well, he always gave credit for any resources he used.

Dark0ne has said he's going to "do a report" on the situation, and what exactly happened; but not right now. Apparently Easter is this weekend or something. I don't really pay attention - the holiday has no real religious meaning (co-opted pre-Christian fertility festival) and I stopped believing in the bunny a long time ago. (one of the nice things about being an adult - if you want a bag of candy, just go fucking buy one and eat it when you please)

I read the linked posts, though; and EARACHE42 states that he came home from a near death experience to find all his mods blocked from public viewing; under review for a baseless complaint (presumably copyright related). Substantial frustration expressed, he swore and asked for a third strike - apparently already having two for unspecified reasons.

EARACHE42, buddy, I can relate. More than once I've been tempted to tell some little twit what I really think about them and just accept the Nexus ban. The Capital Wasteland is going to be a lesser place without his clothes and weapons and beauty mods.

Good luck to you in whatever you decide to do with your free time after this; and may the next place you share your mods have fewer retards than the Nexus.

36 comments:

  1. When I'm leaving my two-cent's-worth here and there on the Nexus Forums I try to be fairly amicable and cooperative with the Mod Squad, hopefully without appearing to be too much of an ass-kisser (because I really am not into that, unless of course she requests it specifically), but as I mentioned to Nos in the PM on this matter, I'm also not afraid to send one of the Nexus Moderators a PM if I think their actions against a member are in my opinion unwarranted. I'm going to give Robin time to enjoy his little egg-hunt or whatever and see what his public statement will be, but if I don't agree with the reasoning behind the ban you can rest assured that I'll make my opinion known... however carefully-worded it may be.

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  2. I was checking out his "Book of Earache" metamod thing to consider using it, but I didn't really trust the whole CaliberX or whatever that it required, so I never got around to installing it. And now it's been yanked. pity. A couple other modders whose worked I've really liked have gotten themselves banned for similiar reasons - the cretins in the "community" pushing them too far, and the modders lash out and get banned for "abusive behavior". I'm amazed at times ya'll keep your tempers dealing with these people. :|

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  3. The great irony is that eXCALIBR was actually good. It was the addons like the Book Of that were the problem causers.

    As for: "I'm amazed at times ya'll keep your tempers dealing with these people."

    Most of us don't.

    Virtually all modders who have done it for long have some system in place for venting. I use the blog here; others have similar, or Livejournals or something else similar.

    If you don't, you end up eventually blowing a seal on the Nexus and getting your ass B&.

    As I've opined many times over the years, it never ceases to amaze me that the Nexus moderators go out of their way to punish contributing modders to protect spineless, brainless leeches.

    I'd call it a microcosm of modern society in general, but fuck it - it's a privately owned network of servers, than can do as they please and if we don't like it we can walk.

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  4. ...they can do as they please...

    Fucking hell, I either need more caffeine or more sleep. Probably both. I'm only up to about 425mg of caffeine today...

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  5. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
    -- John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

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  6. Hmmm, His choice of language in responding to the twit was, perhaps, a trifle strong for use on the Nexus boards.

    But the response should have been handled through PMs, instead of the ban hammer. Earache had been a productive member of the community, while the twit was... a twit.

    Am I allowed to think that all three sides of this mess are idiots? Twit, Earache42, and moderators, all?

    Parts of Ling's was very good - I hope that it can find a new home. There are a fair number of dependent mods that will either need to be rewritten or become useless without the Ling's mod.

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  7. Mod dependencies is one of my major concerns as well.

    I'm not looking forward to having to re-outfit all 100+ RR Scouts with lame vanilla clothes and hairstyles, as well as changing their cool recall items to something more mundane. In many cases, changing their hairstyles will have a serious impact upon their appearances, and the outfits added much individuality as well. Having to change all of that will really suck. (I think there might be a different hair compilation that I could use, but still it would be a lot of work to convert them.)

    If Earache42 does not get reinstated a lot of mods on the Nexus will suffer similarly. It's all bad news if you ask me.

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    1. This is Papajack55 from Nexus. Hey Herculine, I got banned too from the Skyrim acc't and had to go to Oblivion to get my self re-instated. All I did was post a pic of my character in a feminine manner, sitting in a chair with her legs crossed, using animation. She had on a microminiskirt (non-lore) of course and a skimpy top. But no nudity. I was told I could be banned at any time? :-/

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  8. "Am I allowed to think that all three sides of this mess are idiots? Twit, Earache42, and moderators, all?"

    You are, of course, allowed to think that. We here at NosCo are ardent Libertarians, after all. Well, okay I am. I'm pretty sure the security staff are natural selection-totalitarians (I have a gun and you don't, so I'm in charge!); and I have no idea where the nekomimi'd head of companion creation flags.

    I do disagree a bit, though; on the idiocy.

    I can really relate to EARACHE42's situation. After my heart attack last year, it put a lot of things into question ("why am I wasting my time on this bullshit?"). Had I come back from that to find my uploads all blocked, because some brown-nose moderator had decided to act on a report without investigating it in any way? Odds are good I'd have told the entire "community" to take a flying fucking leap - in those exact words.

    While I'll say that EACHACHE42's actions may not have been... the best thought-out in regards to the players; I wouldn't call them idiotic so much as fed up beyond caring anymore.

    Especially considering we haven't seen the contents of his PM box. There's a ton of stupidity that goes on in there that most of you never hear about. I just got a PM yesterday morning from someone wanting me to teach them how to add pictures to a file entry's description. Couple days before that, I was asked out of the blue by someone I've never heard of to send them a copy of a mod I don't even have, because it's been pulled from the Nexus.

    There are days I, too, wish to begin yelling profanity, and call the mods and some players bad names until they ban me.

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  9. And as for Herculine:

    I'm sorry to say my dear neko, that you may well be screwed. I've tried to "clean" masters from a plugin before, and it's pretty random in whether it works or not.

    While there are other hair packs, the clothes and items in Ling's came from a couple of hundred other mods; and it may be moot because FO3Edit may refuse to remove the dependency without corrupting the plugin in the process. I lost like six copies of my special companions plugin trying to clean RR from it. If you're gonna try, always make backups first.

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  10. "Backups" is my middle name. Remember my Dell backup from '07?

    But it's not removing the .esm dependencies that concerns me so much; I'll delete the hex IDs one by one if I have to.

    My problem is that I never would have created so many characters if I hadn't had so many outfits and hairstyles; using the vanilla resources they'll all inevitably look basically the same or in the very least very redundant. Most of them will be superfluous.

    The way I see it I have two choices:

    1: Reduce the number of companions in the package to about a quarter of what it is now.

    2: Post a disclaimer in the description and readme stating that it's not my fault the guy got banned a year after I made the mod and I have no intention of changing it.

    At the moment I don't like either of those options. Now I kinda know how you feel every time you have to rewrite all your scripts just because there's a new update or some such.

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  11. Understandable. I'd probably leave it as-is. You can bet there are still quite a few of us who have archived copied of Ling's, and someone will probably file-share it sooner or later.

    But, as for:

    "Now I kinda know how you feel every time you have to rewrite all your scripts just because there's a new update or some such."

    You're close, but not quite there. You won't fully understand the feeling until people start coming out of the woodwork bitching at you that your mod "doesn't work" and needs to be fixed.

    Did you fix it yet?

    How about now?

    What about now?

    My game still doesn't work you know.

    Done yet?

    This is all your fault! You should have known it was going to happen and planned ahead!

    Screw you, I'm rating your mod down now.

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  12. The problem with most users on Nexus is that it is their inherent right to demand something gets fixed immediately. Most don't even think or care that the creators are the same as them (human) and cannot respond immediately to things. Most of the time, I tell the guys to do this and that. Majority of the time, they do it and it's fine. However, there are the insistent idiots that continue to be a bastard and just make like more and more difficult to the point where they bad-mouth to get their point across. I had been asked by a mod to stop it when all I did was try and help the bugger.

    When I heard EARACHE getting banned, I asked the mods into why. All I got was a stony silence and to butt out. If that is how they treat users and creators alike, then it will come back and bite them in the backside.

    Nos, sorry to hear about your heart attack issue and hopefully, it hasn't been a problem. And yeah, it is a struggle for all of us given how fast idiots and the universe is spreading. But the idiots are winning this round.

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  13. crossfire_boy89, I hope you mean "most users on Nexus is that they think it is their inherent right to demand something gets fixed immediately"

    'Cause, if you actually meant that it is their right to demand changes or "fixes" to something they didn't pay for, well... you and I have a fundamental disagreement a'brewin'.

    I do agree with the rest, though. I try to steer clear of the Nexus moderators, but I do poke my head in and read a ban thread every now and again; and I've noticed they have a worrying proclivity for declaring such things simply are, and no questions will be answered nor backtalk allowed.

    I can understand not taking crap for banning someone who breezes into the forums spouting racism or antisemitism; but when there are legitimate issues and they still play that "because I said so" crap, I know it grates on my nerves.

    I also note with no small amusement that Dark0ne's "report" still doesn't seem to have materialized. Granted it is only Monday... but still. One would think at least a five minute cliff's notes post about the issue.

    As for the lump of obsidian that passes for my heart: thanks for the concern, but I'm not worried. I'm apparently not allowed to die. Through some dietary changes, careful management of exertion and stress, and enough Zantac 150 to choke a moose; I've managed to get it under control. The issue seems to be healed - no chest pains in a couple months now; and I know the early warning symptoms to watch for should it begin to reemerge.

    Shame, though. I was looking forward to getting to take some time off, and visit my condo on the north shore of the lake of fire...

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  14. A condo, eh? You HAVE been busy, haven't you?

    In regard to the majority of the Nexus Moderators ("majority" because I don't think they've all been bad) I simply refer you to the quote I posted a ways back up the page. That's all I have to say on that.

    As for the majority of Nexus "users", it is my firm belief that they are exactly like my GF's 4 nieces and 1 nephew (and most likely fit into the same range of adolescent ages). My GF has a heart of gold and will sacrifice almost anything to do everything she can for these kids, and they don't have the decency to at least pretend that they appreciate anything. We don't expect any trophies or anything, but I was brought up with at least enough manners that when I receive a gift I say "thank you" even if the thing wasn't necessarily something I liked or wasn't exactly what I wanted. These kids just can't seem to bring themselves to say those two little words that would mean the world to her. Being the jaded pessimist that I can often be, I try to convince her to stop wasting so much of her time and money on the ungrateful little brats, but she has no children of her own so of course they are "her kids" and, despite the fact that she knows they're never going to show her any respect, she just keeps trying. Anyway, most of the Nexus kids are exactly the same; they have a grand sense of entitlement but no desire to show any appreciation for the things they demand. When I was a kid I was often told that my generation is bad for this sort of thing, but my generation has got nothing on today's youths. I sincerely wonder what will happen once all the old folks are dead and there's nobody left around to take care of them. Perhaps the human race will simply die out.

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  15. My annoyance with Earache was mostly that a presumably intelligent person got into a swearing fit with an idiot.

    Idiot is contagious.

    Better to ignore them, there is justice in ignoring the ignorant. :P

    I had to deal with an idiot last week, after another idiot convinced her that she didn't need virus protection if she only visited Pogo.

    She removed the anti-virus, but didn't tell either her roommate or her roommate's teenage son.

    Both of whom used that same computer....

    But at least I did my swearing at her computer, not her....

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  16. @ Nos, sorry, I meant what you posted. Sorry if that came out a bit too strong.

    As Herculine and theauldgrump conveyed, I get it too whenever someone says "It doesn't work" or "I can't get this to do blah". It had been posted as clear as day on the instructions or had been suggested in the comments earlier. I try not to get too involved in the mods. That's probably why I stick to the technical problem as that's where I'm more at home with. A plus given how I deal with customers returning objects that their customers had buggered up. :P

    However, I do think some manners (regardless if you are doing it in person or online) goes a long way. Sadly however, internet etiquette isn't ingrained as it was any more.

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  17. Banned? Seriously? Wow, I miss a lot when I'm out of town...

    I like to keep all my downloaded mods archived, as I don't see the point of having to go through the process again if I have had to re-install my game. I have eXCALIBER and the various Ling's mods, mostly out of the requirement of other mods to use them. Herculine's Scouts, Blackblossom's Bittercup and some of her weapons mods, and some of Chrome Hamster's newer companion mods being the main ones. I will say that I am not a fan of Ling's Coif or Prettyt things, so the afformentioned mods are the only reason they are on my system at all. Having said that, though, Earache42 did some really good work. The loss of his mods on the Nexus will be as much a blow to some as was the loss of Tailor Maid.

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  18. *sigh* "Pretty Things"
    I really need to proof read better...

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  19. @DRUULER:

    I do the same thing; I keep a well-organized folder of mods I've downloaded and liked enough to keep in my game. My motivation has little to do with Nexus politics, though; I do it simply because I'm not wealthy and internet service would be one of the first non-essentials to go if things got bad enough. I hate using the slow-ass computers at our public library, which are only available in one-hour intervals.

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  20. Wait, Tailor Maid is gone? When the hell did this happen?

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  21. Son of a bitch. It is gone. Can't find it on the Nexus; and it appears to be gone from my tracking list somehow.

    So the Nexus has now driven off Montana, the Tailor Maid crew; and now EARACHE42, as well - while protecting the moronic little shits who never upload anything except miniguns changed to fire nukes and other such LOLZ weapons.

    Hell with it. I hereby declare the Nexus is a microcosm of modern western society.

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  22. Jeez, Tailor Maid is gone too?

    Maybe the world needs an alternative to Nexus.... Seems like the best are getting driven off by the twits, and the mods are allowing it to happen.

    Now I am trying to explain to someone that, no, they didn't do anything wrong - the installer for Adobe AIR really is a piece of steaming refuse.... And once it has decided not to install on a Windows 7 machine it will NEVER install on that computer. (Did I ever mention that I hate AIR? Well, I do....) And she has to use software dependent on it.

    One of the things I love about it is the way Adobe techs always act as though this is the first time that they have heard of this problem.... They give tech support a bad name.

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  23. "Maybe the world needs an alternative to Nexus.... "

    While I don't disagree in principle... I'm not sure I've ever seen a better example that had any popularity whatsoever. Anywhere that does ban/otherwise punish for stupidity gains an immediate reputation for elitism and all round mean-ness.

    All of the ones that don't... Fileplanet, FileFront, the Nexii, DoomWorld - end up a steaming pile of condensed stupid.

    Even the ones that temporarily escape that eventually fall. Anyone else remember Exnem's forum? Bastion of high quality body replacers and adult armor/clothing mods in general... until a few of the moderators got into a hissy fit over who was in charge and it imploded.

    I swear, if you want to avoid drama these days, you've about got to hearken (Damn you, Firefox! the American spelling of that word does not use EA! but fine, whatever...) back to the days of our ancestors and only share files direct with people you know.

    Buuuuut... that carries the distinct drawback that none of us would have ever met. So maybe the Nexii shouldn't be replaced.

    And don't get me started on Adobe. I swear, those people are trying to make Acrobat and Flash Player as annoying and resource whore-y as humanly possible.

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  24. Dark0ne's "special report" is up now.

    http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/372658-earache42-banned/page__pid__3073947#entry3073947

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  25. I was the one who reported him on FO3 Nexus used my mod without credit. Don't rage at me either, I didn't think nexus would take it so seriously, I was nice about it and everything. EARACHE42 sent me a message asking why I reported his file. I simply responded to it was not Toxa01's it was mine. Since he gave credit to Toxa01 but not me. It was not my fault he swore and took it the wrong way. I also didn't mean to make such a big deal over it.

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  26. As it says in the report I was banned after porting COD file :P stupid. He did steal my mod though, since he did not give credits.

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  27. He did receive permission from me but I said he could only use it if he added appropriate credits. Also that model was ported from stalker that is another reason I was banned.

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  28. I have no intention of raging.

    Interesting that you note you were banned for porting a STALKER model. Last I heard - and there have been a couple big news posts on the Nexus about it - STALKER's content owners had publicly stated that their resources were reusable, provided it was for noncommercial purposes.

    I'll also posit that a PM, asking for his credits section to be updated appropriately would have been a better idea than mashing the report button. EARACHE42's mods used resources from dozens if not hundreds of other mods and modders, and even the best of us slip up and omit a name or miscredit something here or there.

    I am, however, going to call you an idiot for "not thinking the Nexus would make such a big deal about it". They're (in?)famously overzealous in attacking anything that even remotely smells like piracy or other copyright violation.

    Personally, I'd think the report function should only be made if the reuser of your resources flatly refuses to update their credits, or failing that remove your content. Using it in lieu of a simple request for a credit update is just asinine.

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  29. [And don't get me started on Adobe. I swear, those people are trying to make Acrobat and Flash Player as annoying and resource whore-y as humanly possible.] Try Googling for problems installing AIR, and see how many times the techs repeat 'We have never heard of anyone ever having this problem before'. You will find that response going back five years, over, and over, and over....

    And the woman I am working with is required to use AIR for her job.... AIR's installer is a known Piece of Crap, and Adobe is pretending that there is nothing wrong... unless you want to, you know, install the program....

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  30. Sorry Poop, but you saw that he HAD given attribution, merely misapplied it - you should have handled it with a PM.

    No amount of whining is going to change that - Earache WAS willing to give credit, and you went and had yourself a hissy fit because he didn't know it was yours. A simple PM and he almost certainly would have changed it.

    Bad show.

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  31. Not that it matters much now, but I believe Tailor Maid disappeared off the Nexus back in October or November. I think the author decided to pull the files and leave the Nexus. The forum thread about it might still be on the site (Tailor Maid Gone?).

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  32. I found this:

    http://bethplanet.ru/load/globalnye/anthony_lings_pretty_things/25-1-0-412

    It seems to be the same file that was banned by that self-righteous megalomaniac. Gotta love the Ruskies, standing up to developers instead of thinking of their own worthless pseudo-corporate integrity.

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  33. Earache is still updating his mods on VGUNetwork if you want to check it out.

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  34. This is poop719 lol ... I, personally have come to an end with Nexus. If you want the whole story, Dark0ne over exaggerated and made us both sound extremely horrible.. I was banned for porting, and he was banned, which was not intended, for something very minuscule.

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