Tuesday, August 19, 2014

I attempt to respond to a blog post by Fighteer, was ignored.

Several months ago, Fighteer published an extremely paranoid, accusatory post on his blog, all but accusing ATT of being responsible for vandalizing and DDoSing TV Tropes, saying all of TV Tropes' enemies were just butthurt perverts pissed their porn was deleted, and gravedancing over the ED article on Nate Spidgewood (while ironically saying nothing about his own).

I was made aware of it sometime after it was made, and I and Brent Laabs officially denounced the accusations on the Drunkard's Walk forums as groundless and without merit.

Recently, a Tumblr user who wishes to remain anonymous brought up the article to me and suggested I officially reply to Fighteer's post with a comment on the post, so I submitted one.

Almost a week later, Fighteer has yet to publish my response, so I have decided to make my comments and rebuttals to his post available below.

A Tumblr user provided me a link to this page, and since I would like to set the record straight, here is our official position on several of the items you have addressed concerning our site.

Nate Spidgewood has been permanently banned from All The Tropes in all its incarnations. I myself informed him he had no right to vandalize or harass TV Tropes, and I had no tolerance for him trying to recruit people for trolling or harassment of TV Tropes on my own wikis, and since one of your own tropers advised me keeping him around was unwise, I made the decision to permaban him as a result. In fact, here is my official position on the matter of his foolishness:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:604330 (he is still permabanned, but rest of this thread is still relevant)

Also, I would like to make it quite official that the staff of ATT (Orain or Wikia) does not condone, sanction, support, or encourage any vandalism, harassment, trolling, or any other mischief to TV Tropes, its staff, or its users. We cannot control the actions of unaffiliated third parties, but we do not condone them either.

We do support anyone with a dispute with TV Tropes to do so via proper channels, and if there is any hint on our part that anyone from our wikis is party to acts harmful to TV Tropes, we will duly inform TV Tropes ASAP.

Also, we are not a revenge site. We are a legal fork of content from prior to the licensing changes of July 2012 and onward, and we will not use any content that violates the CC BY SA 3.0 licensing. We have grave concerns about the legality of any content since TV Tropes changed it's licensing (since it would seem those changes are in circumvention of Creative Commons conditions), so we have elected not to allow anything past July 2012 to be imported (save a user's own edits from TV Tropes, since Creative Commons allows a user to relicense their own work under any conditions they see fit) since we are not lawyers and thus we do not want to risk plagiarism of any sort, and we (and especially I) maintain a firm stance against deliberate plagiarism and do not tolerate it. We have no desire to test the legal status of TV Tropes current content base due to this, and thus we avoid using any content from TV Tropes post July 2012 as a general rule, save any fair use images or anything else I have stated above.

Our goals are to be ad free or host our content on hosting where advertisement does not compromise our content integrity, such as on Orain and Wikia, and we oppose the censorship on TV Tropes on academic grounds, as we feel it has constrained discussion of media and the tropes those media use, and thus do not censor content unless it is illegal or outside our site mission. Also, while we share your disgust at someone using a troping wiki to store their masturbation material, we believe if an adult work has enough story to be tropable, it deserves to be troped and discussed for its literary (or lack thereof) merits, regardless of its sexual content, though we understand why certain works like this are not allowed to be discussed on TV Tropes.

Also, I reject the assumption we are based on a negative premise. If anything, we exist to provide an alternative to those who do not wish to trope on TV Tropes for whatever reason, and so long as our tropers do nothing to injure ourselves or TV Tropes in the process, we see no negative consequence of that.

As for Encyclopedia Dramatica, I agree, it's a biased website filled with a lot of embellishment and lies, and while I personally find some of it's content entertaining, I don't put that much stock in their accuracy myself, especially due to their obvious biases.

Also, the implication we had ANYTHING to do with a DDoS is not only one we deny, but we consider such an act criminal and consider any accusation we have done so without proof to be libelous.

However, you do make a valid point in that it's not a site's engine but it's content being what matters in the long run, and I concur wholeheartedly, but we feel that having a more efficient site engine can help improve the quality of our content, and frankly, having used PmWiki, I and the staff of ATT discarded it as utterly unsuitable to the task of managing a wiki, and while we understand why TV Tropes chooses to remain using a customized derivative of it for their own use, we have chosen to use MediaWiki because we believe it would better serve our needs long term.

Finally, we have had no part in spamming links to ourselves on TV Tropes or anything related. We have attempted to spread the word of ourselves via word of mouth, various social media outlets, and other above board means, and anyone attempting to use us in the manner you describe does not have our support or sanction.

If you wish to see either site or our policies, you can find them here:

https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/All_The_Tropes_Wiki

Our contact information made be found here:

https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All_The_Tropes:Contact_us

I have a personal blog on Blogspot where I discuss our site and related topics, but it is not an official arm of our wikis, which you can find here:

http://gethn7.blogspot.com/

If you have questions, concerns, or even if you would like to criticize myself in regards to site or its goals, please feel free to bring them to my attention at any time.

2 comments:

  1. Derp. Never noticed that. I meant to say "no right", but yeah, he probably thought it was intentional.

    Fixed now.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Too late; Fighteer's gonna out-legalese you with that typo like you never even existed.

    I'm not even kidding.

    ReplyDelete

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