I think that Hobbes is saying that internal politics and strife can make it very difficult to remain objective when an administrator. Especially if you're heavily involved in everything that's going on, there is a risk you'll lose sight of the neutrality a root administrator should have. It happens to a lot of administrators who get caught up in politics, and sometimes it has a result of what happened with Hile.

I can see, and do agree with his logic. But that is another topic unrelated to our current one.

The Osiris case, was a little different. A few threads were deleted and two user accounts. Zeta restored the threads that they were given direct links for, and one of the user-accounts. It was an emotionally charged situation and one I was far too involved in to think of it without some degree of horror, even a year and a half later.

Also, wasn't Todd_McCloud a root for a million places and everyone trusted him and even I thought he was pretty nice? He seemed the most neutral person ever but he assisted in the recent attempt to vote stack in TSP so no there is no one who is neutral enough if they are in NS.

GR and Tsunamy can both balance each other out in terms of politics.

I think the Administration Team had a done a very good job of separating politics from administration. Almost all of what we do is technical. We've never delivered an administrative ban, even. The three of us leave politics to the Assembly and the Cabinet, where we do express our positions and run for offices. That political activity hasn't really impacted our administrative duties, because we purposefully want a firewall between them. It's just not necessary to neuter administrator involvement in the region to achieve that firewall.

As for Zetaboards, yes the dangers still very much exist. The root can delete the entire the forum, and ZB will not restore it without the root asking. That is their stated policy. So it's the same danger posed with any off-site forum solution.

(03-04-2015, 01:54 PM)Escade Wrote: Also, wasn't Todd_McCloud a root for a million places and everyone trusted him and even I thought he was pretty nice?  He seemed the most neutral person ever but he assisted in the recent attempt to vote stack in TSP so no there is no one who is neutral enough if they are in NS.

GR and Tsunamy can both balance each other out in terms of politics.

You are incorrect: he was not root administrator for a million places. He is the root administrator of the old Osiris board, from July 2013 to December 2013. He is an administrator of TEPs board; he is not the root there. He used to be an administrator of a past TSP board, and was once an administrator of a Lazarus board iirc.

Quote:As for Zetaboards, yes the dangers still very much exist. The root can delete the entire the forum, and ZB will not restore it without the root asking. That is their stated policy. So it's the same danger posed with any off-site forum solution.

I think it's far more likely that we might lose our data while it's being hosted by a private figure in the region than a rogue admin deleting the forum.

I'm a bit of a NS Historian and I can safely say that about 85% of the forums hosted privately (like the Met's forums and TWP's old forums or even NSwiki) eventually go under and the data is lost for eternity, whereas most of the forums that were on IF and ZB exist to this day - which means most of our NS History is recorded since NS started using IF (NSRadio being one of the major sources of historical information). Anything from the Met, which would be a big source of info for researchers, was lost - and it's almost impossible for that information to be recovered because of uncooperative admins who disappeared into the depths of time.

So, will Glen-Rhodes being playing NS in a decade?

I'm just addressing the argument that the danger levels are different. They aren't. You're arguably better off having a co-root system with both people downloading regular backups, than you are with ZB where you can't download backups at all and only the individual root owner can authorize a forum restoration.

I don't think it's useful to get into predicting the future 10 years down the road. I doubt very many of us will still be playing, and I doubt we'll be using the same forum, let alone the same software, in a decade no matter what. If you're counting on ZB to survive another decade under their current practices, you may want to consider a different approach to conserving history.

(03-04-2015, 05:15 PM)Sandaoguo Wrote: I don't think it's useful to get into predicting the future 10 years down the road. I doubt very many of us will still be playing, and I doubt we'll be using the same forum, let alone the same software, in a decade no matter what.

*cough* Some of us might be still playing 10 years from now.

NationStates might not even exist 10 years from now! A decade is an eternity on the Internet. [emoji88]

There might something totally new to replace it like NationStates MMO :O

(03-05-2015, 12:23 AM)Escade Wrote: There might something totally new to replace it like NationStates MMO :O

Doesn't nationstates already count as a MMO?