I've been wanting to make a post here for a little over 9 months now but I just hoped that the Curse staff would at least take the time to respond to one of my messages to them. 10 months later, still not a single response. I guess that shouldn't be a shock when you consider all of the negative information you can find about them all over the web. As for my reason for wanting to post, it all goes back to the original reason of why I was here or at least what started the ball rolling back in 2011.
My first exposure to the Bukkit forums left me wondering why there were so many people asking the same questions over and over again but never getting a response. After browsing the forum for months, I decided to try to help. Then wham, deleted post. Damn, what did I do wrong. Some time later, I got the hang of things and was a very productive member of the forums answering questions in all sorts of areas. Then again, deleted post and by of all people, FootInMouth. I still laugh when I type that. It doesn't take much to amuse me.
Now after 2 deleted posts and an incorrect direction that the forums are heading in, I'm pissed off. 3 months or so go by and I start posting here. I was amazed to find out that the Bukkit staff were reading these forums and even in some cases responding to them. Even to the point that Evil himself sent me a personal message. I'm going to post some of that message below but if he wants me to remove it, he knows how to get in touch with me.
First off, I would like to apologise for the unfriendly welcome you experienced when you first came across the community. I am not sure why your post was deleted - I can't seem to even find your first post - but I apologise if it was removed without a valid reason, which brings me to my first point: more communication from my staff whenever we take action.
That was very nice of him to say. I'm not sure if I said it before or not but I've been involved with forums in the past that had 10x the traffic that the Bukkit forums had in 2011 and there were rules for how you dealt with the public. The public has rights and you have to make sure they are respected. Something as simple as a message when one of your posts is deleted would go a long way. But not the abuse I received earlier this year from one of their moderators. I'll get to that later. (For a bit of programmer humor - "select * from messages where userid = <my user id> and deletedflag = 1". I could look up the actual tables for Xenforo but I'm an SMF guy myself)
Lastly, I've been following your criticism and opinions closely on drakia's forum and I'd like to thank you for it. It's surprisingly difficult to get people to openly criticise the project, the community or things we do in a constructive manner so our best bet is to find some other avenue that people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts in to get reliable, honest and helpful feedback from. I've been searching long and hard for the right additions to the Community Staff team for a while now and you seem to be a worthy candidate: you have your head on straight, you're not afraid to tell it like it is when it matters, you're mature and tactful and you obviously care a lot about the community. To that end, I'd like to offer you a position on the Community Staff if you are interested.
I'm a professional programmer with over 35 years programming experience. I can't even count the number of code reviews I've been involved in but after a while, you find it is a lot quicker just to tell people what is wrong with their code. I tend to do the same for other things too so it came easy for me to criticize the way they were doing things. I was very impressed with what Evil had to say above not because he offered me a position on their staff (I've been offered positions at least 3 times so far) but because he was willing to listen. The current administration can't even be bothered to respond to my posts asking them questions.
Which brings me back to the main point of this post. 2 posts deleted, 3, 4, 5, .... Yes, I've counted them all. Some were deserved but a lot weren't. And when asked about why, I get ignorant responses about offtopic posts and the like. But nothing any of them tell me can even come close to saying why almost 400 of my posts are missing now. One moderator suggested that some of my posts were archived. Nope, that isn't it. I hate to even admit this but one spammer left Bukkit a while back and when he did, someone said that he must have set a record for the number of posts he made in his short 3 months on the forums. Ignoring the fact that the majority of his posts were either worthless or were outright spam, I had to go check how many posts I had in my first 3 months. I captured all of my post data into an Excel spreadsheet, summed up the first 3 months and I beat him by over 200 posts. Yeah, pat myself on the back. I'm not sure why I still do this stuff at 50 but hey, I'm very competitive.
A month or so goes by after that post and I start to notice my post count going down. I start checking my current posts against the spreadsheet but I can't find a pattern as to what was being deleted. I start sending Curse messages asking if something was going on that might cause it. No response. I get a nasty response to one of my reports from a moderator so I send that along to Curse. No response. I see the old boys club is seriously active on the forums where there are some members of the forum that are above moderation so I report that to Curse. Yep, no response. Moderators are making false claims but don't care because the forums are dead/dying. Reported to Curse, still no response.
I'm sure I've said this before on here or perhaps elsewhere but Evil is just a guy who created a very popular website and server tool. Even those who dislike the way he did things would have to admit to the success that he had. But he was still just a guy running a website. Curse is a very large corporation. I don't care if they have 2 people running it or 20k, they are still a very large corporation. So why can't they figure out how to run a simple forum with all of 20 users. Evil had to deal with 100k+ with a staff team that was filled with people who didn't know the difference between moderation and censoring.
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) I never really went back, so I never kept tabs on how the forums were going. It's too bad the Curse staff seem to have less interest in feedback than the Bukkit staff back in the day 
