Potentially removing Mugen Archive from our site blacklist?

[Darkflare]

 

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Forgive me for being blunt, but I think you're being delusional or at the very least optimistic in the extreme on this. Also, saying "well if nobody has it besides MA then it must not have been that great to begin with" reeks of childlike thinking that is beneath you and is more the thing cesarshadow would say, "I can't get that thing? Well, fine, it sucks and I never wanted it anyway!" Since MA has seen considerable growth, it would seem most of the rest of the community does not agree with your assessment; even if we take for truth the very optimistic assumption that all of the Mugen Archive's tens of thousand of files are possessed by other members of the community (or are so bad that no one wants them), what does a person do if want a file that is only held by some lurker who does not engage with the community like I used to be? Post a topic here and hope I notice it and decide to be generous? The Archive streamlines that process, it provides a place where sharing files is as easy as clicking a button and filing out a few fields (wheras the only other option is to tediously register with a filesharing service) as well as find such characters. And yeah, most people that register accounts only do that to download files, but that would be the same here too if registering was required to view the download links.

Whatever grudge you have against this Cesarshadow you should keep off this discussion.

You say MA has had considerable growth? Here's my question, on what basis are you measuring this growth? We both agreed that the majority of those accounts are only there just to download. I've taken a peek over at what MA considers their community and I found that it was laughable. There was barely any community at all.

 

Also, doesn't Archive let anyone upload to there? I trust an author's pride and reputation more than some random person that may have other intentions.

 

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Can you tell me in detail how it is accurate? Like I said, I'm willing to hear you out on this, even if I am skeptical.

- MA bans anyone that disagrees or suggests anything the staff doesn't like.

- MA bans anyone that interacts with any of its "rivals" regardless of whether they've broken MA's rules or not

-As an example of the above, I know a few people that have asked to have their creations taken down from MA, only for them to be banned instead and their creations remaining no matter how polite they were in asking for their removal.

- MA believes Plasmoidthunder has multiple accounts made to defame them
 

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If I was partisan I would be just mindlessly shilling for MA and would refuse to hear anything negative about them. I have already admitted your experiences with MA, whatever they may have been (you haven't told me in any detail yet) were valid, even if I am currently not convinced they were more than a single person's bad experiences.  If I was partisan I would refuse to listen to your side at all. As it is I am a supporter of MA but not a mindless one, i acknowledge they have both good and bad points and am willing to hear why you consider them more of a negative force than a positive one.

 

 

 

You claim that you're looking at MA's negatives, but to be honest, I believe you're just brushing them off as nothing. As long as MA is run by people like Dizzy and Sol, it and it's shillers can go eat a bag of dicks. I have my beliefs and you have yours, let's not waste any more time with this since neither of us is going to budge.

 

1 hour ago, Flare-Gamer-64 said:

Well said my dude. Plus I suggested that they add a "download later" option for Lurkers. So community weekend can be less of a problem so the Lurkers can download the file after the event is over. And that whole streamlining line was so true. Say if you wanted Jotaro by Warusaki3. What would you want to do? Get it fast and easy via going through a few pages? Or go find a Japanese website that you (likely) won't even be able to read? For most of us we would go with the first. Hell archive even has a thread just for files that need updating where you can give them the updated version and then they put that version over the older one. By the Mr Darkflare, if a creation was posted to Mugen Archive, made available only there and then somebody made a link for a different site, Would that also count a stealing?

If I wanted to DL Warusaki's Jotaro, I would just go to Warusaki's site. It's not hard to navigate at all and I know for sure I'm getting Warusaki's Jotaro and not some cheap edit of it. A lot of japanese sites are easy to navigate even if you don't know a lick of japanese.

 

It's only stealing if we were in the year 2007.

[Milbury]

2 hours ago, Darkflare said:

Whatever grudge you have against this Cesarshadow you should keep off this discussion.

You say MA has had considerable growth? Here's my question, on what basis are you measuring this growth? We both agreed that the majority of those accounts are only there just to download. I've taken a peek over at what MA considers their community and I found that it was laughable. There was barely any community at all.

 

Also, doesn't Archive let anyone upload to there? I trust an author's pride and reputation more than some random person that may have other intentions.

 

I could say the same about your grudge against the Mugen Archive (and I'm sorry, but it still looks like a grudge.)

As for growth, I'm measuring it based on my time as a member there since 2013. I was actually a lurker for the first 3 years and I remember back then there were days when the website would get less than half a dozen uploads a day. Now it gets between 20-50 uploads daily and apparently they are doing so well that they stopped using adfly purely because they don't need it anymore. I don't know the specifics because I'm not part of the MA inner circle, but if you think they're on the decline I have some land in a bayou to sell you. I'm pretty sure Dizzy said once they serve something like 25,000 downloads every day now.

And I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your last point. Are you saying that MUGEN downloads are only worth downloading if they have been uploaded directly by their own creators? By that logic, are you saying that no one should download any work by a retired creator, because they are retired and their downloads can no longer be obtained from them (excluding retired creators like Loganir who maintain their own websites, but these are exceedingly rare)?

 

2 hours ago, Darkflare said:

- MA bans anyone that disagrees or suggests anything the staff doesn't like.

- MA bans anyone that interacts with any of its "rivals" regardless of whether they've broken MA's rules or not

-As an example of the above, I know a few people that have asked to have their creations taken down from MA, only for them to be banned instead and their creations remaining no matter how polite they were in asking for their removal.

- MA believes Plasmoidthunder has multiple accounts made to defame them

 

- Just today I told Dizzy something she probably didn't like or want to hear that disagreed with her but I have not been banned (and as I said before, I am not in the inner circle by any means, just an average MA user).
- I'll give you this one, I don't know the details but I was warned not to mention being on MFFA when provided the link to come here.
- I agree with this halfway; I do think it's reasonable for MA to deny requests to have work taken down because, frankly, there are a lot of selfish MINE MINE MINE creators in this hobby that only want to release work under their very specific rules and regulations. Logansam, FabryTaz, creators of this type. It's very selfish of them to try to maintain a stranglehold in this way and I don't blame MA for telling them to get bent, but banning them just for requesting it is excessive.
- I have seen PlasmoidThunder's name on MA and accounts banned for being his dupes but I have no idea who he is or what his history with MA is. As such I will abstain from forming an opinion about this until I learn more about the situation there.

 

2 hours ago, Darkflare said:

You claim that you're looking at MA's negatives, but to be honest, I believe you're just brushing them off as nothing. As long as MA is run by people like Dizzy and Sol, it and it's shillers can go eat a bag of dicks. I have my beliefs and you have yours, let's not waste any more time with this since neither of us is going to budge.

 

 

Not agreeing with you about the MA being pure irredeemable evil is not the same as brushing off MA's negatives, which I have admitted in previous posts exist (I've just said they don't outweigh MA's positives). I appreciate you admitting you're an ideologue about this, even if I disagree with you I respect your honesty.

 

[Gray Fedora Productions]

Story time: I was browsing MUGEN archive one day last Summer, it was a Wednesday (remember that) and I wanted to get a character, I go to download, and i'm not allowed too, I didn't see why? So I go into the forums to ask why, then I see it. A verbal war was going on in the "Community Weekend" section, people were getting banned, left and right, for saying just how messed up it was that it was WEDNESDAY, and people still couldn't download things. So I go type up a paragraph explaining to the staff (Dizzy mostly) why people are angry. Then this guy with a Rugal avatar jumps in behind me and talks about how he has been using MUGEN since the beginning, and was angry about how ridiculous the community "WEEKEND" was and how the site can go "fork" itself. Well, that triggered a ticking time bomb, Dizzy started acting like the victim and blamed ME for this. Then got all her buddies together and got me and Rugal banned. To this day, I have vowed to stay as far away from MUGEN Archive as possible even though its the second thing that appears when you search MUGEN. Until the website gets its mind out of the gutter, I suggest staying far away from it.

[Flare-Gamer-64]

5 hours ago, Gray Fedora Productions said:

Story time: I was browsing MUGEN archive one day last Summer, it was a Wednesday (remember that) and I wanted to get a character, I go to download, and i'm not allowed too, I didn't see why? So I go into the forums to ask why, then I see it. A verbal war was going on in the "Community Weekend" section, people were getting banned, left and right, for saying just how messed up it was that it was WEDNESDAY, and people still couldn't download things. So I go type up a paragraph explaining to the staff (Dizzy mostly) why people are angry. Then this guy with a Rugal avatar jumps in behind me and talks about how he has been using MUGEN since the beginning, and was angry about how ridiculous the community "WEEKEND" was and how the site can go "fork" itself. Well, that triggered a ticking time bomb, Dizzy started acting like the victim and blamed ME for this. Then got all her buddies together and got me and Rugal banned. To this day, I have vowed to stay as far away from MUGEN Archive as possible even though its the second thing that appears when you search MUGEN. Until the website gets its mind out of the gutter, I suggest staying far away from it.

To be fair they don't make it obvious that it's a community weekend. I suggested they change the banner whenever they hold one so people will instantly know about it. And this is one of the reasons why I suggested that they add a download later option. So the Lurkers who don't wanna participate can get them after the event is over. 

[Flare-Gamer-64]

9 hours ago, Darkflare said:

If I wanted to DL Warusaki's Jotaro, I would just go to Warusaki's site. It's not hard to navigate at all and I know for sure I'm getting Warusaki's Jotaro and not some cheap edit of it. A lot of japanese sites are easy to navigate even if you don't know a lick of japanese.

 

It's only stealing if we were in the year 2007.

Fine then. But who has the first search on google when you search up "Mugen Jotaro"? Is it Mugen Archive, or Warusaki3's own site? It's Mugen Archive. And say if this is a new person who didn't know authors were, how would they find it otherwise? And what if people wanted a bunch of JoJo Mugen creations? They would go search "Mugen JoJo characters". In which the top listing is guess what, Archive. Case and point, it's quick, simple and effective. And what the hell is that 2007 statement? That can still hold true today.

[PlasmoidThunder]

7 hours ago, Milbury said:

- I have seen PlasmoidThunder's name on MA and accounts banned for being his dupes but I have no idea who he is or what his history with MA is.

Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

 

I am the head admin of the MUGEN Database. I blacklisted MA on the MUGEN Database as a source for downloads due to their use of adf.ly at the time and the security risks associated with it, and was banned on MA for writing a single silly quip on MFG, like many others at the time.

 

A good while later, certain quotes from the Database Discord were taken out of context regarding MA's pestering of Capcom for money, of which MA (or to avoid blaming the entire site, Sol) saw as a threat on Dizzy's life (note: 'Dizzy should be removed', which was referring to the user's position, not existence) and made a thread about it on MA. Certain people questioned whether Sol had misunderstood, though someone brought up the possibility of these people being my alts, also leading to the person who originally stated 'Dizzy should be removed', DoomBowser, being accused of being my alt. When Dizzy joined the MFFA Discord to tell everyone how evil of a person I am, I explained the whole situation to them as being a huge misunderstanding and posted the original conversation in full, of which Dizzy acknowledged before making a passing statement of how childish we are; it's a pity that despite knowing this, they still continue to parade Sol's original assumption as the truth.

 

To this day, Dizzy persists in claiming I'm trying to divide the entire MUGEN community for my own benefits by instigating a war on MA, as well as flooding sites and Discord servers with alts to convince people to join me. Both statements are a load of nonsense with no evidence to back them up.

 

1 hour ago, Flare-Gamer-64 said:

And what the hell is that 2007 statement? That can still hold true today.

2007 was when what's known as creators' rights was in full swing, which is when stuff in this community was pretty stupid. In short, using code snippets, sprites, and other content from other characters deemed 'closed-source' by the creator was considered stealing, and a lot of forums enforced this to the point of policing releases and banning people who were caught doing such, not to mention the amount of flak you'd get from everyone; in addition, warehousing was despised and creators would actively try to get any rehosted versions of their content taken down.

 

It was dark times, Harry Flare. Dark times.

 

[RicePigeon]

At this point any further posts in this thread regarding or asking for citations or evidence about which hosting services are malicious or not will be construed as deliberate flame baiting and/or provocation and will be deleted on sight + the poster infracted. We've been through this same shitty song & dance routine many times before. This stops now.

[Xenocard]

That sort of era is over I believe, and frankly this whole "Lurker" thing shouldn't be an issue anymore because that sort of stuff happens in any fourms.

 

If they want to do it, more power to them. Although I understand their goal, some stuff are best not archived or they could at least respect some wishes. I don't even hate the entire site as a whole, it's just certain things and certain people aren't efficient like the limit to prevent Lurkers or Regular users to get a download if they're over 10mb or 50mb.

 

I could go on to this topic but at this rate, the motivation for M.U.G.E.N is drained from me so I don't feel confident to keep up with you guys.

[RicePigeon]

Actually, it isn't. We have no control over off-site activity and unless the website offers some kind of actual threat against MFFA or its users, then that's not reason enough to act. People's main issue with MA is one member of the staff and their questionable administrative actions, not the actual site or its user base.

[Kazagami]

you might need to elaborate or post some proof that can back up your claims for that.

[PlasmoidThunder]

It seems suspicious that you're not able to back up your claims, yes.

 

I dunno what was "stolen" from your character, but I like to think we've moved on from the age where taking content from someone else's character is considered a heinous crime. What was "stolen", exactly?

[Shinzaki]

Battle icon as in...character portraits, correct? Also I think it has less to do with something being off about what you're saying and more you're blowing it way out of proportion. Letting it go would be a good idea though.

[USTLER GOD]

Hey, I know you. You were the one that kept complaining that your characters are not perfect at all.

[USTLER GOD]

Wait, @Quietlife ✞, what's your real name?

[PlasmoidThunder]

Why would you ask something like that?

[USTLER GOD]

4 minutes ago, PlasmoidThunder said:

Why would you ask something like that?

Uh, he seemed like someone I know, so I would want to know his name just to make sure.

[RicePigeon]

Regardless of what was or wasn't stolen, this seems like a personal issue between Quiet and Kater that happened offsite, and we really don't have much control over this even if it were true. Policing things that happen outside of MFFA, unless it directly impacts MFFA itself, is neither our jurisdiction nor responsibility. That being said, that is still no excuse to bring up the drama here and/or harass each other through this site, or else we will take action.

[PlasmoidThunder]

Whatever happened to dropping it?

[Neo_Fire_Sonic]

ya just remove dem from da blacklist and instead hate each other in secret and act like nothing ever happened

who the fuck cares at this point

also

DON'T ANSWER THAT

[RicePigeon]

Assuming that your accusations are true, what exactly do you expect us to do about it? From what I gather, this is something that happened off-site, and no reasonable person is going to expect us to ban kater from MFFA purely because of actions that he may or may not have done over on MA, which is way outside of our jurisdiction.

 

Aside from that, you've still failed to provide anything of substance to back up your claims, despite various people, including myself, instructing you to do so multiple times. If you're not going to provide anything of substance, then all it will do in the long run is make you look like you're just rambling on and on and using it to incite drama against other users; which is exactly what you've been doing so far as we have had to give you several warnings as well as an infraction for harassing other users and making threats of violence, respectively.

 

Consider this your last warning. Either provide something of substance or just drop it entirely, or else we will take further action if this continues.

[IDGCaptainRussia]

Why did we revive this?

 

I think anyone who's not a complete tool knows that MA content uploaded by admins is not to be respected

All I see is some person who got real salty over their work being stolen, this happens all the time in MUGEN, get over it.

 

Unless your character had completely original high quality spritework you made for it (something that can cost alot of money to have done), this isn't worth fighting over.

[Milbury]

@Darkflare I'm afraid I owe you an apology. I tried to be fair and evenhanded when I was here last, but as it turns out you were completely right about Mugen Archive... or rather about Dizzy, since for all intents and purposes Dizzy is the Mugen Archive (if there are other mods, they just let him do whatever he wants).

 

I think I'm gonna take a break from Mugen for a little while, but before I did I felt like I need to let the MUGEN community know something. Right now, there's a "debate" going on at MA (in this thread) over forcing new users to submit their phone numbers for verification. Everyone, here and everywhere should know that this is almost certainly a data mining scheme of Dizzy's to harvest user information to sell. I called him out on the possibility of this (I wasn't sure yet) in this post which was instantly nuked by Dizzy. I'd taken a screencap of it in advance because I thought he might pull something like that, and lo and behold. I tried to give Dizzy the benefit of the doubt there (for what little benefit of the doubt he deserves at this point), but the speed at which that post was nuked erased any doubt in my mind to Dizzy's intentions. When he implements phone verification (and it's a when, not an if; Dizzy only pretends to listen to the MA community to keep up appearances), I'd be very careful about any data I submitted to his site if I was a new user. He wouldn't be so aggressive about this scheme of his if there wasn't something in it for him.

 

To you old timers who tried to warn me about MA the last time I was here, I apologize for my skepticism. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt but Dizzy aka BladeArt has proven himself to be a bad faith actor. He hides behind a cute anime girl name and avatar so people feel uncomfortable about criticizing his incompetent modding, and if they criticize him anyway, he bans them. He gives nothing to the MUGEN community, he only takes, and on top of that he's driven off several content creators with his sociopathic behavior. He's a disease infecting the MUGEN community, and my only regret is I didn't see that sooner.

[RicePigeon]

Someone brought up the phone verification thing in another discord a few days ago, so I'll sum up what I said then.

 

Dizzy's claim that their discord server is lively is, frankly, bullshit. Unless the MA staff is actively deleting 90%+ messages on a daily basis, the activity that I've witnessed there is very minimal, if not 0, with only a few messages every other day or so. While I can't speak about implementing phone verification on their forums & site as a whole since this is news to me, I can speak from experience that phone verification, at least on Discord, does almost nothing to stop spam attacks. In the aftermath of the DDoS we received in early April, we elevated the security to require phone verification and, while this stopped spam accounts from posting messages in our discord, it did nothing to stop them from saying what they wanted to say by making their user name the message, many of which were targeting the same individual. In the meantime, several legitimate accounts were negatively affected by this and unable to access our discord server either because they were unable or unwilling to disclose a cell phone number for verification purposes, some going far as citing privacy concerns (and rightfully so); this led to us creating a workaround by granting known users a dummy "approved" role so they wouldn't be affected by this change, which we eventually rescinded because of the undue burden it was putting on legitimate users while doing nothing to stop the influx of spam accounts, and I have no doubt in my mind that something similar could happen to MA if they do decide to go through with this.

 

Of course, if Dizzy is adamant on implementing this feature, he is either unable or (most likely) unwilling to take these negative repercussions into account.

 

EDIT; Seeing as this thread seems to be going in the direction of a general MA discussion thread, I'll be allowing the posting of MA links here for the purposes of providing context.

[Darkflare]

You got banned from MA, didn't you?

 

Yea, I figured that one by looking at Diz's actions over the past....2-3 years or so. And while I can't prove it, I'm absolutely sure the DDOS that happened in April was MA's doing(Whether it was Dizzy or one of his MA zealots)

 

My opinion hasn't changed, in fact his recent actions has further reinforced my thoughts. Archive is a good idea in theory, but it's run by the worst kind of people.

 

1 hour ago, Milbury said:

He hides behind a cute anime girl name and avatar so people feel uncomfortable about criticizing his incompetent modding,

 

It's from a video game. One of the best fighting game series even.

[IDGCaptainRussia]

I would have to agree, at this point this isn't about blacklisting the site from sharing content. I think we can all agree that there's only 1 person pulling all the strings and using the archive's hosted content exclusivity as a means to enthrall users to serve Dizzy.

 

We went from ad.fly, something legit creators across the internet use as a donation option (note: option, most still provide alternative direct link for those who don't want to use ad.fly) to what I can only describe now as a scandal.

 

This is really starting to get bad, I told a friend about this and they described it as "Facebook scandal" levels of bad.

 

I think the only way this is going to stop is to take Dizzy's power aware, and I can only see that happening through 2 means:
1: Legal action against him by the masses and a binding judgement to keep him in check.

2: Educate the masses, a popular youtuber or other media outlet to warns users en-mass about what the archive "really" is.

 

Agreed, the archive is a novel idea, just in the wrong hands of the wrong people with the wrong amount of power.

 

1 hour ago, Darkflare said:

 

It's from a video game. One of the best fighting game series even.

 

Not just the avatar, he's quite literally using the same name as well as that character. I am unsure if this is meant to intentional because of MUGEN, or he just really, really likes said character... Who knows, but that's not important right now.

EDIT: I'm not trying to sound like I'm "correcting" you Darkflare, just adding onto what you said.