Milbury

20 hours ago, RicePigeon said:

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

As far as I can tell, the phone verification thing doesn't even have anything to do with the Mugen Archive's discord, although Dizzy's spam/DDOS campaign against MFFA back in April and you guys's response to it might have been where he got the idea. Spam actually isn't even half the problem on MA that Dizzy would like people to think it is, most spammers on MA are actually welcomed by him since they provide a constant stream of the MUGEN equivalent of clickbait to net MA more of that precious traffic. When I made that post bringing up the concern of Dizzy doing this phone verification thing to harvest data, I wasn't actually sure that was his aim, I just wanted to bring it up since it's one of those things that everyone in that thread was thinking but no one actually wanted to say out of fear of getting banned by Dizzy. I knew him losing his shit and banning me was a possibility, and the fact that he did tells me my gut instinct about his intentions was right. People don't freak out over bullshit accusations, they freak out when someone hits too close to home.

20 hours ago, Darkflare said:

You got banned from MA, didn't you?

Yup, I've been on Dizzy's shitlist since 2017 for calling him out on how he handled the Cesarsombra/Cesarshadow thing (his mods permabanned the guy for hate speech against myself and others, but Dizzy reversed it because Cesar donates a portion of his autismbux to MA every month). I've tried to give the dude the benefit of the doubt, even after the community weekends (a thing I'm mostly sure by now he does just to screw with his new users for the fun of it) and his driving off several of my good friends on that side. The dude's got obvious mental health issues and I tried to take that into account for the longest time, but after I did some digging and found out about his past and BladeArt and the scummy things he did under that name, I just completely lost any trace of anything even remotely resembling respect for the guy.

One thing that you and the other people who were burned by the Mugen Archive years ago can take comfort in: Dizzy is absolute and completely obsessed with you guys. Like, honest-to-god, malignant paranoid narcissist levels of obsessed. It's one of the first thing I noticed about him, he's talking about "his haters" constantly, I believe the phrase "living rent free in the head" was coined for people like him. It's even kinda funny in a sad way, he makes enemies for himself with his antisocial jackass behavior, then obsesses over those enemies and abuses his members because he thinks they're possible enemies/enemies in disguise, thereby creating more actual enemies for himself, and on and on it goes. The best thing that could happen to the Mugen Archive would be if the person actually keeping it afloat (Justice would be my guess) realized how toxic Dizzy is and kicked his useless ass to the curb. Everything else about the site runs like a top, it's just Dizzy himself that's the problem.

18 hours ago, IDGCaptainRussia said:

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.

Please don't get the wrong impression from my post. Dizzy's not pulling any strings, he doesn't have the brains for it. He's more the figurehead of MA, a moron who gets the front-facing work while the real brains behind the site keep it running from the background. If you want an idea of what kind of brain trust you're dealing with in Dizzy, read this post about incompetent Amazon managers. Because that's all Dizzy is, an incompetent warehouse manager constantly throwing bad ideas at a wall to see if any of them stick. MA is successful despite Dizzy, not because of him (being the only warehousing game in town since the death of Mugen Infantry also helps).

2 hours ago, RicePigeon said:

Give me one good reason why I shouldn't just ban you right now for flamebaiting & making threats of violence against members of the site. You have 24 hours, starting now.

I can give you one: this guy (who is either one of Dizzy's pet speds or yet another sock for Dizzy/BladeArt himself) is so nuts that he should absolutely be allowed to speak freely. Let this loon tell the world exactly the kind of mentality that supports Dizzy of the Mugen Archive. Go on, @sero, tell us more about how anyone who speaks out against your master should have their bones broken. Tell us all about what you and Dizzy would do to anyone who dares criticize the almighty jackass in chief of the Mugen Archive if only you and him had any actual power outside of his sad little Internet fiefdom.

@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.

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.

6 hours ago, Darkflare said:

Yea, all those files can be found elsewhere. And if you can't find them, mugen forums have a request section. Someone is bound to have it and if not...well, it must not have been that great to begin with. Either way, even if it's a very old creation that not many people have anymore aside from the fact such an old creation is outdated and there has to be a better version of that made somewhere else, MA has been making it hard to actually download from their site no doubt as a response to being forced to remove the adfly links. Especially with those community weekends. Come on, more than half of their registered accounts only registered to actually download from there, not to participate in their community.

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.

6 hours ago, Darkflare said:

Melodramatic? Actually, that analogy of mine is more accurate than you think.

Quote

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.

6 hours ago, Darkflare said:

What a coincidence. I was thinking the same about you.

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.

58 minutes ago, Darkflare said:

If I have personal beef with MA then so do a lot of people in MFG and here. No, it's less personal beef and more my belief that certain people shouldn't have power. The fact that you claim MA provides a useful service is amusing. Their "service" isn't exclusive to them. The collections section here in MFFA is a good alternative for example and I'm certain there are other places that provide the same "service". Mediafire can go down like other file sharing sites. True. You know what else can go down like other file sharing sites? Mugen Archive's servers. They're not immune to this possibility either. MA can suddenly go kaput without warning just like any other site.

Mugen Archive hosts over 80,000 files. Say you got what you want and God wiped MA from the face of the Earth, do you think the MUGEN community would be better for it? Do you think all those files can be found elsewhere, or that all their long lost creators would return from the ether to provide them back to us? I have personally uploaded characters and stages to the Archives people believed were lost forever and I am just one of many, many people that uses the Archive for this purpose. Right now there is no other website in the MUGEN community that provides this service. Is it true that certain people shouldn't have power? Absolutely. Is it worth depriving the MUGEN community of its largest resource, simply because you and a handful of others feel that the people running it are evil incarnate?

1 hour ago, Darkflare said:

Terrible analogy. When I shop at Wal-mart, I don't have to have a thorough check up on myself to see if I've been infected with cancer. Wal-mart doesn't steal other products and claim it as their own. Wal-mart doesn't go to other megastores to cause a commotion. Wal-mart doesn't ask it's customers to go to their competition to shit on it. Wal-mart isn't paranoid that the other megastores are conspiring together to shut it down. Wal-mart doesn't believe that multiple people that don't like the store are in reality the same person with different identities.

Don't you think you're being just a little bit melodramatic here? At worst, Mugen Archive is a storehouse of files being run by unpleasant people (and I don't believe they're all that unpleasant). They're not a terrorist group or a child grooming ring or Hillary Clinton. (Amusingly, I also think you're underestimating Wal-Mart's capacity for paranoia and cross-competition subterfuge, but that's another topic entirely) They're certainly not giving anyone cancer (although I did visit an oncologist following exposure to cesarsombra's army of godawful Pokemon spriteswaps, just to be on the safe side!)

I'm willing to hear you out on this, dude, but you are coming across as slightly... uh, partisan on this issue.

34 minutes ago, yuri linda said:

 

Yeah, good luck with that one Cesar. Are you going to Internet sue me for making you chimp out too? You should try hiring Kevin Landau, I hear he's great at these cases!

By the way, no one is fooled by your "pretending to be your own girlfriend" shtick, it's just embarrassing like that time you claimed you found your own creations on the dark web and they were now being made by some Wakandan witch doctor name you obviously made up.

EDIT: Oh, and I already told you I'm not Edmund, that's a friend of mine I shared your posts with and he dug up all that fun stuff on you for me. You would understand how this works if you had any friends, my man!

34 minutes ago, Darkflare said:

He's probably going to get banned here as well.

 

Way to completely miss the point. By now, the majority of creators expect their works to be hosted somewhere else and edited. This whole thing isn't about that, but the reason why you're told to get it from the author's site is because A) It's from the author directly so you know exactly what you're getting and B) You know you will always have the most up to date version since again, it's from the author directly.

 

This isn't about not wanting stuff to be hosted somewhere else, this is about how MA's staff is the scummiest of the community and how they treat everyone else like shit. How they wanted to risk infecting other computers for the sake of making an extra buck. And the reasoning behind doing as such has more holes than swiss cheese(They need more money, but can afford to make a contest with money as a prize. Wait...hold up.). They removed adfly? Great! There's still the underlying problem that the head of MA staff is an asshole to everyone that even hints at not agreeing with him and the rest of the staff are like minded. Mugen Archive has been very hostile to the other Mugen communities because the rest of them didn't agree with them putting up adfly and decided to turn it into "a war". The adfly may be gone, but there's still the severe hostility of their actions. This is why I've been saying to keep it black listed. This hostility is not healthy for our community and actions have to be taken that such actions are not tolerated. When MA changes their head staff to someone that has more reason and won't automatically become paranoid of anyone disagreeing with them, then you can drop them off the blacklist.

It'd just be the latest on a long list of places that have banned him.

I'll be honest, man, I read your earlier posts in this thread and it seems like you have some personal beef with the Archive. Not to the point of losing your mind over it like some people I could name, but I think you're approaching this thing with the Archives from a place of personal feelings rather than thinking about how it benefits the community, regardless of how the Archive's administrators may or may not behave. Honestly people up and down this community have behaved badly for years, I don't like it but that's a fact. You may feel that the leadership of the Archives are assholes, that's your prerogative and might even be true, but they still provide a useful service to the MUGEN community, one that afaik no website does anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the links here on MFFA are all on Mediafire, yeah? That can go down like other file sharing sites have gone down in the past (sometimes I wonder how much MUGEN content was lost forever when megaupload got shoa'd into oblivion), but Mugen Archive hosts its own content and has already outlived the usual lifespan for a MUGEN community. Like it or not, they're here to stay.

I regard refusing to use the Archives out of principle as refusing to go to the local Wal-Mart out of principle and driving out of your way to tinier grocery stores instead... sure, Wal-Mart is a soul-crushing corporation and its leadership is a giant bag of dicks (not saying the Archives is equivalent; I've had only good experiences with them, though I respect that your experiences went rather the other way), but it's not really accomplishing anything except inconveniencing yourself. If you want to, more power to you, but try to understand why some people just shrug and get their groceries from the place that's cheapest and most convenient to them instead. Similarly, I think upholding the blacklist out of "principle" is as petty as upholding it just because this site's leadership doesn't like that site's leadership. I'm not arguing for it to go down outright, not when MFFA is still blacklisted there, but I think this is an issue both communities are behaving somewhat childishly about.

14 hours ago, yuri linda said:

i think mugenarchive must be in blacklisted too. the webpage had many problems

for one point... excessive security but for another

i think web is not prepared yet.

the only good is avoid error 404 

i think the web needs many settings: 1- let users without account download maximun 50gb.

2- configuration of block spam/bad commentaries

3-let people to sync fb with the page as instagram did

4-put categories of fixing files (they uploaded in addons)

5- let chat online because discord is a problem and make chat with security bot and administrators online as mffa had.

6- option to erase repeated files and hard-critical comments

for the other things, all is ok

 

Let's be honest, cesarsombra, you're just mad that the Mugen Archives slapped you with a permaban for sperging out calling users every Spanish profanity in your tiny little head.

(By the way, remember me? Yeah, you do!)

Setting aside the Chris-Chan of MUGEN... I'm of two minds about this thread's topic. As anyone reading it might have gathered, I'm a Mugen Archive user. In fact, up until ten minutes ago, I was pretty much a Mugen Archive user exclusively, I knew of this website and occasionally used it as a lurker for resources, but I found the links here to be dead more often than not and so grew to reply on the Archive more.

I believe, and have believed for the 12 years now that I've been a part of this hobby, that the hatred of "warehousing" is stupid and that creators who get upset when their works are hosted elsewhere (or, god forbid, edited by other users) are being silly. This is fundamentally a hobby about sharing, and people who take the Nemo's Seagull attitude of "MINE! MINE! MINE!" are missing the point, I think. So I agree strongly with the Archive's mission and am glad it exists. It fills a role that used to be filled by the old Mugen Infantry (anybody remember them?) and is frankly invaluable to the MUGEN community imo.

That said, I have recently learned that the Archives has MFFA blacklisted as this website apparently has MA blacklisted. It's petty on both ends, I think. Silly tit for tat stuff that most of us, being functioning adults (ahem) should be above. But if the Archive blacklists MFFA, I can't reasonably argue for MFFA to lower its own blacklist, unless there were some sort of mutual agreement between the two websites.

So that's my stance. I don't agree with the Archives being blacklisted, but seeing as it blacklists MFFA, I would be rather a hypocrite to argue for one side to lower its blacklist and not the other.