Thursday, 20 October 2011
Half Way to Insanity
I feel like I'm half-way to insanity. Not because half of me is insane or going insane but because I am insane. I am also sane. It's a tug-of-war with myself. Won't anyone join me?
Monday, 3 October 2011
The Stage Hand
It is unfortunate that I am constantly banging my head up against a natural human characteristic. The tendency of people to not appreciate things that they don't necessarily see. Perfect example are stage hands and staff at plays. There is a LOT of work that goes into creating the set, manipulating the set, timing said manipulations, timing lighting, timing music, assisting the actors/actresses off stage with hair/makeup and costume.. etc etc. Without them the play wouldn't be what it is but we don't normally pause to think of them. It's because we don't actually see them doing the actions as well as because we take things for granted. All the results of a stage hand's job are things that we expect as the norm and therefore think nothing of. However, if they're not there or done badly we will remark upon it.I feel like an abused stage hand these days. A lot of it has to do with things that occurred on the Toegoff forums which I manage.
First was the whole drama incident where I felt rather insulted that people could complain about my efforts to make the community a safe, friendly place. If you honestly don't know then someone got banned for being continually disrespectful and making personal attacks on people on the forums. It was a bit of an express ban since he made it clear to me that warnings have no effect on him whatsoever. Anyways, the issue is that people started saying the admins banned whoever the heck we wanted if we didn't like them; saying that we're too strict with the rules and that we're restricting their freedom.
This really insulted me because when setting up the forums and the rules and guidelines for them I seriously took into consideration the fact that the rules may interfere with the forum experience. I made the rules in a way in which we could still enforce a friendly environment but not have people feel like we're breathing down their necks. Even in enforcing these rules we were so lenient that warnings were hardly ever given. That doesn't mean that there was no moderating going on though. Our moderating crew and I spend a lot of time just going through the forums. But no one sees that. Even if someone gets a warning, no one but the recipient sees that either. No one witnessed the amount of thought I put into making the rules or all the messages I sent to members regarding little ways in which they were toeing over the rules. In fact, there have been many many cases where if I was strict I should have given them a warning, instead I just wrote them a message about it. But no one really knows the number of these that go out except me.
Second is something a bit more specific as well as largely general. The Toegoff forums recently made the change from invisionfree to zetaboards. To do this I had to get a new layout since invision codes do not work on zeta. After everything was done, one guy says that he would like a different theme to be available for use since the one on there right now makes his eyes bleed. It's not really the insult to the layout that bothered me. Tons of other people have told me they like it so I don't really care that much about one dick's opinion on it. But rather how completely dickish that request was. First of all the layout took a lot of work from me. In their minds all I did was find a layout and paste the codes in. That's not what happened at all. I'll be completely anal and go through every single thing that went into making that layout what it is at this moment.
Of course the very first step is to find a layout. I am not a coder and have no knowledge of CSS at all; therefore, making my own layout is out of the question. This first step is actually one of the hardest. It's pretty dang hard to find a layout that looks good, as well as functions well, as well as matching your individual need. I spent literally over 2 hours picking a layout. When picking a layout I need to put aside my own personal tastes and consider the theme's appropriateness for the forum and its audience. I went through so many layout threads it's crazy. And then I found one that had a really cool feature of a menu at the top which has the options slide slightly when you mouse over it which I thought was a cool effect. I really liked this menu because it let you put a LOT of links at the top (up to 12) and I really wanted to have something like that. Unfortunately, while the actual layout was very well done and pretty to my eyes, it was... too pretty. It was kind of girl-ish and that's definitely not what fits the Toegoff forums. So I found another layout and with my complete zero knowledge of CSS put in that menu I liked at the top of this new layout. That process sounds so easy in a nice little sentence but trust me it was a lot more. I had to figure out where the coding (html) went in the headers. Then I had to go into CSS and find its corresponding coding (which is no easy feat when you have no knowledge of CSS at all) and put that in the new layout CSS. Unfortunately again, I wasn't pleased with the results. This entire project got scrapped.
After some more searching I finally found one that was clean, simple, yet still "styled". The process of finding this layout and then finding where the coding for it was is a story in itself. One thing that I didn't like about it though was that it had a designated box for the advertisements on the board. As someone who uses adblock plus and doesn't see the advertisement, the white blankness in the middle of the board just felt absurd to me. So I asked Toegoff to take a look at the CSS coding for me to see if he could take out the box. He succeeded but it changed the board's white cells to black. He then asked bobtherocket (another moderator) to take a look at the CSS (since bob is a website designer) and even he couldn't figure out a way to get rid of the box and maintain the same colors at the same time. He probably could have done it but we decided it would be too annoying and wasn't really worth it. So that's two other people's time poured into this layout that no one will ever know (well now you do since you read this but let's be honest here, who's still reading this crap?). And of course changing button graphics on those forums are fucking tedious as hell. The thing is I had to do this twice because I originally did all the fiddling around on a different private forum to make sure everything was ready. So I copied and pasted a ton of links from the layout code source to the private forum, then I had to later copy and paste again from the private forum to the actual forum. You'll probably think "what's the big deal? It's just copy and pasting." Yes, but it's a LOT of copy and pasting. My fingers were literally sore after all the copy and pasting. It's mindless, tedious work.
So now I got my layout. Now I had to configure the board to match it. First of the matter was that the layout came with a banner which just said the theme's name on it. Obviously I wasn't about to use that. So I had to go into the CSS, find the URL of the background of the banner and multiply it about 12 times in photoshop just to have a backdrop for the new banner. Then I got to actually working on the banner. Looking at my list of fonts I had nothing very good. So I had to go online and browse a ton of shit fonts to find a couple that may or may not work. Installed all of them, then finally back to photoshop. Try out a dozen of these new fonts and found one that would serve well. Then I went through a lot of different effects such as metallic gradient in the font and a boarder around the word that has an inner and outer glow. Fiddled around with it for a while. Then finally settled on font, metallic gradient, bevel, settings to make it look metallic. Finally done. Up it goes to photobucket.
Next are the pips. The user rank indicators. I had no idea what to use for pips but looking around the new layout I found that the topic markers were little orb things that could serve as pips. So I open it up in photoshop but unfortunately there was no way to separate it from its background cleanly so I decided to make my own from scratch. Black dot, bigger white dot behind it with bevel, smaller white dot on top of it which is then blurred, put an even smaller white dot on top of the smaller white dot and blur this too. And there you go, you have an orb with a beveled white border. Save for web as gif, upload it on photobucket, put its link in the coding and now I have pips. But unfortunately invision's pip system was a bit messed up so in turn my old pips were messed up. I had to go in and edit every single tier and change it to use forum's default pip and set how many of the pips. Another tedious task. Then comes the issue of admins and mods who have 7 pips currently. Admins red, mods blue. Photoshop time again. Except this time with those colours respectively and instead of one orb I have to stretch it to 7 in the actual one pip. This goes up onto zeta as a badge and then I have to go into group settings for admins and mods and set each badge accordingly. There was the additional thing of making a hearts badge for pwnies but I won't bitch about that because it's a personal joke I played on him a long time ago.
Then came the menu links. This layout displayed them nice and large at the top (which is part of the reason the other menu code that I liked wasn't used). I wanted to add some personal links on that bar. So off I go into google and zetaboard forums to find coding for that. I find one and successfully put in a link to Toegoff's YouTube channel. Later on I decide that I want to add his Livestream link too. I add it and it completely messed things up. Adding the new link made the bar stretch too long and therefore it went to a second line. Needless to say, looked horrible. So then I had to go and find a code that lets me completely take control of that menu so I could take some stuff out. Had to go and get the links for the standard links like Search and Members: put those in minus the FAQ and Portal buttons which were useless then put the new ones in and finally everything looks good.
Even in that I left out some annoying shit I had to go through. I left them out because it was just a matter of stupid circumstance or mistakes on my part. I also left out all the new settings that I had to set after the conversion. But yeah, no one knows all that. No one even thinks about it. To them it's just "oh she just copied and pasted some shit into a box."
(Oh and the old doHTML tag was taken out which was how we were embedding videos. So I had to google how to do that in zetaboards. Then I had to go into the admin CP and enable that function. Then I had to write up a tutorial on how to do it for the forum ((and trust me, some people need tutorials that assume they're really stupid)). Not that big a deal but again, something that's taken for granted. Like honestly, I have things I'd rather do than write up a tutorial on how to embed youtube videos but I know that I should to let everyone know of the change and so that new users can be pointed towards the thread instead of having someone explain it to them every time. It's part of my responsibilities as a forum admin and I do it.)
And now finally back to the one guy and his one comment. See why his comment is dickish? Just because the layout isn't appealing to you, you want me to go through all that again? And you have the audacity to request this with an insult attached? Yes, like I'm going to waste my time pleasing your ocular senses. In any case, it wouldn't exactly work out right as the admin and moderator badges are just that... badges. Not pips. Therefore, they will not change with the theme change and will look very strange on a different layout. This comment had one good thing I guess though; it made me realize just how invisible my work on that forum is.
Another case on the forums where I felt a bit like a stage hand was a year ago for the community league of legends tourney. Sure, everyone said thank you to me for setting it up, etc etc. But no one but me knows exactly what a grueling task that damn thing was. Try organizing 36 mostly random people from the internet and getting them to be on at a specific time on a specific date. Not easy. I basically had to keep track of every single person and what times they said they can or can't be on. Once someone suggested a time I would have to make sure the other 3 all confirmed agreement to it. Not only that but things were made more confusing by the fact that people's forum names weren't their LoL names. By the end I had literally memorized who was who with a different name and everyone's partners for each round. And the biggest pain in the ass of all were the people who just didn't show up to set times or would come on the forum once in a blue moon to say "no, I can't that day." Then not check back for another forever. In total, I sent 53 individualized e-mails for the setting up of this tourney. Mind, those are just e-mails, not posts I made on topics or conversations I had on LoL PvP.net chat or on skype. I say individualized because... they were. What does that mean? It means it did NOT involve much copy and pasting but actual personal input from me to match that specific person's interests. I sent a variety of messages: asking them to please come on the forums and post their schedule, telling them that a date and time has been suggested and for them to confirm it, warnings for lack of participation, disqualification by lack of participation alerts, telling people on the stand-by list that they got in and had to respond soon or lose the spot and here was the thread and this was their partner... etc. But most of them were me telling people of the new suggested time and asking them to come and confirm it. But really no one knew how much time went into checking all this information for that person and then e-mailing them about it. If someone received one from me they'd probably not think much of it other than about the pertinent information at hand. They wouldn't think, "wow how many of these does she send out?" Yes, I got a pat on the back for this tourney but at the same time I don't think anyone really understands how much shit went into it. You have no idea how mind boggling it is to have 8 people discussing their available times in one thread while keeping in mind which 4 are together as well as the connection between forum name and LoL name and keeping track of who has or hasn't confirmed to what time. Then realize that there's 4 of these going on at the same time. As the organizer I literally spent forever organizing all those in my mind as well as on Notepad and making sure everyone has confirmed availability on the set date. It's not really something you can understand unless you try it. Especially with a group of people who don't really have a motivation to keep responding to you.
And that is the conclusion of my bitching about people not realizing how much work I do. I probably sound like such a bitch in this post but honestly I don't give two shits. This is my blog on which I vent shit. If I can't be a bitch on my own blog then that's when I know it's time to shoot myself. And see, now that all this has been recorded on this blog, that much more of these thoughts and feelings has left me. Isn't that just so wonderful about blogs?
First was the whole drama incident where I felt rather insulted that people could complain about my efforts to make the community a safe, friendly place. If you honestly don't know then someone got banned for being continually disrespectful and making personal attacks on people on the forums. It was a bit of an express ban since he made it clear to me that warnings have no effect on him whatsoever. Anyways, the issue is that people started saying the admins banned whoever the heck we wanted if we didn't like them; saying that we're too strict with the rules and that we're restricting their freedom.
This really insulted me because when setting up the forums and the rules and guidelines for them I seriously took into consideration the fact that the rules may interfere with the forum experience. I made the rules in a way in which we could still enforce a friendly environment but not have people feel like we're breathing down their necks. Even in enforcing these rules we were so lenient that warnings were hardly ever given. That doesn't mean that there was no moderating going on though. Our moderating crew and I spend a lot of time just going through the forums. But no one sees that. Even if someone gets a warning, no one but the recipient sees that either. No one witnessed the amount of thought I put into making the rules or all the messages I sent to members regarding little ways in which they were toeing over the rules. In fact, there have been many many cases where if I was strict I should have given them a warning, instead I just wrote them a message about it. But no one really knows the number of these that go out except me.
Second is something a bit more specific as well as largely general. The Toegoff forums recently made the change from invisionfree to zetaboards. To do this I had to get a new layout since invision codes do not work on zeta. After everything was done, one guy says that he would like a different theme to be available for use since the one on there right now makes his eyes bleed. It's not really the insult to the layout that bothered me. Tons of other people have told me they like it so I don't really care that much about one dick's opinion on it. But rather how completely dickish that request was. First of all the layout took a lot of work from me. In their minds all I did was find a layout and paste the codes in. That's not what happened at all. I'll be completely anal and go through every single thing that went into making that layout what it is at this moment.
Of course the very first step is to find a layout. I am not a coder and have no knowledge of CSS at all; therefore, making my own layout is out of the question. This first step is actually one of the hardest. It's pretty dang hard to find a layout that looks good, as well as functions well, as well as matching your individual need. I spent literally over 2 hours picking a layout. When picking a layout I need to put aside my own personal tastes and consider the theme's appropriateness for the forum and its audience. I went through so many layout threads it's crazy. And then I found one that had a really cool feature of a menu at the top which has the options slide slightly when you mouse over it which I thought was a cool effect. I really liked this menu because it let you put a LOT of links at the top (up to 12) and I really wanted to have something like that. Unfortunately, while the actual layout was very well done and pretty to my eyes, it was... too pretty. It was kind of girl-ish and that's definitely not what fits the Toegoff forums. So I found another layout and with my complete zero knowledge of CSS put in that menu I liked at the top of this new layout. That process sounds so easy in a nice little sentence but trust me it was a lot more. I had to figure out where the coding (html) went in the headers. Then I had to go into CSS and find its corresponding coding (which is no easy feat when you have no knowledge of CSS at all) and put that in the new layout CSS. Unfortunately again, I wasn't pleased with the results. This entire project got scrapped.
After some more searching I finally found one that was clean, simple, yet still "styled". The process of finding this layout and then finding where the coding for it was is a story in itself. One thing that I didn't like about it though was that it had a designated box for the advertisements on the board. As someone who uses adblock plus and doesn't see the advertisement, the white blankness in the middle of the board just felt absurd to me. So I asked Toegoff to take a look at the CSS coding for me to see if he could take out the box. He succeeded but it changed the board's white cells to black. He then asked bobtherocket (another moderator) to take a look at the CSS (since bob is a website designer) and even he couldn't figure out a way to get rid of the box and maintain the same colors at the same time. He probably could have done it but we decided it would be too annoying and wasn't really worth it. So that's two other people's time poured into this layout that no one will ever know (well now you do since you read this but let's be honest here, who's still reading this crap?). And of course changing button graphics on those forums are fucking tedious as hell. The thing is I had to do this twice because I originally did all the fiddling around on a different private forum to make sure everything was ready. So I copied and pasted a ton of links from the layout code source to the private forum, then I had to later copy and paste again from the private forum to the actual forum. You'll probably think "what's the big deal? It's just copy and pasting." Yes, but it's a LOT of copy and pasting. My fingers were literally sore after all the copy and pasting. It's mindless, tedious work.
So now I got my layout. Now I had to configure the board to match it. First of the matter was that the layout came with a banner which just said the theme's name on it. Obviously I wasn't about to use that. So I had to go into the CSS, find the URL of the background of the banner and multiply it about 12 times in photoshop just to have a backdrop for the new banner. Then I got to actually working on the banner. Looking at my list of fonts I had nothing very good. So I had to go online and browse a ton of shit fonts to find a couple that may or may not work. Installed all of them, then finally back to photoshop. Try out a dozen of these new fonts and found one that would serve well. Then I went through a lot of different effects such as metallic gradient in the font and a boarder around the word that has an inner and outer glow. Fiddled around with it for a while. Then finally settled on font, metallic gradient, bevel, settings to make it look metallic. Finally done. Up it goes to photobucket.
Next are the pips. The user rank indicators. I had no idea what to use for pips but looking around the new layout I found that the topic markers were little orb things that could serve as pips. So I open it up in photoshop but unfortunately there was no way to separate it from its background cleanly so I decided to make my own from scratch. Black dot, bigger white dot behind it with bevel, smaller white dot on top of it which is then blurred, put an even smaller white dot on top of the smaller white dot and blur this too. And there you go, you have an orb with a beveled white border. Save for web as gif, upload it on photobucket, put its link in the coding and now I have pips. But unfortunately invision's pip system was a bit messed up so in turn my old pips were messed up. I had to go in and edit every single tier and change it to use forum's default pip and set how many of the pips. Another tedious task. Then comes the issue of admins and mods who have 7 pips currently. Admins red, mods blue. Photoshop time again. Except this time with those colours respectively and instead of one orb I have to stretch it to 7 in the actual one pip. This goes up onto zeta as a badge and then I have to go into group settings for admins and mods and set each badge accordingly. There was the additional thing of making a hearts badge for pwnies but I won't bitch about that because it's a personal joke I played on him a long time ago.
Then came the menu links. This layout displayed them nice and large at the top (which is part of the reason the other menu code that I liked wasn't used). I wanted to add some personal links on that bar. So off I go into google and zetaboard forums to find coding for that. I find one and successfully put in a link to Toegoff's YouTube channel. Later on I decide that I want to add his Livestream link too. I add it and it completely messed things up. Adding the new link made the bar stretch too long and therefore it went to a second line. Needless to say, looked horrible. So then I had to go and find a code that lets me completely take control of that menu so I could take some stuff out. Had to go and get the links for the standard links like Search and Members: put those in minus the FAQ and Portal buttons which were useless then put the new ones in and finally everything looks good.
Even in that I left out some annoying shit I had to go through. I left them out because it was just a matter of stupid circumstance or mistakes on my part. I also left out all the new settings that I had to set after the conversion. But yeah, no one knows all that. No one even thinks about it. To them it's just "oh she just copied and pasted some shit into a box."
(Oh and the old doHTML tag was taken out which was how we were embedding videos. So I had to google how to do that in zetaboards. Then I had to go into the admin CP and enable that function. Then I had to write up a tutorial on how to do it for the forum ((and trust me, some people need tutorials that assume they're really stupid)). Not that big a deal but again, something that's taken for granted. Like honestly, I have things I'd rather do than write up a tutorial on how to embed youtube videos but I know that I should to let everyone know of the change and so that new users can be pointed towards the thread instead of having someone explain it to them every time. It's part of my responsibilities as a forum admin and I do it.)
And now finally back to the one guy and his one comment. See why his comment is dickish? Just because the layout isn't appealing to you, you want me to go through all that again? And you have the audacity to request this with an insult attached? Yes, like I'm going to waste my time pleasing your ocular senses. In any case, it wouldn't exactly work out right as the admin and moderator badges are just that... badges. Not pips. Therefore, they will not change with the theme change and will look very strange on a different layout. This comment had one good thing I guess though; it made me realize just how invisible my work on that forum is.
Another case on the forums where I felt a bit like a stage hand was a year ago for the community league of legends tourney. Sure, everyone said thank you to me for setting it up, etc etc. But no one but me knows exactly what a grueling task that damn thing was. Try organizing 36 mostly random people from the internet and getting them to be on at a specific time on a specific date. Not easy. I basically had to keep track of every single person and what times they said they can or can't be on. Once someone suggested a time I would have to make sure the other 3 all confirmed agreement to it. Not only that but things were made more confusing by the fact that people's forum names weren't their LoL names. By the end I had literally memorized who was who with a different name and everyone's partners for each round. And the biggest pain in the ass of all were the people who just didn't show up to set times or would come on the forum once in a blue moon to say "no, I can't that day." Then not check back for another forever. In total, I sent 53 individualized e-mails for the setting up of this tourney. Mind, those are just e-mails, not posts I made on topics or conversations I had on LoL PvP.net chat or on skype. I say individualized because... they were. What does that mean? It means it did NOT involve much copy and pasting but actual personal input from me to match that specific person's interests. I sent a variety of messages: asking them to please come on the forums and post their schedule, telling them that a date and time has been suggested and for them to confirm it, warnings for lack of participation, disqualification by lack of participation alerts, telling people on the stand-by list that they got in and had to respond soon or lose the spot and here was the thread and this was their partner... etc. But most of them were me telling people of the new suggested time and asking them to come and confirm it. But really no one knew how much time went into checking all this information for that person and then e-mailing them about it. If someone received one from me they'd probably not think much of it other than about the pertinent information at hand. They wouldn't think, "wow how many of these does she send out?" Yes, I got a pat on the back for this tourney but at the same time I don't think anyone really understands how much shit went into it. You have no idea how mind boggling it is to have 8 people discussing their available times in one thread while keeping in mind which 4 are together as well as the connection between forum name and LoL name and keeping track of who has or hasn't confirmed to what time. Then realize that there's 4 of these going on at the same time. As the organizer I literally spent forever organizing all those in my mind as well as on Notepad and making sure everyone has confirmed availability on the set date. It's not really something you can understand unless you try it. Especially with a group of people who don't really have a motivation to keep responding to you.
And that is the conclusion of my bitching about people not realizing how much work I do. I probably sound like such a bitch in this post but honestly I don't give two shits. This is my blog on which I vent shit. If I can't be a bitch on my own blog then that's when I know it's time to shoot myself. And see, now that all this has been recorded on this blog, that much more of these thoughts and feelings has left me. Isn't that just so wonderful about blogs?
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