Coke and Pepsi

It's been awhile since I've posted an entry. Haven't had much to say. Clearly I'm not a very good blogger.

Anyway, over the months, I've confirmed that my decision to walk away from RC was the right one on a regular basis.

I was recently made aware that http://thereeftank.com is now being censored on RC. It's a damn shame. When I was there I made sure that other sites were not censored unless that site was clearly trying to directly siphon members by using the resources. If posts were made to just share information they were always allowed. I carry that philosophy over to TRT. I will NEVER censor RC just because they are a "competitor". If someone starts a campaign to use TRT as a membership drive, then I would deal with that, but if they post informative links they will never be censored.

However, I consider this to be good news. The upper management at Pepsi threw company wide celebrations the day Coke first mentioned Pepsi in one of their ads. It was at that point they knew they were a viable competitor. I feel the same way about the censorship. I have never nor will never intentionally misuse someone else's resources to advertise TRT.

If they feel the need to censor TRT from their site then they must think we are doing something that will capture peoples attention if they happen upon our site. They must be worried or they wouldn't do it.

On one hand, I am truly saddened that things have come to this, but on the other hand it encourages me that I made the right choice.

It's not about making money, or being the biggest. It's about providing the help and community that people in the hobby need.

Now what?

It's been a little over a month now since I stepped down from my duties at RC. I have to admit it's been easier to do than I thought it would be. It has been very pleasant to only have one full time job. That is not to say that I don't miss some of the friends I made during my time there. That is really the only downside to this situation for me.

Some have asked what my plans are. For now, I'm putting my spare time into improving www.thereeftank.com, and just relaxing and enjoying the lack of extra responsibility. I might even buy a new fish or coral. I've really let the tank get boring over the last year. I never did stock it with fish after building the monstrosity. I still have no interest in even reading on RC, which is more due to burnout than anything else. I think I'll stick with the folks on TRT where it's a little less dramatic and stressful. ;-)

Anyway, be glad to hear from any of you old friends that might read this.

Clearing up some misconceptions

I see by some of the feedback I'm getting that there is still a lot of confusion. I'm going to try to address some of it.

Q: "Why were mods given the ability to delete threads if they are not expected to use that ability? Thats a pretty stupid oversight on RC's part."

A: Trust. I know I personally never dreamed in a million years one of our moderators would do that.

Q: "Thanks for posting your statement, it combined with Erics and Rons, has provided almost a complete picture for me, the only thing left is Bomber's POV, has he made any statement? "

A: What statement would you like him to make? Besides posting his entire private life and exposing to people who clearly hate him exactly who he is and what he does for a living how can he respond? Only an idiot would give these people more information to go on their witch hunt with. There's blood in the water, why would you jump in? What I think you are missing here is that he has no incentive to prove anything? He doesn't have a financial need to flaunt his credentials. Things can only get worse for him. There is no point. Other than being a big shot on an internet site, what point is there in his sharing?

Q: "I am confused. When I research that site, I see it is owned and paid for by John L. Are you and John L the same person? "

A: No, we aren't. To clarify, I don't know the situation exactly, but I would guess that John registered the domain for Ron as a favor, just like I hosted the site for him as a favor. Ron controls the content of the site. I guess John purchased the domain for him, and I provided the physical equipment and bandwidth. Pretty sweet deal.

Q: "Thanks for the explination greg. I can see where one action called for another. Doesn't matter at this point, sorry it had to go that way. As far as the persons credentials in question, he used them all the time. I know cause he pulled them on me before. I guess you were just stuck between a rock and a hard place in the situation. Wish you well and good luck."

A: I would like to see where that was done. I never read all the posts made on RC by far so I'm curious to see if I'm wrong about that. And thank you for the well wishes, it is greatly appreciated.

The truth about www.rshimek.com

I have hosted www.rshimek.com for several years now at absolutely no cost whatsoever to him. I've never asked for a dime and I've never been paid a dime. I covered all operational costs for that hosting out of my own pocket.

I did it despite being called names and being publicly disrespected by Ron. Despite his attitude towards me, any help he needed with the site was greeted with immediate and professional response. In repayment for that free service I have been lied about so many ways it's no longer humorous.

Here is my current dilemna. I am STILL hosting his site FOR FREE despite his public accusations that I am doing something nefarious with it. This puts me at risk as anything that he may do to the site will be blamed on me. I have two choices. I can either continue to give someone free service while they bash me publicly or I can turn off the service and give him yet one more thing to bash me with. Either way, I'm the one being damaged in this situation.

Some people will just take advantage of anything. To take someones generosity and use it against them is just reprehensible. I am continually amazed at just how low some people are willing to stoop. For now the site will remain up. However, everyone should be aware that I have no contractual reason to do so and I may be forced to change my approach to this problem.

You're welcome Ron. I'm glad I could help you out.

I did not ban any expert ever

I need to throw in a couple other things here as I've seen lies being put out on the net about it. I did not ban any expert ever. I did remove the ability of an expert to delete threads after he deleted a thread in which he made ridiculously slandorous and idiotic comments including how people were going to get sick from boiling (not cooking) rock.

RC has never deleted a thread from the database from day one. We removed them from public view, but NEVER deleted them. Until that day. That was the only time a thread has ever been deleted from the database since the day I started on RC how many ever years ago. It was my responsibility as Sr. technical administrator to protect the data of the site, and removing his privledges to cause additional damage was a no brainer decision. Anybody that doesn't agree with that decision is a fool in my eyes.

I also restored that thread - which was the right thing to do as well. My responsibility was to the owner of the site and it's members and I fulfilled that responsibility with professionalism and honor. I wish I could say that about others involved.

It has been put forth that the thread was deleted because of pictures of illegal corals. Balderdash! First off, RC would have no liability for allowing those pictures to be shown. If they are illegal then the person posting them has the liability. Second, those pictures were in fact used in an RC tank of the month 5 years ago. Why the sudden need to delete them from a thread? The person that deleted the thread did not even consult with the rest of the staff or tell them they did it afterwards. Up until that point, no mod had ever removed a thread without consulting other staff members or at least letting them know about it afterward.

The truth of the situation is that the thread was deleted to cover an idiotic and childish (if not slanderous and libelous) post by the person who deleted it.

Also, it has been opined that I started the thread in question. This is either a lie or complete ignorance, it's really difficult to tell which as both ignorance and lying seem to both be rampant in this situation. I had written some customized code on RC so that when threads exceed 1000 posts it automatically creates a new thread (with the side effect of my name appearing on the thread). You can look and find dozens of such split threads like this on RC, such as this one for example: http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=718744&highlight=split

Why I'm no longer on the staff at RC

This is very difficult for me. It is difficult for me because I have had a great love for RC and much respect for the staff there and it's owner. I don't think anyone will argue with the fact that I have devoted more blood, sweat, tears, and time to RC than any other person involved. My passion for the site was unequaled. I took over RC when it was running on a windows server in a closet at John's office and it couldn't handle when 300 people came online. From there I built it into a well operating site running on 4 unix servers and multiple redundancy that can handle in excess of 2,000 simultaneous users. I did this during my weekends and spare time. I don't say this to inflate my ego or importance, but to try to help give perspective to the reader of this essay. I am writing this more to clear my own mind and help myself move on than for anything else, but I'm also publishing it to try to answer the great many questions that I'm being asked. As I mentioned, I have had a strong passion for RC. The sudden absence of focus for all that passion has been a traumatic event in my life and I am trying desperately to get over it. I will try here to explain the situation from my point of view without going overboard, but please realize that this is my opinion and I may become over zealous at times. Please keep that in mind. I am not trying to change anyones mind about anything or cause anybody any further grief, only to express my own opinions and insight on the events that have transpired. My apologies to JohnL in advance for saying anything at all, I have nothing but respect for you, but I think I deserve the opportunity to tell my side of the story.

Anyway, to try to move forward, I did a lot of work for RC, blah blah blah everybody knows that already and that's not why you are reading this anyway, so let's get down to the nitty-gritty. As is usually the case in situations like these there is no single reason for my departure. Many things building up over time caused it. Some of them are merely harmless disagreements that don't really effect the way RC works in a profound way, they only effected me. I won't bore you with those except to note that they existed and contributed to my final decision. The situation that ultimately led me to my sudden departure was one that I consider an earth-shattering departure from the way we did business. I have always been very proud of the fairness and integrity the staff showed to it's members in case after case. However, in one particular case that integrity and fairness seemed to disappear and was replaced with covering your ass and fulfilling a vendetta, at least in my opinion. The saddest part about that is that apparently I was very alone in that opinion. In an organization of this size, it's no surprise that there were disagreements and it's no surprise that someone occasionally loses sight of what is reasonable, fair, and just. We all go off the deep end occasionally. However, when apparently the entire organization finds a way to justify outrageous behaviour then that is a horse of a different color entirely.

The final straw for me was that a member was singled out because he didn't agree with the methodologies of the "experts" of the site. His credentials were called into question. Credentials that I never personally saw him use in attempt to get someone to agree with him. Maybe he did, but I never saw it. If you are a little confused over why this is important, just think about how you would feel if someone discounted what you had to say because you didn't have their level of education. If you can back it up does it matter - or should you be ignored? Do you want to be singled out for review of your credentials because of what you post? Do you want someone looking to see what your education is, or who your employer is because of what you post? I want to point out at this point that who the member was is irrelevant. It does not matter to me who it was. What matters to me is that personal information about a member including, but not limited too home phone number, home address, full name, birth date, sexual preference, employer, and educational credentials was searched for and in some cases obtained and passed around freely. Even worse than that, the information was used to attempt to force the person to divulge even more personal information about themselves. The fact that I seemed to be alone in speaking up against what I consider a breach of ethics beyond compare simply because some staff didn't agree with what a member had to say made it clear to me that I no longer was a good fit in the organization.

I cannot comment about what the future holds for RC as I really have no idea. I will let you determine for yourself if you feel the site is up to the standards you personally set. In the past I have always had extreme pride in the lack of bias the staff permitted and perhaps because of that I set my own bar for such things higher than could reasonably be expected. I'm not going to lower it however. I will always remember with pride my involvement in the RC that did set the bar that high. I see some minor evidence that perhaps some are now seeing how wrong they were. Someone else must have stood up to the experts to cause them to quit. Who knows? I don't. But it does give me a glimmer of hope that there is some sanity remaining.

For those that may be wondering why the person targeted didn't just provide them with what they wanted let me ask you this. Have you ever been asked "Have you stopped beating your wife?" It's the same sort of situation. There is no way to win when you are placed in that situation. Would you give someone even more personal information after they had already dug into your personal life and passed it around and threatened you with it? I wouldn't. And neither would any other sane person.

Ok, enough of the negative stuff. I really do wish the best for them, but it's up to them from here on out. I doubt I'll be hanging out on RC much. Too many painful memories. But if you want to talk to me, I'll always be around on TRT, so stop by and say hello.

Intro

The internet is a funny thing. People actually believe what they read is 100% true. All I ask of my readers is that you think about what you've seen happen and apply what you read about it to the facts you know.

This blog is what I have to say. If you are interested read. If you aren't don't. If you want to comment, please do. If you want to say nasty things about me, there are plenty of other places that would love to hear from you, so don't bother here. If you want to say nasty things about other people - well, I won't be allowing that either. One thing I have retained throughout this mess is my integrity and I'm not going to compromise my ethics now anymore than I was willing too before.

The messages that follow are my original explanation with addendums following that. Enjoy!