CodeWalrus

(Note to members, visitors and other site members, this topic is not intended to attack specific calculator sites or members or claim any site as inferior or superior. Any event described below happened or were perceived that way between 2011 and 2014 and we are simply posting this because since the Pimathbrainiac incident, more and more people have been asking why CW opened. What we believe is that diversity is better and that Cemetech, CodeWalrus and Omnimaga are different from each others and should be ran the way their respective admins want. Since this topic was posted and reviewed by the entire CW staff, if you feel anything below is objectionable, quote it and let us know so that we can address it.)

Topic edited in 2016 to append informations about why I stepped down from Omnimaga in 2011, since that was initially missing from this post. EDITED again in 2017 with a link to a safe-haven section topic explaining further.

Since this website was founded, it was one of our goal to be as transparent as possible towards our userbase (excluding of course sharing our admin passwords and such stuff). On some sites, warnings, bans and even future staff changes may be announced publicly, while on other sites, all of this is kept private. We chose the first option for the most part, even if sometimes this could cause a bit of friction, because we felt that people should know that we are doing something about situations.

There is one thing, however, that we were not transparent about, but that it was only a matter of time before it goes public: The reasons why CodeWalrus opened in the first place. We apologize for not saying it sooner but we felt that to spare the TI community from a potential massive episode of drama at the time, it was better to wait until the whole thing is done. We explained it before, especially during the pimath incident when people were asking questions, and many people figured it out by themselves from the fact I founded both Omnimaga and CodeWalrus, but since more and more people have been asking in the last two weeks, we felt that it is now time to officially explain it:


To sum things up, after three years of growing disagreements and conflicts about the mentality/direction changes that Omnimaga admins underwent after I gave them ownership of the site, we finally called it quit then branched out into our own site: CodeWalrus. I and many others might not have handled the situation correctly over the years, but the thing is that at one point, it became clear that things were not gonna work. And something that not many people know is that the idea about a new site was not first brought up in June 2014, but rather in September 2011 (I forgot until I checked my old Omni PMs two weeks ago).

The TL;DR that follows is the chronology of events that ultimately led to CodeWalrus (green text denotes when the new site idea was considered or became a thing, with key dates in bold):

Quote-September 1st 2001: I founded Omnimaga.

-March 3rd 2004: Omnimaga finally gets a website.

-July 8th 2011: I am forced to step down from my admin position, as result from high community pressure against Omnimaga's stance against hostility and rule enforcement. Health problems, mainly related to things explained here (https://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=2030.0) were one of the other factors.

-July 15th 2011: Omnimaga and TIMGUL ownership transfered to AngelFish, Geekboy1011, Netham45, Hot Dog, Juju, Rcfreak0, Ztrumpet and Eeems, via the following e-mail (I didn't have AngelFish's e-mail):
(http://img.codewalr.us/omniownershiptransfer.png)

-September 6th 2011: Worrying about Omni moderation becoming biased and too lax towards provocative remarks, this is the first instance where I brought up the idea about a new site, via PM, but the recipient info was lost since his account no longer exists.

-March 6th 2012: Juju demoted from Omni staff. Lack of info about his demotion and the fact that he was by far the most (if not only) active Omni maintainer at the time result into the long-term future of Omnimaga and its transparency being called into question.

-Late April 2012: United-TI merges into Cemetech. Out of anger due to Omni's state, the news article about UTI's demise is photoshopped into an Omnimaga death prediction (inspired by calc.org's (http://fryedsoft.bluecrimson.com/rants/calcdeath.htm)), set in the then-future of April 2014:
(https://img.ourl.ca/futureofomni.png)
(that image was hosted on Removedfromgame, which recently shut down and the original URL was http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/futureofomni.png . That image was never shown in public until now, but some people saw it before.)

-Summer 2012: Major Omni restructure is also announced around that period, but info about it is minimal. It is believed at the time by members that the site and staff will finally be updated to ensure the long-term viability of Omnimaga as we knew it, while the site will retain close to its original mentality/policies.

-Fall 2013: This is when talk about the Omni 2.0 upgrade becomes more frequent and when large changes in site moderation happen. Some people have the impression that rule enforcement now depends of which admin is online and if that admin likes the person and discussion or not (for example, one admin once warned someone for posting a 9gag link). Officially, admins can act at their own discretion at any time. Some members including myself no longer feel welcome on Omnimaga.

-March 2014: Omni site upgrade happens in emergency, due to major security exploits being discovered. However, many administrative decisions (eg the topic URL changes), as well as moderation actions,  starts controversy.

-May 29th 2014: Judgment Day (the final incident before discussions about a new site starts.)

-June 2014: Discussion about the new site between myself and Pimathbrainiac. Hosting, content and my activity level are the main concerns for the new site because I lack VPS management skills and didn't want to pay too much for a brand new site.

-October 3rd 2014: Perhaps as a last-ditch effort to make an extra contribution to help Omni (the reason was forgotten), DJ Omnimaga applies for Coders of Tomorrow one last time, providing that he doesn't get global mod privileges.

-October 14th 2014: DJ starts seeking for opinions about VPS providers and one person is given hints that a new calculator site is being considered.

-October 23rd 2014: The final conflict before the new site project officially starts. At this point there is no turning back.

-October 24th 2014: I co-founded this site with aeTIos, Streetwalrus, Pimathbrainiac and Juju (codenamed TI-Walrus). The plan was to only give access to close friends that are hard to reach outside Omnimaga and interested in such project first, then gradually give hints that the site exists through December then open to public on January 1st 2015.

-November 2nd 2014: VPS rented

-November 4th 2014: Site name chosen: CodeWalrus is the winner, with codewalr.us as a domain name, owned by pimathbrainiac at the time (later Scipi).

-November 11th 2014: Site opens in invite-only mode and is leaked to Matrefeytontias by accident (he was supposed to get the URL a few days later).

-November 11th 2014: As a last-ditch effort to make Omnimaga revert back to its old ways before we go all-out with CW, matrefeytontias instigates a petition on Omni that the CW staff and most of the then-future founding members then join, discuss in private then sign, but since the site project predates the petition by weeks, it is too late already. As a compromise, CW focuses on being solely a programming team with the old Omni forum rules as long as the petition effects last. The effects will finally last about three weeks.

-December 2014: Site slowly gets revealed to public, with some minor incidents on December 8th. Official announcement scheduled for December 15th is then posted 5 days earlier.

-January 1st 2015: Site opens to public and all members awaiting account activation are approved.

Just because Omnimaga is now ran the way it is doesn't mean it's bad, however, same for their admins. Same for Cemetech, Revsoft, TI-Planet, etc. Every site administration is free to run their site the way they want. CodeWalrus simply offers something new (that used to exist back in the days) for more TI community diversity. It would be very bad if the only TI site in existence was, for example, CodeWalrus, because then there would be less diversity. However, because many of the Omnimaga members who moved to CodeWalrus were by far their most active posting ones (for example, 25% of all August-November 2014 posts were by me and I stopped posting there on December 22nd, aside from a goodbye post in March), this caused Omnimaga activity to drop considerably. Also, the entire Omnimaga staff stopped posting completely between December 19th and January 2nd, which probably didn't help either.

My hope is that one day the Omni admins at least start posting more again on Omni, since that would make it easier to keep the new members they got (just look at Cemetech). They already have a new type of userbase that are fine with the new policies or who joined after they came in place, now free from the drama that our differences brought in. Some CW members still posts there. But we felt that CodeWalrus was necessary for the community and to keep everyone around, even if we wished that other solutions could have been possible at the time. In fact, here are the first 12 members who joined CodeWalrus before the site was leaked:
DJ Omnimaga - 2001
Streetwalrus - 2012
aeTIos - 2010
Juju - 2010
Keoni29 - 2011
matrefeytontias - 2012
Hayleia - 2011
Duke Take Eiyeron - 2011
Scipi - 2011
unknownloner - Mar 2013
Thecoder1998 - Oct 2013
Vijfhoek - 2012
The year besides the nickname is when they joined the TI community. All of them joined Omnimaga prior the policy changes and only four joined after Juju got demoted.

Something to keep in mind is that after CW was opened, I often got blamed for all the drama that happened on Omnimaga prior my 2011 resignation. The problem, however, is that those people always looked at my reactions without the original context, failing to realize that it was almost always the same group of individuals instigating the drama in the first place (most likely on purpose, since they didn't do any effort to do otherwise and were fully aware of the consequences). In other occasions, they did not start the initial drama, but as that drama was about to resolve itself, they joined in and added extra fuel to the fire. My resignation from Omnimaga was caused by those repeated incidents, combined with severe health issues and not knowing how to setup SMF software so that I can remain admin, but without the global moderator privileges. Those people are partly to blame for what happened to Omnimaga afterwards, because if it wasn't for their behavior, I would still be Omnimaga administrator today.

As someone who isn't very active in any calculator community, I'm very thankful you wrote this post, as it helps many newcomers and people who never paid much attention to all the drama, understand the motivations for the foundation of CodeWalrus. The event chronology was very helpful, as well.
When I'm say I'm not very active, I mean except Cemetech at one point, and only because during and after the 2011 Omnimaga drama (which, at the time, I didn't even grasp, because I was just new to this calculators thing) this was the only community with active discussions about the Casio Prizm. I don't own any TI calculator, even though I'm interested in them from a "let's hear what others have to say" point of view. Nowadays, my activity there is about as much as here (and that's very low, just look at my post count).

To my innocent eyes, all that happened was that for some reason Omni activity levels had gone down the drain, Prizm forums included, and Cemetech was thriving with interesting discussions and programs, so the choice of which one to use for hosting my own Prizm discussion topics was pretty clear. (note that unlike what happens with TI calcs, with Casio calcs Cemetech and Omni were, as far as I knew, the only English communities with Casio subforums and non-zero levels of Prizm activity).

I never understood very well all the rivalry between (some of) the TI communities, especially since at a time when TI only puts more roadblocks to 3rd-party development, people should be more united than ever. But I understand these communities have a long past and I understand that more often than not, even small changes to community staff and the appearance (and disappearance) of other forums on the same topic can cause a lot of drama. It is the same thing with many other forums, for example web hosting ones - I was a moderator in one of these for some years and I know what I'm talking about, having dealt with staff step-out, step-in, step-in of staff that previously stepped-out, staff promotion and demotion, and even rogue community takeovers. More often than not, every new forum that comes to "fix" the situation by attempting to provide an environment that's amenable to everyone, is faced with a situation similar to that on the XKCD about standards: soon, there are n+1 rival communities instead of just n.

Personally I believe CodeWalrus, Cemetech, TI-Planet, Omnimaga, Casiopeia, etc. all have their place and some of them are obviously going to cater to some crowds more than others. In my opinion, trying to win and alienate users over each other makes as much sense as religion wars (it's up to you to decide if these make sense or not). Certain people like certain administration styles and discussion styles more than others, and some people are apparently fine with whatever comes, as with the technical types which don't care so much about the community part but just want a place to publish and discuss their findings (in terms of Casio calculators, I'm thinking of Simon Lothar, TeamFX, etc., as well as people who appear once and then disappear, yet leave precious stuff behind, as was the case with Prizm overclocking).

I'm going to speak for myself: I currently participate on both Cemetech and CodeWalrus. Periodically, I visit the other calculator communities looking for news that (maybe out of some of that rivalry? or just plain laziness?) don't get posted to the ones I frequent the most. I think the kind of people and discussions you find on each site is different and I'm completely fine with that. For some things I visit and post on CW, for others I post on Cemetech, for others I may post in both. If more people did like this I believe everyone would be happier.

I'm not happy with all the decisions and the way each community went over the years, but I learned to live with them. In the name of transparency, and also because I've written blog posts and Cemetech posts on the subject (so it would make no sense to leave it in the air here), I'm going to specify what I'm talking about: I do not like the way the discussion, relevance and staff highlighting of the Prizm (and HP Prime) went at Cemetech, mainly after TI came out with non-Nspire color calcs, especially after so much Prizm appraisal from some staff members.

As I said, as a mere member I learned to leave with it, but I can totally see why people would branch or merge communities when they feel it makes sense (admins, having the power to change things, should not learn to live with things but instead try to fix them). From what I know, in the case of CodeWalrus, I think it made sense to spin off of Omnimaga, and it also made sense to archive UTI at Cemetech.

Thanks for writing, DJ, That clears up a lot.
I myself joined the community when cw went public, so i don't really have any knowlege of the history.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 25, 2015, 04:50:52 AM
-March 6th 2012: Juju demoted from Omni staff. Lack of info about his demotion and the fact that he was by far the most (if not only) active Omni maintainer at the time result into the long-term future of Omnimaga and its transparency being called into question.

TBH, this event is partly why I was okay with a new website and actively contributed to it. The other Omni admins knew I was more on DJ's side and I was not shaping Omni the way they intended it (I was disagreeing a lot with everyone else, actually), so they must have kicked me out because of that. Omnimaga diverged so much from DJ's original vision, making a new website with a different vision seems to be a good idea and, as DJ said, it does add to the community diversity.

I have nothing wrong with Omnimaga, far from it. The current admins are still pretty nice (to me, anyway). It's probably just what happens when you have a new administration, I guess.

Indeed. Plus while I sent that email in 2011, they didn't have to abide by it since the site was now theirs. I guess back then I just found it a bit disrespectful to the previous 10 years I devoted into making Omni what it was. But I moved on about that wheb CW became considered.

Fascinating.

Thanks for posting that DJ, I knew a little but not a lot about the founding of CW.

Thanks for posting DJ! It was worth the read. Do you mind sharing what happened on "Judgement Day", exactly?
Also, what does the text in green mean?

Judgement Day was a day where a dispute happened. Not because of the dispute itself, because the dispute by itself was nothing all that special compared to past ones, but by then, they had piled up enough and the cup was already about to run over, so it did not take much for the latter to happen. It's called judgement day because the dispute and especially what happened next caused the chain reaction that ultimately led to the split.

Had that dispute not happened, this would only have postponed "judgement day" until something else happens

Green text denotes events where a new site was being considered, discussed or worked on.

Quote from: gbl08ma on August 25, 2015, 11:23:17 AMTo my innocent eyes, all that happened was that for some reason Omni activity levels had gone down the drain, Prizm forums included, and Cemetech was thriving with interesting discussions and programs, so the choice of which one to use for hosting my own Prizm discussion topics was pretty clear. (

To be fair, parts of the reason why PRIZM discussion became rare on Omni back then is because only two Omni members were interested in programming something else than BASIC for it. Once AngelFish and Z80man stopped doing PRIZM dev, PRIZM talk on Omni almost died completely. Also, Cemetech did agressive promotion of their site back in the days, so it was rather easy for them to lure members from other sites who are interested in topics that Cemetech is also interested in, so that could probably also explain why the discussion moved there.

CodeWalrus is similar to Omnimaga in the way that most people here prefer languages such as TI-BASIC, Casio BASIC, Axe and HP PPL, so PRIZM hacking discussion would probably be minimal here too.

I honestly think that each site adds something.
Cemetech has more discussion for the non Nspire Color calcs. (CSE, CE, Prizm, and so on)
Omnimaga appears to have more discussion for the monochromes, and the Nspires.
TI Planet seems to have discussion about the Nspires, from what information I have gathered about news posts there.

Anyways, its good to know why this site was founded. :)

-Omnimaga also has the highest amount of Axe talk, since the official sub-forum was always there.
-TI-Planet is very Nspire-centric, although not as much now that the CE is out. But overall the site focuses more on school/education than calculator development nowadays.
-Cemetech has the extra hardware talk and more ASM
-CW has more hybrid color BASIC

But also the mentality of each site comes into play as well:
-Cemetech is stricter against randomness, but less against controversial remarks
-CodeWalrus is stricter against rudeness and intolerance, but more lax against some randomness (eg the :walrii: posts on IRC)
-TI-Planet is lax against all of the above
-On Omnimaga, it depends of which admin is around. But Omnimaga peanuts and the game references are usually fine no matter what


So yes, they all add something. When TIMGUL was around, it was the only Playstation 1 MTV Music Generator forum out there and its rules were lax about NSFW jokes, but strict against personal attacks and attempts to start fights. The minute someone got banned the site almost turned into an holy war with defenders of free speech because banned users had no other alternative besides TIMGUL.

Ok so some updates:

-So tonight I was indirectly "informed" by an user of a TI IRC channel that the reason why Omnimaga died is because CodeWalrus staff is actively siphoning it out of all its users. However, one week before I and DarkestEx were also indirectly informed by another user in the TI community, that CodeWalrus is a fiasco, and that time it was in a forum post.


What should we do? Discuss? Pop-corn? Or elect Nikky as community-wide admin?

Yep, definitely bring the popcorn here.

I don't have any, though. It was lost somewhere in this post (https://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=38.0). :P

There was also a third thing I witnessed, except that I lost the convo due to copy/paste fail and it doesn't really involve CodeWalrus (other than the fact that what happened was similar to what led to the split)

There are worse failures than CodeWalrus... Under its new direction, Omnimaga has become one, to begin with.
And if CodeWalrus wasn't a success, there would be no such misplaced remarks, because nobody would have anything to fear from CodeWalrus from a visitor count / post count / whatever standpoint.
Looks like some people still haven't understood (I'd even say "don't want to understand") the reasons behind the fall of Omnimaga.

Quote from: Lionel Debroux on October 06, 2015, 08:06:40 AM
There are worse failures than CodeWalrus... Under its new direction, Omnimaga has become one, to begin with.

That's partly why CW was founded, and became a success, Omnimaga changed a lot since DJ's tenure as admin.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on October 06, 2015, 05:41:33 AMOr elect Nikky as community-wide admin?

Nikky for admin 2016!

And now Kerm is at it, insisting with even worse stuff (the last part is the problem), despite me insisting otherwise during the pimath incident, when he first said that CW goal was to steal users from other sites:

Quote<@KermPhD> DJ_O: CodeWalrus was responsible for siphoning off Omnimaga users and activity, which I believe was the goal.

I'm done with Cemetech. We will also be discussing those matters with CodeWalrus staff to decide if we start a poll about if further action shall be taken about those repeated matters (EDIT: Done, and there won't be any for now.). The two people who shared this with me better not be banned for it (like what happened to Netham45 in 2011 when he privately shared logs of incriminating stuff), else the ban will be made public. I would rather not take any further action about those matters, but this is not the first time that such libelous claim is posted.

Quote<@KermPhD> DJ_O: CodeWalrus was responsible for siphoning off Omnimaga users and activity, which I believe was the goal.

Er, what, Kerm ? Rather, a consequence of the goal of CodeWalrus...
As was clear (to me, anyway) from the initial public announcement, which post-dated the "Dear Omnimaga" episode by months, CodeWalrus aimed at providing a place where people would feel at home again, because the mood slowly imposed by the new lead at Omnimaga was increasingly being seen as hostile. AFAICT, siphoning Omnimaga users and activity was a consequence - not a goal - of strongly disgusting several of the most active and skilled users from posting, and the otherwise increasingly disrespectful atmosphere. IOW, people voting with their feet, like they did for e.g. the TI-68k/Nspire section of yAronet.

Omnimaga's new lead clearly didn't have in mind the mutual growth of community sites, especially TI-Planet, any longer. Just like Cemetech's lead, in fact, as is repeatedly seen by recruiting people on #ti for Cemetech (exclusively - not even their Omnimaga, let alone CodeWalrus or TI-Planet), making jsTIfied unusably closed down, etc. Omnimaga's new lead and Cemetech's lead are very good friends.

If I wanted to make claims as baseless as Kerm's (er, would they be ?), I'd state that I believe that one of the unwritten goals of the Cemetech + new Omnimaga vs. TI-Planet row (not all of which was explained, Cemetech pulled out of the discussion with major unexplained items...) was to diminish and later absorb Omnimaga, which was much more dependent on TI-Planet staff and activity, for the greater glory of Cemetech. And CodeWalrus saved the English-speaking community from Cemetech's domination and stranglehold - how annoying.


Kerm's general arrogance has been ruffling my feathers lately. Of course, getting a PhD is an achievement in itself, it represents a lot of work, and he made superior work, judging by the fact that he got at least one poster accepted to no less than SOSP, which I've known as one half of the pair of highest ranked conferences in OS design, since my 2-year tenure as an engineer in a systems- and middleware-oriented research team. And there are countries, such as Germany, where persons who got PhDs are highly regarded. But still - a bit of humility doesn't hurt, quite the contrary in fact.

EDIT: direction -> lead (lead sets the direction), it's better that way.

(was writing it while Lionel was writing too so it might be redundant)

Can't just people read ? I'm going to summarize so that lazy people can understand Codewalrus...

Omnimaga used to be great, original and a great addition to the community.
Not anymore (wrong atmosphere, etc).
People still wanted to hang out, but not on Omnimaga.
People created Codewalrus.

For the people who still think 4 lines are too long to read, maybe the creation of Codewalrus is responsible for the fact there is no one left there, but Omnimaga is responsible for the creation of Codewalrus.

Now, Codewalrus "stealing" Omnimaga ? Not really, it's more Omnimaga not being able to fix the original leak.

Also, for those who speak before knowing, go back to the petition topic (https://www.omnimaga.org/site-feedback-and-questions/dear-omnimaga/msg396670/#msg396670) on Omnimaga, BEFORE Codewalrus was launched, where people say "we're fed up with what's happening, can't we all be friends again ?" and we were told "are you admin or something ? wait, nope" so we left and came here instead. This topic basically shows that no one wanted to kill/replace Omnimaga, otherwise we would have left without a topic. But we told them what we thought was wrong and they basically confirmed it in their answers.

That's pretty much it, Lionel.

The direction here always been the mutual growth of community sites (no matter if said other sites like it or not) and we never aimed to replace whoever and steal users from anyone. We saw Omnimaga's change of direction, we saw its decrease of popularity and we pretty much said, did you liked Omnimaga as it was before, if so you'd like our brand new site CodeWalrus. The thing is, you can't change a winning formula and this can't be more true in this case, so this is pretty much why CodeWalrus proved popular since its foundation. If anyone is jealous, heh, can't help it :)

As Lionel said, it is a consequence of the goal of CodeWalrus rather than the goal itself and we do want to see Omnimaga thrive as it was before (again, that's also one of the goals of CW), as well as Cemetech.

I think we should just all go naked and jizz.

@gameblabla don't you mean you'll make a n2DLib port of The Mighty Jill Off? :P

Also @Hayleia there is a difference between reading and caring. Just because someone reads info about something doesn't mean he will relay the info accurately.

This reminded me of how much I hated the new omnimaga design at first.

This is a very worthwhile post and speaking as someone who will be a member of and use any number of programming "forums" without prejudice, I don't see why some members of other sites feel the need to make scandalous claims as to what other sites are doing to steal members and all that jazz. It's actually become exhaustive how personal and community rivalries lead to what they do. Every calculator site has its specialty, and some are more welcoming than others. I know of some places where an elitist mentality fostered among some of the "better" programmers causes those less skilled or more unsure of themselves (like me) to feel looked down on, almost unwelcome. My statement to every admin of every site who can see this is to stop blaming other sites for stealing your members, and instead think about what causes people to feel less welcome on your site.

More remarks but not as bad at least (I somehow had a browser tab open with both CW and Cemetech and happened to see I was highlighted):

Quote5:29:56 PM

• [KermPhD] DJ_O and the TI-Planet staff are very interested in implying the Omnimaga is dead or dying.

While he is right that we sometimes implied that Omni is dying, it's not like we entertain ourselves in saying so non-stop all over the place on CW or TI-Planet. It's not CodeWalrus staff who tried to take users away from Omnimaga, it's Omnimaga staff that tried to get rid of them. Geekboy even stated himself before that Omnimaga was better off without the users that moved to CW.

But I guess that certain people would rather have just 1 type of mentality in the TI community and get rid of all the TI community users who don't want to get yelled at for saying "hex", posting SFW 4chan screenshots or complaining when unnecessarily nitpicked at. That's certainly would have improved community activity more than opening CW, does it? 9_9

Quote from: annoyingcalc on October 06, 2015, 09:26:19 PM
This reminded me of how much I hated the new omnimaga design at first.

I don't mind it personally, since it has the same color scheme as the TI-84+ calculator and was less bandwidth-intensive. But it definitively gave less character to the site since it's very close to SMF default theme.

Quote from: ACagliano on October 06, 2015, 10:12:18 PM
My statement to every admin of every site who can see this is to stop blaming other sites for stealing your members, and instead think about what causes people to feel less welcome on your site.

Best post in the thread so far @ACagliano . It deserves a +1 just for that. Of course, admins don't have to please every single member, but I think that trying to keep users around is something to consider when running a site, as well as what the leader says. I learned the hard way before that sometimes, as a leader, when we say things that don't please people, then the consequences are often much greater. We can say that our opinion doesn't represent the site's opinion, but it's impossible to prevent users from falling into synecdoche.

What I said before, privately and more recently publicly on #cemetech :

Quote[Adriweb] regarding Omni's activity decrease, more precisely it happened when Cemetech + Omni admins decided critor couldn't post front-page news directly anymore. That was the death certificate for Omnimaga, but didn't change much for Cemetech. So all in all, Cemetech killed Omnimaga by proxy, kind of

which seems like an awfully trivial reasoning to make once you know the people involved.

Though of course, someone's denying the facts:

Quote[KermM] critor stopping posting news on Omnimaga and Cemetech had nothing to do with Omnimaga's decrease in activity

I mean, can't he look at the graph? The data is there.

To be fair, there are many things that could have caused the activity decrease and it's hard to tell which one was the worst. Even the severe downtimes in Early 2012 caused a massive activity drop (UTI once went from 2500 posts a day to 800 in 2005 due to extreme site lag)

I'll go to bed soon but I'll soon edit my post with an edited Omnimaga graph with key events added on top of it. EDIT nevermind, I think the first topic post will do. Besides, the dates are there and you can just look at their graph.

Nobody's saying it was the one and only factor, but considering 90% of the news were critor's, it's obvious that all posts that would have been written on new news don't exist because of that

Yeah, well, no one in the community, as far as I know, makes front-page news posts as regularly as Critor. I agree it's kind of a problem when you decide he can no longer do that on your site, but I don't think you'd lose that much posts directly because of that.

critor's news yielded hundreds of replies on Omnimaga, amounting up to high single-digit / low double-digit percentage figures.
The fact that Omnimaga news item posting by the TI-Planet staff came to an abrupt end is clearly not the only cause of activity decrease, but was part of it - that's all we're saying :)

Yeah, exactly, it could be one of the causes, but it's not exactly THE cause.

@Lionel Debroux when I stepped down in 2011 Omni newsing almost stopped entirely until Critor became news editor and it caused a drastic decrease in program features and activity.

Not only that, but the CGPN Newsletter ended the day I stepped down too because no one was willing to take over

So yeah that kind of stuff certainly didn't help.

Now that I mention it, I really need to write the July/August/September CWPN <_<

I am really new at calc coding and calc forum(have only seen omninaga front page pretty much), so I probably missed out on a lot of the details, but you've been talking about why you've made this site after you stopped being owner of the site, but my question is: why exactly did you step down from your position on the site? Why did you give control over in the first place?

All of this fighting is pointless and will just result in an even smaller community. First of, Kerm and whoever must figure out that if a group of five people dont like a site, they have the choice to leave, and start their own site. Second of all, why would dj be trying to destroy a site he himself created?, and if so where is the hard proof that he is? So far the only thing I've seen are blind accusations. DJ and the other admins should confront (positive connotation implied) the admins that are acusing CW, and explain to them face to face (over skype or something) that their actions are immature and are only splitting the community farther with no solid proof! Lastly, CW and other sites should work together to revive each other and to keep each others' communities alive, as to allow the WHOLE ti comunity to thrive for decades to come.

Not trying to be offensive to anyone. yes my tone in writing this is angry one, but it is sad for me to see the community go this way :P I hope something can be done  :-|  :)

For those who don't know, and if I'm wrong please correct me, so in short, a few years ago, DJ was the main admin of Omnimaga, then retired in favor of other admins. Then those other admins changed quite a few stuff not in spirit of DJ's tenure as admin and some people disliked the changes. So a few people (including DJ and myself) went ahead and created a new site (this one). That's pretty much what happened in tl;dr version, something like that.

And yeah, if any admins of other sites want to confront us directly, we'll be happy to do so.

@semiprocoder Back in July 2011, Omnimaga mentality and policies were nearly identical to CodeWalrus today. The reason why I stepped down is because a certain group of individuals repeatedly tried to start site wars and force me to change Omnimaga mentality to be closer to theirs. Also, back then I didn't know how to setup SMF so that I can manage forum categories without having full moderator privileges, and since I can be unstable I didn't want moderator privileges anymore. I simply collapsed under the pressure.


@c4ooo It wasn't just 5 people, some other people were already fed up with Omni long before CW existed. What we didn't know is that none of the Omni moderators nor admins would take CW seriously at first: Instead of increasing their activity after the split, they all stopped posting from December 19th to January 2nd simultaneously. Not a good way to prop up activity when your top poster (me) is about to leave.

Oh and yeah, I don't see why I would try to destroy the very site I created and devoted 10 years of my life admining. I spent 3 years begging the remaining admins to not do so, racking up a total of 55000 posts in the process, often losing my mind in the process because I cared so much about Omni. The reward for doing so was a few bans, newsing privilege reductions, anyone who sides with me getting kicked out of Omni staff and me no longer being welcome.

As for contacting the admins or users who falsely accused CW, people did that many times before for other matters (for example, clarifying Ndless authorship due to kerm repeatedly claiming it's by TI-Planet), to no avail. The real solution is to frequent the websites you like, make new calculator, computer or hardware material, music, encourage other members on their projects, give your opinion and have fun. Oh and tell us what to improve on CodeWalrus so we can please you and perhaps more people within our free time/abilities. :)


@Juju yeah this is why I didn't lock this topic. Ideally I would prefer that it won't continue into a "throw mud at Cemetech/Kerm/Omni" discussion, though *pokes Lionel to be a bit careful*, because what had to be said was already mostly said and it won't really change much anyway.

By the way @Hayleia CodeWalrus was founded before the petition was started (by three weeks). The site opened in invite-only mode just before the petition was started and when we saw that Omni staff was open to changes, we instead decided to just be a programming team with different mentality and unique features as long as the petition effects last. But they turned out to be short-lived, as just 3 weeks after the petition, @Thecoder1998 was blasted on IRC for insignificant reasons. As a result, CW slowly reverted back to a full site. CW doesn't replace Omnimaga, though, because it's too different (mentality-wise) to do so



EDIT: Interesting data:

DJ Omnimaga - 2001
Streetwalrus - 2012
aeTIos - 2010
Juju - 2010
Keoni29 - 2011
matrefeytontias - 2012
Hayleia - 2011
Duke Take Eiyeron - 2011
Scipi - 2011
unknownloner - Mar 2013
Thecoder1998 - Oct 2013
Vijfhoek - 2012

Notice a pattern? The major Omnimaga policy changes happened in November 2013, and all of the first 12 users to be let in joined the community before that date. Among them, most arrived before or just shortly after I stepped down from Omni administration.

And the following users joined the community in 2014, but waited until CodeWalrus opens to public before starting participating:
Cumred
alexgt

Due to repeated attacks and attempts at starting inter-site drama (then playing the victim once they get a response) by 1 Cemetech admin and 2 Omnimaga admins, 1 moderator 1 recently demoted news editor, I initially contemplated setting an embargo on both those sites, which was discussed a few days ago in the staff sub-forum. But the embargo was set prematurely out of anger after yet another incident since I had enough, and I apologize for that (although it will be re-instated if anyone vandalizes our site again like during the Pimath incident in August). I now instead decided to paste every incriminating logs in this post so people can see the truth and make their own mind about it:

February 23rd thrashing of our entire userbase: http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Mon%20Feb%2023%202015#1424726741451

May 1st thrashing of our entire userbase and bashing the 4v3 contest: http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Fri%20May%2001%202015#1430516571810

August 9th libel: http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Sun%20Aug%2009%202015#1439143800602

Autust 9th: CW defaced (400 posts lost). http://pastebin.com/k9ecpSQ0

August 9th (Omni admin telling people to enjoy the s***show, in reference to CW being defaced) http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Sun%20Aug%2009%202015#1439148660186

August 10th (then telling juju to basically cry him a river) http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Mon%20Aug%2010%202015#1439170987828 (at this point the embargo would have been in place if it wasn't for the PR-move news posted afterwards)

October 6th (libel from one Omni moderator, although someone's remarks about Omni aren't much better, no offense Nikky): http://pastebin.com/hByyv8UZ

October 6th (same line, but this time from a Cemetech staff): https://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=676.msg23435#msg23435 (EDIT: I discovered a few hours after posting those logs that both people were reprimanded by another Cemetech staff for it, privately, so that's good)

October 12th (same admin trying to encourage his members to boycott CW) http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Mon%20Oct%2012%202015#1444692200147

October 13th (then admins playing the victim as if they were perfect and never do anything wrong) http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Tue%20Oct%2013%202015#1444696139434

September 23rd (CW being called a fiasco): https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=240086#240086

In April 2013, TI-BANK and every other website and Youtube channel ran by TI-BANK admin suffered from an embargo for similar reasons: On [embargo'ed], links to TI-BANK and related sites were disallowed for about a year, while on TI-Planet, any post containing "TI-BANK" or the name of his founder were edited to remove those. Again, I am sorry for taking this rash decision out of anger, but I feel that unlike what they imply when playing the victim, the [embargo'ed] admins are not perfect nor never doing anything wrong. here is a screenshot of the post explaining that 2013 embargo: https://i.imgur.com/lGO2RZI.png

I do like the idea of transparency. Wow, you've been through so much as well. So much drama. *starts crying*(I really wouldn't be able to deal with that much conflict-congrats man)

To be fair, I did MANY mistakes in the past too (including my earlier anger outburst that led to the short-lived embargo) . The biggest mistake I ever did IMHO was stepping down from Omnimaga admin, but I didn't have much choice back then, due to my health. Now I am just defending CodeWalrus place (and its mentality) in the TI community, just like I defended Omnimaga's former mentality back in the days.

My volatile temper is another serious issue I have, which is partly why I didn't want to be global moderator here (I can warn, help taking decisions, manage forum categories, design and plugins, though). My temper often gets in the way, though, but sadly there are people elsewhere who knows this and use this at their advantage.

Human nature is screwed up badly.


Now what I am gonna do is eat some food then check project updates and interesting discussions elsewhere on the forums.


EDIT: And of course some people will defend Omni like if they are perfect and never do anything wrong, then shift the entire blame on me. That's a classic:

https://www.omnimaga.org/general-discussion/enough-is-enough/?topscreen 

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on October 13, 2015, 03:21:48 AM
Now what I am gonna do is eat some food then check project updates and interesting discussions elsewhere on the forums.

Sounds like a good idea :)

WOW. After reading only several posts, I wonder if Homo Sapiens wasn't an uncontrolled error... Seriously, all this c shows another time how humans are stupid. Why, each time any community creates, there should be stuff like this ? Kevin Kofler, Mic Nic, KermMartian, the geekboy... Why are there always jerks like these to do absolutely whatev's ? Isn't it possible to joke without falling in that type of... (I can't find any word to describe this) ? I mean, on TI-Planet, I and others often 'troll' and there have never been any problem ! I know, 'I'm too young to understand', but let's say that : all of us are more immature than a 5-year child ! So, stop criticizing others, hidden behind your computer, and really TALK !

PS : (Moderation) Moderate/Boycott this if you want, I'm just trying to be a bit objective)

I didn't know the calculatorcommunity was THAT vicious o.o

Quote from: StarTrek on October 13, 2015, 11:15:20 AM
without falling in that type of... (I can't find any word to describe this)

Perhaps jealousy about CW success despite our users sharing a different mentality than theirs? Either way, apparently those people are perfect and never do anything wrong and it's always my fault (or ours). So end of story.

Quote from: brentmaas on October 13, 2015, 02:11:29 PM
I didn't know the calculatorcommunity was THAT vicious o.o

I didn't know it either until the stupid Omnimaga-TI Planet wars. The best thing to do is just ignore all of this.

I agree. Everything that has been said has already been said now anyway and it's up to each party to decide what they think about what happened or if they want to ignore it. The summary is that CodeWalrus is to Omnimaga what Mighty N° 9 is to Mega Man and that people needs to accept their co-habitation in the community. I would lock this thread, since it ran its course and the most important part is the 1st post and the questions+answers that occurred afterward, but only 1 side of the story, as well as neutral people, have expressed their opinion in it directly, and I'm not a big fan of silencing 1 side of the story. Since the other side have already expressed their view via different mediums (linked above), then perhaps I could lock the topic anyway, though (and unlock if there are enough requests). What do you think?

From watching both sides, this is what I see:

The Omnimaga side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from CW are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.
The CW side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from Omnimaga are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.

See the pattern? I suspect this is why this just keeps going in cycles and never ends.

You are free to help both parties figure out what they are doing wrong. This is why we have a suggestion sub-forum (or in this case, this topic I guess). There are things we can possibly even change or partially change if that's possible (unless it happened in the past, since we can't fix the past).

Quote from: Travis on October 14, 2015, 12:54:34 AM
From watching both sides, this is what I see:

The Omnimaga side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from CW are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.
The CW side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from Omnimaga are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.

See the pattern? I suspect this is why this just keeps going in cycles and never ends.

Any idea on how to break the circle? I'd very much like to get on better terms with the rest of our mother communities (cemetech included). I feel like we're seen as traitors, which I didn't wanna be. Is it wrong to make a place for yourself?
(Yes, I know that Omnimaga was sort of put into a coma with the leaving of ~10 pretty active members which I did not really see coming. Oh well)

Quote from: aeTIos on October 14, 2015, 05:36:38 AM

Quote from: Travis on October 14, 2015, 12:54:34 AM
From watching both sides, this is what I see:

The Omnimaga side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from CW are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.
The CW side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from Omnimaga are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.

See the pattern? I suspect this is why this just keeps going in cycles and never ends.

Any idea on how to break the circle? I'd very much like to get on better terms with the rest of our mother communities (cemetech included). I feel like we're seen as traitors, which I didn't wanna be. Is it wrong to make a place for yourself?
(Yes, I know that Omnimaga was sort of put into a coma with the leaving of ~10 pretty active members which I did not really see coming. Oh well)

Stop blaming each other and settle your differences?(It might be harder than it sounds-most likely)

Quote from: aeTIos on October 14, 2015, 05:36:38 AM

Quote from: Travis on October 14, 2015, 12:54:34 AM
From watching both sides, this is what I see:

The Omnimaga side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from CW are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.
The CW side can't figure out what they're doing wrong and feel as though people from Omnimaga are coming out and causing trouble and blaming them.

See the pattern? I suspect this is why this just keeps going in cycles and never ends.

Any idea on how to break the circle? I'd very much like to get on better terms with the rest of our mother communities (cemetech included). I feel like we're seen as traitors, which I didn't wanna be. Is it wrong to make a place for yourself?
(Yes, I know that Omnimaga was sort of put into a coma with the leaving of ~10 pretty active members which I did not really see coming. Oh well)

No it's not wrong to make a place for ourselves, especially if we are different than the others. It's called diversity.

Regarding breaking the circle, it's impossible that every single user in the community gets along together, because they are too different. That's why there are multiple sites. I think that rather than our old "Fight fire with fire" approach (especially from me), we might need to take the following approach: If you don't like what someone says about CW on another IRC channel, then simply take a break from that person then pay an extra visit to CW users.

Quote from: aeTIos on October 14, 2015, 05:36:38 AM
Any idea on how to break the circle? I'd very much like to get on better terms with the rest of our mother communities (cemetech included). I feel like we're seen as traitors, which I didn't wanna be. Is it wrong to make a place for yourself?

My best guess right now is that it would probably be necessary for both sides to set aside their notions of which side is "right" or "wrong", try to figure out and understand the other side's point of view, and then work from there to figure out a solution. Which I know doesn't tend to be the easiest thing in the world to do when one is on one of those sides. That may also require mutual cooperation and motivation from both sides as well rather than just one.

I'd say the best solution for the time being is to simply ignore the rantings from the Ceme and Omni folks. It's not like that stuff has any major impact on CW, they're only hurting themselves. And other than that, the recent post numbers speak for themselves.

Quote from: utz on October 14, 2015, 10:23:33 AM
I'd say the best solution for the time being is to simply ignore the rantings from the Ceme and Omni folks. It's not like that stuff has any major impact on CW, they're only hurting themselves. And other than that, the recent post numbers speak for themselves.

...and we fall again in that vicious circle. Boycotting this people implicitly means treating all of them like some kind of evil, bad idiots, and losing our neutral point of view.  :banghead: All of us have made errors and we should fix them. For example, when DJ O' quits Omni's admin team and then 'criticizes' them and creates a 'rival' website, it strangely reminds me Mic's attitude with TI-BANK. Of course, it's evident DJ O didn't do that for that purpose, but I think some 'Omni-side' people can have lived this situation like that. And that's all the problem : Humans never try to anticipate what could happen later, or at least to imagine what will the other think. I think it'd have been much wiser for DJ O' to keep at least his admin rights to keep control on the others' attitude as admins, instead of giving them total control and then accuse them of having initiated all this trouble.
@DJ O' : The main reason for which I'm a bit 'criticizing' or 'blaming' you is quite simple : Since I've discovered the community through TI-Planet, which is on the 'CW-side', I'm trying to be more neutral by imagine myself as someone on the 'Omni-side'...

Except you don't want to be on the Omnimaga side - I mean, you've seen the set of attacks from the Omnimaga+Cemetech side above ;)

But normal people can appear as jerks when they defend a jerk, or become one when frequenting one... ;D

@Travis I agree. That said, like I mentioned before, it seems like we will never change some people's opinions about each other site. The best step would be to at least do the first thing you said (use the mindset that neither side is right nor wrong) then ignore haters.

@StarTrek the problem is when I was Omni admin, I kept receiving non-stop complains about how we tried to keep the site free of hostility by banning troublemakers. Some people simply did not accept that a website other than theirs could have a different mentality. Back in 2010, though, I suffered from a big depression that almost led to the same incident as what happened to Tribal, then in 2011 I spent most of the year recovering from the depression. As site manager I simply collapsed under the pressure, then called it quit. I simply had no choice at the time, because my health was more important.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on October 14, 2015, 01:10:12 PM
@Travis I agree. That said, like I mentioned before, it seems like we will never change some people's opinions about each other site. The best step would be to at least do the first thing you said (use the mindset that neither side is right nor wrong) then ignore haters.

Quote from: utz on October 14, 2015, 10:23:33 AM
I'd say the best solution for the time being is to simply ignore the rantings from the Ceme and Omni folks. It's not like that stuff has any major impact on CW, they're only hurting themselves. And other than that, the recent post numbers speak for themselves.

Yeah, I think that's the other thing. Criticism is going to be unavoidable, but if the site is successful anyway, it shouldn't be something to worry about. (Ever wish you had a dollar for every time someone ever criticized/accused Microsoft/TI/Google/etc. of something? and yet look how successful (not necessarily "good", just successful) they continue to be :P) They just seem to ignore the criticism (sometimes irritatingly so, as we all know ;)) and just keep doing what they're doing unless it actually starts to cause them to lose money/market share.

Well, to be fair, I would like to get a dollar everytime somebody criticized CodeWalrus publicly or privately. :P

Ignoring people trying to mess with you is something my mom has always taught me. When they see you don't care, they give up because it's not fun.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on October 15, 2015, 06:37:22 AM
Ignoring people trying to mess with you is something my mom has always taught me. When they see you don't care, they give up because it's not fun.

Good advice, just ignore the people who want drama, and they'll stop.

Just close this thread I'd say.

Yeah, no point in going further with this. If anything happens we will discuss it in private and determine whether further action is needed. For now regular moderation rules apply (we had a ban evasion yesterday on irc and it was a frontal attack, only result was to properly enforce the ban).