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As Nilatai stated, this has prompted one of the cherished members of our community in the Mead Hall to begin washing his hands of Alla. For shame.

If you had your reasons for deleting the thread, the appropriate moderation would have been to let him know in advance why and when it was going to happen. Then he could have taken the appropriate steps to move it to his own blog for the dozens of people interested in what was being discussed there.

Now, through lack of communication of intent, you have ostracized one of the prominent members of the warrior forum.

Redshift is not only one of the most consistently entertaining and friendly posters, he is also one of the most helpful. He has taken the time to mathematically discuss dozens of subjects so that those of us less able to understand the mechanics of FFXI could understand the best choices to make in situations, and invested huge amounts of time in our community. He was already an established poster when I made my very first post on these boards and was never anything short of helpful and communicative, which is more than can be said for a surprising number of the mods here.

Sorry to rant, but we in the mead hall feel an injustice has been done.

Mojo.

The administrator who dealt with that thread was Darqflame.

Looking at the text, it appears that someone wrote a program that takes game data from FFXI, parses it, and then triggers actions in the game based on that data. If that is a correct interpertation of the program, that is a huge no-no in terms of Square Enix's policies, and will get you banned in game if they decide that it is cheating.

Now it may be that the program is actually just a big glorified timer that doesn't actually interact with the game, but tells you when to do things based on something ele. That is probably more acceptable, but it is still more of a grey area. To be honest, I don't know enough about the game or the intent to really judge if what it is doing is breaking the terms of the FFXI EULA or not.

When it comes to programs that interact with a game in any way, we will ALWAYS err on the side of caution, because we don't want anything coming from our site that will get users banned. My guess is that someone reported the thread as being a potential problem, and it was nuked to be on the safe side. Looking at the thread, if a FFXI user reported that to me as being a potential exploit that would get people banned, I'd probably take their word for it.

I'm sorry that the thread nuke apperently irritated a user into leaving, but the purpose of thread nukes is administrative, not punative, and they are there to protect the community. I'd rather have one pissed off user than 50 banned FFXI accounts personally. It would have been nice to let the user know why the thread was nuked, but sometimes that doesn't happen for a variety of reasons. Distraction by other spammers in the forum, etc.

I would hope that the individual who left would take the oppertunity to ask darqflame why the thread was nuked rather than just leaving in a fit of rage. It may be that there was a misunderstanding regarding the scope and intent of the program, or a misunderstanding of what would be allowed in the forum. Darqflame is fairly reasonable, so if a convinving argument was presented in favor of bringing the thread back, she might do so. I have to say in her position though, I probably would have nuked the thread as well if it were brought to my attention, because I don't want to see anyone get their game account banned over a third party application.

Looks like the thread has a bunch of stuff on using SpellCast (a Windower plugin), and it's fairly well-known that Windower is a taboo subject on the boards. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the policy, I'm just saying that it's not really a huge mystery why that thread would be locked/nuked. It would be nice if such threads could be relegated to journals, though.

Kao, spellcast is basically just a program to change gear. It does little more than what can be done with in game macros, but the problem with those are that they only have 6 slots. Including a spell/job ability/weapon skill, that only leaves 5 spots for gear changes; and people often change 10+ pieces of gear per spell/weapon skill. Spellcast does not automate anything, it simply changes gear for you all at once, instead of having to hit 2-4 macros to change gear, than 1-3 more to change back after the spell/ws.

It technically is not allowed, but no one will ever get banned for it, unless maybe they call up a gm them self and tell them they use it.

In the end, it is a windower plugin, so that is most likely why it was nuked, which is understandable.



Afaik, they can be.

Thanks for the clarification. It would have been nice to salvage the data from the thread though. I wouldn't be adverse to posting it in my journal, if that's an option.

The data is still there, but we can't allow the script to be housed and available on ZAM. If requested, we can send the data to the OP and he can house it on another site.

Edited, Feb 11th 2010 11:33am by Pikko

I don't mean to tell you guys how to do your jobs, or call you ****'s or anything remotely like that, I just wanted to reassure you that the Author in question was one of the most helpful and active members of the forum, and that this useful information should not go to waste. Like mnementh, I don't use windower, but it was a very useful thread for anyone looking to see how the endgame warriors who post here use their macros, and was full of tips and tricks. For that reason I feel it should be restored, even if you ask him to take the actual spellcast script out.

If you wouldn't mind sending the info back, that'd be fantastic pikko, we can then host it on a separate site, and people interested can facebook/email if they want more info.

A program that interacts with any of the games we cover to manipulate, expidite or otherwise alter the in game experiance in any way is not something we can allow, unless the game manufacturer specifically OK's it. It's very easy to scan for specific port activity matching such a program, and occasionally devs decide that they want to blanket ban all such programs, and people end up without their lvl 8 billion hard won prized accounts. For whatever reason, the devs have determined they don't want to add that finctionality into the game. My personal theory is that they are sadists, hence the lack of a jump button, but thats just my oppinion on the matter.

That being said, you are probably right, most likely no one would be banned for that program. unfortunatly since the chance exists, we would have to err on the side of protecting the users, and we have been pretty consistant about that stance for years now. I'm sorry if someone was hurt by removing that post, but anything that is even technically disallowed by the EULA of the game is not allowed in the forums.

I can't see into your password protected jouurnal. If its out in the open it's fair game for moderation.

The content can definitly be given to someone who wants to host it elsewhere, just contact one of us and we can send a text dump.

So for anyone looking to reference this for the future, any program that touches the game client = no. If it does not interact with the game, and the poster who posts it has sufficient credit here to make ust rust it, we would probably leave it alone.

Until it got reported, then we'd break in to see if it was there, and if so probably ban you.

Can you really blame him? This over-moderation has gotten a bit out of hand lately. Posts getting nuked without explanation. Posts get locked and dozens of people wonder "why?". Almost always by a mod who has no knowledge of FFXI whatsoever, which makes it even more frustrating. Then, when we ask for an explanation, the beforementioned mod gives a '***** you, it's not my job to know your game' attitude.

He used very little words to express his distaste. More than a few of us share his frustration, and will probably do the same as him in short time.


This attitue is not helping things. Did you even give a chance for anybody to defend the thread before it was nuked? No.

I'm pretty sure we covered a month or two ago, in detail, that mentioning windower was ok as long as it didn't cross the line of giving specifics, yet you're admitting to blindly nuking posts regardless of their reference.

Personally, I don't use a single one of the very few features (besides an avatar) that come with a Premium Subscription. I've always considered it a donation to a fourm that helps the community... I'm now reconsidering.

Edited, Feb 12th 2010 4:56am by chewzer

It should probably be mentioned that I may have inadvertently had a hand in Redshift's leaving. I sent him this PM asking for the excellent spellcast script he designed. I'm sorry he had to leave because of all this.


Edited, Feb 12th 2010 6:33am by Dynas

We look at it on the standpoint of, there are plenty of other forums where you can discuss windower or spellcast scripts, macros, and the like (Windower forums being one of them), which is why we requested Aikar and others from the Windower forums to stop advertising new versions of Windower and likewise started locking topics that either advertised it in some form, linked it, or dealt heavily in uses for it. Two of the most recent topics that have been locked/nuked and been brought up in the feedback forum were pushing that, as they were chock full of spellcast scripts and the like, and that's why they were both nuked.