Reflections on Summer
Tomato
tomato@starmen.net

First, if this is your VERY first time to the site, and you've done nothing else here,
DO NOT read this article, it's definitely not something you'd like to read when you
think of EarthBound and EarthBound websites, much less the top EarthBound site in the
world.

...

...

...

Okay, I warned you.

It's been quite a while since my last real article, not counting any of that weird
Tomato's Mystical Crap or whatever, heh.  It's been well over a year since my last
article, which I think was the one about Giegue and Giygas and how they're the same guy.
Man, when I wrote that article, I never, ever could have imagined I'd be writing an article
like this at a time like this, when the site would be in such major upheaval that people
like EBounding and PSI322 would choose to leave.

As the title suggests, this article is about the current state of affairs here at
Starmen.Net, in August of 2000.  Who knows where we'll be in a year from now, but for now,
let's just keep plodding along.

There are, obviously, a lot of problems with the site.  A sudden surge of lamers on the
forums, more lamers in our IRC channel, technical problems with the server we're on,
problems with our host, overusage of disk space, overusage of cpu and memory resources,
internal staffer struggles, and more.  This sure was the Summer of Fun.  Not.  Let me
explain everything I can remember from the past few months which has led us to where we
stand now.


-It started on IRC......

Seeing as how I don't hang out in the site's channel, #earthbound, very often, I'm not
clear on the circumstances, but I personally tend to mark the major turning point of the
site to be when in late spring/early summer, godofcows, who then had op status in
#earthbound, decided to go on a rampage and kick/ban everybody out, including other ops.
Of course, the other ops and staff members didn't appreciate this and quickly took away
his ops and banned him.

Now that I think about it, some people can probably claim the beginning of all this
actually started when j0hndeere got hacked and icefusion's hard drive was reformatted.  But
oh well.

Then for some reason or another, some goofy thing called the "Free Saboten" campaign began.
Saboten was also a former op who had some problems and for some reason or another was
removed of his ophood many months before.  However, he caused some problems and was finally
banned, but he tried to evade his bans several times.  This "Free Saboten" campaign was
meant to get him unbanned.  I don't know why they wanted him unbanned, or why the
supporters of it were so violent, but they were prime examples of lamers at work.

So, even more pressure was put on the ops of #earthbound, many people saying they had too
much power, they were dictators, blah blah.  Other people were saying how they were too
lenient, didn't do enough work, didn't kick/ban often enough, if at all, or didn't watch
the channel at all.

Of course, this all slowly moved over to the forums, where arguments of the ops and goc and
the Free-Saboten thing were "discussed" even more, just adding more wood to the fire, which
would become a volcano, as we all came to see in the coming weeks.

It was at about this time that a seemingly sudden flood of newbies showed up at our forums.
I can't help but wonder if it's because of the coverage we had on IGN64's front page that
fateful day.  Whatever the case may be, the number of new forum members was overwhelming.

You see, our forums have this special magic to them.  I can't explain it.  All I can really
say is that the people there are nice, the atmosphere is nice, there's always a lot of
people posting on it, even during the pre-dawn hours, and the rules aren't too strict. I
even remember guruzeth (before he turned crazy) really admiring the forums, he liked how
everybody would greet the newbies, all the "Hi, I'm new!" posts would have at least 10 or
so replies to them within an hour or so, all of which warmly welcomed the new member.

It's because of the forum and the forum community that this large number of new summer
visitors stayed.  And although you'd think this was good, it wasn't.

The problem was that most of these several hundred new forum users had virtually no
interest in EarthBound at all, they had just become attached to our forum community.  I'm
sure we had quite a few people like this before this summer, but this was just... well, I
can't explain how bad this was.

Worse than that, it seems that a large percentage of the new forum users were probably the
youngest ones we've had yet, and as a result, not all that mature.  This had several
reprecussions.

1. The amount of idiotic threads increased exponentially
2. The amount of useless replies also increased two-gazillion fold
3. Due to the increase in stupidity and the sudden drop in the average IQ of forum users,
   moderators and admins became severely worn out and just stopped caring
4. CPU/memory resources started to get eaten up like we had a black hole forum

Of course, there were also smaller problems that didn't help matters at all, like Mars
hacking with the forums when he shouldn't have been and without permission (naughty,
naughty), and a lot of the hacks Icefusion had installed on our forum goofed up parts of
the forum.  Like the ever-mysterious Forum Mini-Ghost, who would reach out with its icy
hands and corrupt forum index files.

A little while after, godofcows started really attacking #earthbound.  So we tried a
variety of methods to make the chat livable, without having to put up with his constant
insane rantings.  I believe one was where j0hndeere, the channel's special op-bot, and the
world's only flying tractor, would voice people who came in, using it's built in
recognition system or something or other, and the channel would be on +m.

I guess j0hndeere ran out of gas or something, because that idea didn't last long.  There
were a few more attempts to try to keep order in #earthbound, but I think the ops were
starting to feel a little tired with people yelling at them about not doing their work, or
being too strict, trying to run the channel like they normally do, plus this current
situation on top of all that - it had to have been stressful for them.

And it was.  Oh, how it was.  First, Falcon24 finally snapped and resigned his ops, and
then  announced on the forums that he was quitting the EarthBound community for good.
Luckily, a few people, including guruzeth, managed to talk him out of leaving.

Strangely, soon after, I believe it was guruzeth who became so disgusted with the state of
#earthbound that he too gave up on it and gave up his ophood.  And, as a sickening symbol
of what was happening to the community, people flamed him for it, for no reason.

Now I have to make several major sidetracks to discuss many internal things.  Don't worry,
we'll come back to the main plot of this story in due time....


- Three Tiers

First, perhaps many of you remember during the whole Domain Name Scandal (heh, surprisingly
it's acronym is DNS), one of the things Buzz Buzz really got after us about was the fact
that we were a two-tiered system, with the staffers running the site, and the visitors, who
are led around by the site that the staffers create.  Of course that's how our site is,
that's how any site that works is.  But the truth is, we're really a three-tiered system,
the third one being one that was quietly created over time, very slowly.  This top tier is
where the most prominent staffers are.  Back in the day, it was where Team TRUE (Tomato
reidman Ultimoo EBounding) was.  Then it only had Tomato, reidman, and EBounding.  Now it
looks like it's just Tomato and reidman.  The thing I'm trying to say, though, is that
although this third tier exists, I don't think anybody has until now really acknowledged
its existence, outside of Team TRUE talk.  Think of it maybe as a hierarchy within a
hierarchy, a sub-hierarchy if you will.  Within the staff, there is a hierarchy, who is a
newbie staffer, who's a semi-long time staffer, who's a high-profile staffer, etc.

This is of course no rule, it just turned out to be that way, through a natural course of
events.  And now that I think of things in terms of this three tiered system, things begin
to make sense.

Well, as it is, people in this third tier generally do some of the most important work on
the site, yet they tend to not have any official job.  Take me for example.  I'm listed on
the site as "Japanese Correspondent", and although I do that job, don't you wonder why the
"Japanese Correspondent" does the site's HTML and CGI programming?  Or why the supposed
webmaster does non-webmaster-type work for the site?  We're the catch-all guys, and the
guys staffers go to for answers to questions, approval of ideas, and the like.  We also
handle all the politics and money affairs.  Which is unfortunate.  We really are dealing
with a sort of politics, which PSI322 very nicely described in her farewell article.
Sometimes I wish we didn't have to deal with "web site politics", but when you deal with
money, especially with other people's money, you're automatically involved in politics.
As you can see, this is a lot of work, for now two people.

This doesn't mean that the rest of the staff doesn't work, though.  They work.  They work
hard.  Because I make them.  Just like my father, and my father's father, I really work
people to the bone until something is perfect and is complete.  (Side note: Those of you
who've always wanted to be a staffer here, maybe you should think twice now.)

Now, because of reid's and my extremely stressful mega-super-extra work that we always have
to do, we tend not to hang out in #earthbound much.  We both find that we waste too much
time in there if we do, and we don't get much done, and that slows down EVERYTHING.  We
have staffers waiting for us to get our stuff done so they can get their stuff done, so all
the visitors can see the stuff they submitted.

Because we're not around in chat much, we really don't know what's going on a lot of the
time, and can't make good decisions on what to do when problems like this arise.  So it's
generally the ops who run #earthbound, unlike the site, which me and reid handle.  Now,
when the ops start leaving, the remaining ones become even more stressed out,
disenheartened, and disgusted at it all.  And this is a major reason why #earthbound began
to fall apart.


- Lack of EarthBound

It was obvious at all fronts that we were no longer an EarthBound site, but just a group of
people, a community that somehow got together.  We had lost our EarthBound roots, and we in
the staff were really concerned about this.  What could we do though?  It's not like we
could force everybody to play EarthBound.  Nor could we give a free copy of EarthBound to
every visitor to the site.  EarthBound was gone from the site.

Well, there were a few places where you could find EarthBound still shining, faintly.  PK
Hack probably being the main one, the VERY slow EB64 petition being the other.  The problem
ate away at our brains, until one day, it seemed an answer had somehow presented itself,
albeit in a odd way....


- Hello... and goodbye!

If things are getting hard to keep track of, welcome to Starmen.Net.  Or "teN.edisnooM ot
emocleW" as people would soon come to say.

At about this time, we noticed that we were running EXTREMELY low on storage space on
Starmen.Net.  We would have noticed before, but Communitech.Net's goofy storage space
counter had always said we were using 0 MB until recently, so we never really cared too
much about how much space we were using, even though we could easily check by ourselves,
heh.  We thought that if their counter was messed up, they'd never know.

But, as it turned out, we were using 50 MB over of what we should have been.  Of course, me
and reid started running around like chickens with their heads cut off.  But, after we
calmed down a bit, we started discussing stuff with everybody in #smnet.

The utmost important thing was extra storage space.  Now, we could have just upgraded our
current account, which would have given us 200 extra MB.  However, if we got a new account,
we could have gotten 300 extra MB, plus the nice extras that would have come with an extra
account, such as having more CPU and memory usage, which was going to become important for
the future of our message board, plus it was $10 a month cheaper than just upgrading our
current account.

After some discussion, and some honest-to-god talk about dedicated servers, we finally
decided we should get the new account - it had a lot more to offer.

But, the problem is that you can't use Communitech's accounts as just a file archive, you
have to have a domain name for each account, so that of course meant we had to get a domain
name.

Then we started a small discussion about the problem with the game stuff on the site being
drowned out by all the community stuff, like the Picture & Voice section.  I, and others
felt that when totally new people came to the site and found a section on an EarthBound
site that had say, pictures and voices of people that have nothing to do with the game,
even though the site IS about EarthBound, there is something wrong.

We eventually decided that perhaps moving all the community stuff to the new server could
help get people back into the game, if we kept the two sites very close together, like a
network type thing.  I forget what reid called this network, but I joked about him really
becoming an evil emperor who owned websites like they were territories he conquered.

Well, after about an hour of trying to find a good domain name (which was REALLY hard, all
because of that STUPID FREAKING Name-Zero), we found moonside.net wasn't taken.  And reid
instantly perked up at the idea for a design of a site named after the most bizarre place
in EarthBound.

So we worked on Moonside secretly, and had all the community stuff moved over there.  Of
course, this meant the staff jobs would be changing, some people would work at
Moonside.Net, others would work at Starmen.Net still.  reidman gave EBounding the webmaster
job at SM.Net, and he gave diospadre and Matrix the webmaster job at MS.Net.  He did this
so he could sort of just "float" between both sites, working on stuff as he saw fit and
helping people who needed help.  This of course materialized that "third tier" even more.

Of course, it's hard to keep something this big a secret for so long, so eventually some
people found out, but nobody really knew about it until the day reid held the big meeting
in #earthbound.  I wasn't there during MS.Net's inauguration, so I can't say how people
reacted.  But I'm sure some people liked it and and some people hated it.

Obviously, there were some problems.  The main one being the fact that reidman's idea for a
closely knit network never materialized.  And even though it was up for only about a week
and a half, it was obvious people didn't care about SM.Net, BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T CARE ABOUT
THE GAME.

Shortly after the launch, guruzeth decided to quit his job as forum admin and pretty much
leave the EB scene.  Another victim to all this insanity.

And, because of the HUGE amount of forum lamers, and the huge flood of posts that always
happen everytime a new message board is set up, our boards used much more CPU and memory
resources than they should have.  So much, in fact, that Communitech's staff had to call
reid up on the phone and talk to him about it.  (Heh, just more politics, be happy we're
here to handle it all for you.)

Well, Communitech said that the amount of CPU/memory we were using could only be handled on
a dedicated server.  But, seeing as how our only source of income was from the banner ads
that nobody seems to click (hmph.) and a few rare donations, mostly from Giovanni (who's
richer than the Mr. Monopoly man), there was no way we could afford a dedicated server.

So we had to think of something, once more.  What could we do to avoid this again?  We
couldn't give up our forums, that we adamantly agreed on.  But if we put them back on
SM.Net, it would probably just be a repeat of what happened at MS.Net, right?


- Waking up from moonside, we found trouble was still waiting for us

Well, we decided to test the waters.  After all, MS.Net was a new account, and of course
because of that, Communitech was probably watching it closely.  They probably didn't think
that it'd be very viable to let MS.Net continue the way it was for months and months.  But
SM.Net had been around a while, and they MIGHT not notice.  We hoped anyway.

So we decided to put up "temporary forums" on SM.Net, first to see if we could put them up
and not get kicked off again, and also to let people start posting stuff again.  Of course,
we warned people about not posting too much and that we weren't going to reinstate all the
UBB hacks we had installed before, to help lower CPU/mem usage.

It was about this time that EBounding decided to call it quits, or at least when I heard
about it.  I think he quit when MS.Net was still in existence; he decided he didn't have the
skills to be webmaster, so he should just leave.  Although, since MS.Net is gone, he
doesn't have to be webmaster anymore, he could always return whenever he wants.  Heck, I've
done that twice ;)  EBounding, come home!  *Lassie music plays*

Back in IRC, the day EBounding had been waiting for finally came.  The day he wouldn't run
#earthbound anymore.  Well sort of.  It didn't work out exactly the way he wanted.  It
turns out the solution the ops decided on was to create another channel, #moonside.  They
put #earthbound on permanent +m.  If you wanted to chat, you had to go to #earthbound, find
an op in there, and ask them to give you the necessary access so you could go to #moonside.
This was how they figured out to keep the lamers out.  I don't necessarily like the idea,
but oh well.

Back at the site, I had posted about how we were thinking we might need to streamline the
site, and that we might have to delete some things, and I passingly mentioned old/bad fan
art.  It was just something we were thinking about, we hadn't really started talking about
deleting things.  But a few people really got mad.  So mad in fact that everybody's pal,
Buzz Buzz, heard about it.

So one day, he comes up to me in IRC and says he'll pay us $200 for a bunch of our fan art.
I honestly couldn't believe he would sink that low.  I know he can hide behind his "Save
the EarthBound Community's Creations" stance, but I sometimes wonder if it wasn't also a
scheme to get some actual content on his not-very-original site.

Well, of course I refused his offer, and said we'd avoid deleting things at all costs,
which was true.  It wasn't like we were just, "oh these fan art pics suck, i delete now",
which apparently he thought we were.

Well, after that, we discussed a few things, and I convinced him to run his own banner
contest with his own banners, and to take the ones he stole from us down.

In fact, the next 2 or 3 days, reid and I talked with Buzzy in secret about possibly
getting the domain name EarthBound.Net back, but the sacrifices we would have had to make
were far too much.  He tried to bargain too far.  He's just not a good negotiator.

Back at our site, we got the temporary forums down, and the real ones up.  To my horror, we
had over 2000 posts in General Discussion alone, in less than 2 days!  That is insane!  Not
only the fact that at least 1000 of those were entirely pointless, but the fact that nobody
listened or cared about what I said when I explained why Moonside.Net got shut down and
therefore to keep posting on SM.Net down to a minimum for the time being.

Well, we had decided to re-merge SM.Net and MS.Net.  Just like almost everything else in
this universe, putting it back together was harder than breaking it apart.  reid and I had
decided that we can't just remerge them and hope everything works out.  We'd just wind up
where we were before, minus a few staffers, even more disenheartened regular visitors, and
more insanity in the forums and in #earthbound/#moonside than before.

This time, we decided to really go to the root of the whole problem, the fact that the site
and it's visitors have nothing to do with EarthBound anymore.  We decided to redesign the
site, to make it a lot more game oriented.  When I say redesign, I don't mean like how we
did in the past when we upgraded the pics on all the pages, or got a new sidebar, or got
new random quotes, etc.  I mean REALLY redesign the site.  Even so far as redesigning all
the directory structures, making it easier for staffers to quickly and easily create HTML
pages for the site (which is EXTREMELY complex, look at the source if you think I'm
kidding), and writing new CGI programs to automate a lot of stuff.  We started from the
bottom and worked our way back up, which we've never done before, except when I first
showed up at EarthBound.Net almost 21 months ago.

Because of this work, we really didn't update the site, except for news each day about work
that was progressing on the new design.  As a result of lack of updates, people began to
feel the site was really dying.

Now that I think back, this really feels like it did near the end of Ultimoo's time here,
when his co-worker, who was Spiffage I believe, really, really enforced the 5-Article rule,
which said that each article update on the site would only have 5 or more new articles in
it.  But, because of the lower frequency of article updates, people began to write less and
less articles.  Because people wrote less articles, article updates became even less, and it
just kept happening, until article updates just stopped altogether.  The same happened with
fanfic updates.

What we were experiencing was this same exact phenomenon.  People took less interest in
something that wasn't updated (the site) and turned their focus elsewhere (complaining,
being lame, being preachy, etc. on the forums and chat).

The new site design and all the preparations are really going to change this all.  That was
our intent.

Unfortunately, PSI322 left, during work on the design, even though she really never heard
about the changes that were taking place to help bring the site back to something we could
be proud of.

And, guruzeth, turning temporarily insane, and returning to the EB Community, (and
therefore "pulling a Tomato") decided he'd just mock the staff with all of its troubles,
rather than show compassion for them, which any respectable former staffer would have.
Ironically he had become what he used to despise.

People started to feel more and more like this new design was going to be the only thing to
save the site and the EB community, nothing else could pull us back together.

But, redoing EVERYTHING takes time, so people began to feel more and more impatient.

So, one day, I felt like we should do something to get visitors back in touch with the site
and get everybody back in touch with EarthBound, to help keep them busy while they waited
for the new site design.  The idea was the essay contest, with a copy of EB or Mother 2 as
the prize.

People submitted to that contest like mad.  I did not expect as many entries as I got.  I
was soon overwhelmed.  Essays were piling up, I had HTML work to do on the design, people
were yelling me at me about PK Hack, and I was trying to do ordinary stuff too.  (Hey, I 
really do have a life now!)  Because of this, the redesign work slowed down a bit more,
just as the most important parts were coming up.

But, I'm happy with the number of essays I got and what was written in them all, I really
felt like people began to feel EarthBound again.  In fact, reidman, who hadn't played EB in
months, maybe years, played EB recently and got back to his EarthBound roots.


- We can't tell the future, but we can create it

I write this while I'm unable to get internet access, so I have no idea when the new design
will go up, or if any more horrible catastrophes have occurred.  But, supposing they
haven't, I have the following things to say about the future of the site and the community.

First, I'd like to ask a lot of the forum users to just grow up.  Do not post useless
topics, or post useless replies.  Quick examples I can find are like this:

In a thread about the future of the site:
Idiot: "I used to know a kid name Yutz but every buddy made fun of him because of the way
        he walked and they also called him clutz. Man I miss the good old dayz!"

Another topic:
Idiot 1: "I dont know who you are or what you want. Take my wallet"
Idiot 2: "COOL WE POSTED AT HE SAME TIME! ill take your wallet!!!!!!"
Idiot 3: "HHHHMMMMM... NESS HAS A POINT!!! GIMME YOUR WALLETS!! ALL OF YA!!! I DON'T CARE
          WHAT YOU THINK!!!! I'LL NEVER SHUT UP!!!!!"

In a topic about the new site design:
"my topic is big. *sniff* i'm so proud. I GOT THE NEW FIF CD WHEE!"

My god.  Those are EXACTLY the kind of quotes reid and I make up when we joke about lamers,
but now I'm just scared.  The fact that people can actually be so stupid is just so
frightening to me.

I also emplore forum goers to hold back your urge to tell other forum goers that they suck,
or whatever.  If you have a negative attitude, just please leave.  If you don't, you'll
eventually be deleted or banned anyway.  It's your choice.  Example:

Idiot: "I think it sucks. You just took a whole bunch of pre-made pictures and threw them
        together. Any moron can do that."

(I decided I won't even put the stuff that happened in Freaky Magic here.)

Keep in mind, with about 10 mods/admins total, trying to keep 300-400 people in line, and
reading hundreds of posts each day is quite a chore.  It shouldn't have to be.  You all are
the EarthBound community.  We shouldn't have to babysit you.  The mods/admins should just
be there to keep the losers out, but if most of the visitors are losers, we're doomed.

Imagine it.  400 insane people in a locked room, with 10 people trying to control them.
It's impossible.  The only possible way would to use tear gas and weapons, but even then a
few of those 10 would be taken down.  Yeah, it's a violent analogy, but some of these
mods/admins feel like this is what it's become.  You can destroy a few more mods/admins if
you want, but how long will it take before you realize you're destroying the very place you
love so much?  When there's nobody left to administer it and all you see are "I M HORNY"
messages all over?  Or when everybody else has left because the forums just got so bad they
couldn't stand them?  Or when we decide to take the forums down entirely, because it's just
not worth having them anymore?  Ultimately it's each and every forum goer's choice how they
want to act on the forums, but collectively, your decisions will change the future of the
forums.


For the chat stuff, I'd really like to see us just using one channel like we were before.
The current method is just far too complicated and newbies who want to chat with other
people about EB or just meet other people who like EB can't do that now.  Not easily
anyway.

To do this, first, I'd like it if chatters could treat the ops with respect, and follow the
rules.  The ops are there to just keep order, not be machines who kick/ban at the slightest
infraction of the rules.

Of course, if you do happen to get kicked, you better figure out why it was, because if you
mess up again, you're likely to be banned.  And if that happens, you're likely to become one
of those "the ops have too much power" type people, which we do not need.

And, if you're the "the ops don't do anything" type of person, realize that being an op
takes a lot of work, it's not easy.  People do have lives, they don't just go home and say,
"Oh, it's 5 o'clock, time for IRC duty.  Ok, now I'm in #earthbound.  I'll just do nothing
but stare at this channel for the next 10 hours.  Rest assured, citizens of #earthbound, I
shall protect you from all that is evil.  Have faith in me, for I am your protector."

Similar to the forum users, you chat users have destroyed a few of the ops, even turned
some against the channel, with your bickering and fighting and all your talk about "too
much power".  The channel is meant to be a place to just hang out and chat, not to nitpick
about when somebody didn't kick when they should have, nor is it a place to just flood the
channel with "Somebody talk to me!  Somebody talk to me!  Somebody talk to me!"

Of course, it isn't our job to bring the chat situation under control, it's your job.  We
can only do it if you let us.  If you won't chat like mature, sane EarthBound fans, then
there's nothing we can do.  If that's the case, I hope you enjoy ruining the EarthBound
community.  But for those of you who want change, I recommend you first change your
attitude, if necessary, and try to get others to do the same as well, but not forcibly, of
course.


As for the site itself, I have a lot to say.  First, I URGE people to not ask when their
stuff will get put on the site, or when the next update for a certain section will be, etc.
As I've shown, the staffers have a very stressful life, and having ungrateful visitors does
nothing but decrease the staffer's enthusiasm for the site.

Next, although the staffers run the sections, they still do need stuff to update them with.
Yes, I have told most, if not all of them, that they need to be able to make or find their
own update material outside of material submitted to them by visitors, but they can't write
their own articles, write their own fanfics, make their own flukes, get their own
screenshots, etc. forever.  Back in the good days, people would just jump at a chance to do
something for the site, even if it was as small as an article.

Of course, I also agree that nowadays, we do tend to get A LOT of really crappy
submissions.  Mainly in the flukes department, but I'm sure all the staffers agree with me,
and probably a lot of the visitors too.  Make your submissions GOOD!  The quality of your
submissions will make the site better, or make it worse.  This isn't a happy, sappy,
feel-good movie where no matter what you do, everything is good because at least people
tried.  This is reality, and sorry to say, in reality, many things suck.  What I'm trying
to say is, put some time and effort into your work.  Some of the essays I got in the essay
contest were 3 sentences, sometimes the last sentence of these wouldn't even end the essay,
it would just stop mid-sentence.  Do not tell me those were not sucky.  Or, how about the
fan art people make using MS Paint and the line tool.  Or flukes where people just pretty
much cut and paste random Pokemon images onto EarthBound images and say, "I made a fluke!
I am so smrt!" and then submit it.  The stuff on this site shows to new visitors what our
regular visitors are like, and also the kind of game EarthBound is.  That is why I think
articles, such as those that claim that the author can create balls of PSI in their hand
when they concentrate hard, should decrease, while serious articles, which discuss things
like what will happen to the EB scene when Mother 3/EB64 is released, should increase.

I also urge that visitors not just visit the main page, then head for the forums.  You
should check out the other sections often too.  In fact, I've designed our new site design
to force people to do just that.  When an update is made to a section, you'll have to go to
that specific section to see what was updated.  No more linking to all updated files from
the front page.  The point of this is to explore the site, especially the game related
sections, and get back into the EarthBound spirit.

It would also be nice if you could also just get out your copy of EarthBound and play it.
Why are you such a big fan of an EarthBound site if you're not a fan of EarthBound?  It
doesn't make sense to me.

Unfortunately, the EarthBound Funktastic Game Play Summer 2000 sorta fell apart during the
whole SM.Net/MS.Net moving (and EBounding's departure), but the main reason I invented the
idea for Funktastic Game Play events a year ago was to get people back into the game.

"Get back in the game."  That's Starmen.Net's new motto.  Even though I liked "Make
EarthBound Up Yours" better, this one is really good too ;)  Anyway, we hope this is a
motto that people follow.  As I've shown above, the main problem we had was that nobody at
the site cared about EB anymore.  We want to fix that, but we can only encourage people to
play it, we're not EB Terrorists who will tie you down to a chair and force you to play it.
You gotta go play it yourself.


Of course, I've been ragging on the visitors of the site all this time.  This does not mean,
however, that they're entirely to blame.  The ops/mods/admins/staffers here are not gods,
they make mistakes too.  That is why I have to yell at them now.

Ops: First, thank you for your hard work and all that you've had to go through so far.  The
channel needs a strong leadership, and as I showed, it's not really reid and I who you can
provide that for you; you have to do it yourselves.  I ask that you really start having fun
in the channel again, and not go there just to kick people.  And don't pretend to not see
something in the channel, I know a lot of you are sometimes just too lazy/apathetic to do
stuff sometimes.  I know, cuz I was sometimes too :)

Mods/Admins: I don't know what to say really, the boards are a huge mess right now, and we
got some serious work to do to get them livable again.  This of course means overtime work,
which is never fun.  Which is why I say this: If you feel you being an admin/mod is not fun
anymore, and you just feel it is a job, then please tell us, because that is exactly the
type of mod/admin we don't want around.

Keep a sharp lookout for pointless threads, pointless replies, and excessive lameness.
Since we got our new forums up, you mods/admins really haven't been cracking down on people
unless I tell you to, and even then when I would tell you to, some of you would whine and
complain, "But I already checked my board twice today, have somebody else do it."

Staffers: If you don't like the job you're doing, tell us.  You shouldn't be running a
section that you don't enjoy running.  We can try to find a better position for you if
you'd like, but we don't want you running the section just because it's a job.  You need to
have enthusiasm for the site.

Some of you staffers sometimes forget you're a staffer, and that being a staffer means you
gotta do work.  Do not forget this, as we've all seen how the site will turn out when you
all start to slack off.


Alright, this article is already the longest one we've had, by far.  Most people here are
probably just skimming this thing, although THEY SHOULDN'T!  Go back and READ it all!  I
didn't type up all this just so you can skim read it.

Anyway, I've explained (in more or less correct time sequence) the events that occurred
that caused us to wind up in the huge "EarthBound Depression".  I've also discussed how I'd
like changes from everybody in order to get out of that.

It's our problem, we are the ones who have to fix it.