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Would Team Kodi like to tell me why the hell they are removing my access to the Kodi wiki, which also removes my ability to grant new accounts, block spammers, and make backups (the only backups that exist, by the way, are the ones I manually make)? Do you even understand what it takes to keep that thing going?

No one talks to me about this, no one even attempts to discuss it with me. Why? Because certain people don't like me on a personal level. The only person who let me know what was going on convinced me it wasn't worth fighting over (now that rob has left), and I gave in to ronie's demand that his repo page be blanked. After that happens, you cowards go behind my back and remove my access, and I only find out about it because I am no longer able to grant a new user his account.

On top of that, you've got wsnipex‎ removing access to people like Gamester17, who is still active and still a team member.

How is any of this acceptable? On what planet does this count as reasonable behavior?
You were entrusted with admin rights on the wiki by Team Kodi, even after you left the team.
You broke this trust by repeatedly abusing those powers, adding non team members as admin and even removing rights from several team members.

Even after I removed your admin rights you decided to fight this by going in via ssh, reverting my changes and removing my admin rights.
Such behavior will not be tolerated, specially since one reason for you leaving the team was repeated abuse of power.

edit: As a consequence of this, admin rights on the wiki were stripped from almost all team members as well.
Given up the fight Ned?
Admin access on the wiki is not, and has never been, reserved for only Team Kodi members. Community members have, from time to time, been made administrators. This is no different than making someone a mod on the forum. It's actually written in my years-old documentation for team kodi about what to do if I ever leave the project. Thanks for not reading the manual.

I removed ronie's access because he was blanking pages without cause. The entire community was waiting, begging, for a rule to be cited that was broken in that case. This isn't even the first time I've had to do this to keep drama out of the wiki.

I am more than happy to follow any rule that actually has the backing of Team Kodi, even when I disagree with that rule. Not one lone member who had a bone to pick with robwebset. That's all we saw. Multiple people practically begged for an explanation and clarification of the rules, and we got silence.

And if you want to say that I "abused power" by adding "Trump" as an option for fernet's poll about dropping all Android support, I guess you've got me. Personally, I would have called it sophomoric, immature, or one of many other things, but I guess it makes you sound more justified to make up some bullshit about me abusing power.

You guys can keep the Kodi.wiki domain name. What made the Kodi wiki a good resource was that people updated it with good information. Now you've lost that. It will just return to the outdated, spam filled, broken mess that it once was. I hope you feel good about that.
And yet with al l your experience you couldn't figure out that doing that would not be tolerated by the team. It wasn't a single thing. You repeated the action several times after the first demotion was undone. The wiki logs this quite nicely.

What a complete nonsense that community members were made admin in the past. That is not why you made robwebset admin at that point in time.
I gave him access because I trusted him to only edit his repo page, which was made into a protected page. This is no different than what I've done in the past. There was never an issue of trust or a danger to "team only" pages. You can't pull rules out of your ass when I was the one who set those rules five years ago.

I do need to correct you, I did know that this would possibly result in my access being removed. I just wanted to believe that you guys were better than that, that you would do what was good for the wiki and not what made Martijn and ronie mad. That was the only thing I was foolish about, but it was a risk I was willing to take. The wiki is absurdly outdated, and none of you ever cared about the condition it was in. I had long since planned on moving things away from an officially ran Kodi wiki. I even talked about that idea with you, last year, in person. I guess I need to start looking into that more seriously now.

So yeah, it stings to have that access removed. It feels like a slap in the face. However, it is not something I will be upset about for long. It doesn't matter if it happened as a deliberate action or as a crashed database or anything. Kodi.wiki had been dead for a long time, and you've simply places the last nail on the coffin.

What hurts more is that you actually think this is an abuse of power, or that it is "nonsense" that I would make someone a wiki admin so that they can edit protected pages. 90% of which are protected only to prevent accidental editing, and not because they need some special "rights". For example, nearly every template is protected, because new users sometimes mistake their pages for content pages. But you, Kib, think I'm just making something up. That is what hurts.

EDIT: to clarify, the wiki software is what is outdated. The wiki content itself is in fair shape.
I can explain this one, even though it all happened while I was asleep. It's because a lot of the team was genuinely afraid of what you'd do, Ned. You have a history of flying off the handle and even hijacking official Kodi instruments to trash on team members when you are angry. This appeared to be confirmed when you removing team member mod powers without telling anyone of us, and then replacing team members with the very people they were attempting to moderate, again without talking to any of us.

It sounds like you had a legitimate reason in your head for doing so, but given your history and especially given that you weren't talking to us directly and only making incredibly public, angry-sounding posts casting us as the next coming of satan, surely you could see how people would be getting nervous?

Even the above saying the team can have Kodi.wiki makes it sound like you considered it more yours than the team's.

I have to admit I'm a little bit of a hypocrite in all of this. When you aren't ragingly angry, I'm your biggest fan. I think you've done amazing things with the wiki, and I think you're one of the most personable people on the team, which is why I asked you to do kordkutters with me. But when you are angry, I genuinely have no idea what you'll do next. The angry you, which I don't really consider the real you, is the reason I never made you a Facebook mod after the little incident a few years back. And as long as I'm afraid that the not-real you could be a problem for our Facebook account, I think it's hypocritical of me to lobby for you to still be a mod of any other social accounts.
Fair enough. That logo incident will haunt me till the end of my days. It does kind of ignore how I've never used the Kodi wiki as a threat/bargaining chip/outlet for rants/drama/etc, but like I said before, most people on Team Kodi don't know what goes on there, and they don't care. They can only judge me based on past events, so yeah, I can see how they would be nervous.

As far as not talking to you guys directly, all direct connections to Team Kodi have been cut off. Some people on Team Kodi even have me set on "ignore" on the forum. You yourself haven't replied to the last few messages I've sent you. The only person to reach out to me and tell me what was going on was Koying. He's the one to tell me that martijn was actually upset about it, and not just mildly annoyed like the last time this happened (over a page listing Kodi mirrors when the mirror redirector went down for a week, boring story, but the same thing happened there). With all the little passive-agressive comments that go on here, it's really hard to tell what is an actual concern and not someone just being mean for the sake of it.

Still, I only have myself to blame for the impression that you and others have of me. I honestly feel bad that I have given you, specifically you, Nate, the impression that I'm some wild and out-of-control rage monster. I'm not that way, but it seems I haven't done anything to prove it.



Quote:Even the above saying the team can have Kodi.wiki makes it sound like you considered it more yours than the team's.
I do want to reply to this directly. I was the primary administrator, the one in charge of the Kodi wiki for over five years. I did expect some respect for my decisions regarding the wiki, although I will always honor the rules set by Team Kodi. It wasn't mine, though, and I never felt that it was.

I actually included this in the manual I left you guys for how to run the wiki, written back in 2014:
Quote:Who runs the wiki? Who's in charge?

A long time ago, from best I can tell, the original "XBMC Manual" started out as a PDF document that was copied to the wiki. This was done with the intention of keeping things up to date, and it probably worked for a while, but the wiki quickly outgrew the original document structure it was based on. This lead to many pages being outdated or even redundantly written, among other issues. The mediawiki software was also outdated for a while and a massive spam issue forced the Team to block public account creation. There weren't any instructions for how to go about doing this, so very few accounts were ever made and things got even more outdated.

In 2011, I (Ned Scott) was invited to join the team since I answered a lot of questions on the forum and expressed interest in helping out with the wiki. Previously, I was heavily involved in Wikipedia for a few years and was very familiar with the software. I figured I would just be helping out, but little did I know that no one really knew what was up with the wiki, and no one else was really interested in working on it. I was basically given the keys and told "have fun" :D

Since then the spam and user creation issue has greatly improved, and the community is a lot more involved now. Other members of Team Kodi are now fairly active in maintaining the wiki and help out with various ideas. We've restructured most of the content to be easier to browse, updated many technical portions of the wiki to help users contribute with ease, and other improvements. There are still areas that need a lot of love and attention, but we're in far better shape than we were during those "dark wiki years".

Team XBMC/Kodi has never really had a formal leadership structure, and typically "who's in charge" is whoever is available to work on that area. I've been making most of the major organizational decisions on the wiki, but I don't consider myself to have any more or less authority than any other member of Team Kodi. I can be very opinionated, even argumentative at times, but that's just my personality and not me trying to assert authority over anyone else.

The whole point of this section on this page is to basically encourage other admins/Team Kodi members to be as active as they want. Even with the community being more active, this isn't a one man job for organization and administrative tasks. More importantly, no part of the Kodi project should depend on just one or two people, incase those people ever have to take time away from the project or move on to other things. Most of the decisions about wiki organization and administrative are not controversial, and the discussions about them (even the "heated" debates about issues) are often fun and full of creative ideas. Don't be afraid. By reading this page you've basically become one of us now. There's no turning back. Give into the darkness... err wait, what was I talking about?

So yeah, if you're not sure about something, feel free to ask me (again, I'm Ned Scott). Don't shy away if you have new ideas or even criticism for the way things currently work. The wiki manual exists to serve the project, not egos. The very nature of a mediawiki means it thrives on multiple contributions, ideas, and collaboration. Heck, even if you're not an admin but you bothered to read this page (for some reason), then I'm probably very interested in any feedback you might have.

But no one ever stepped up like that. Instead, all I got was ronie giving me an ultimatum about an unknown rule, that he refused to explain.


That's all besides the point, though. My comment wasn't really referring to all of that. I mention the above to clarify my own philosophy on who "owns" the wiki (at least in terms of daily administration. In the literal sense, the XBMC/Kodi Foundation owns the domain and makes the final decisions, etc).
Yeah, I'm not sure what to say. This is a sucky situation for all kinds of reasons, but the reduced trust is a real killer. I think kib is especially upset, because he was another big fan and he's feeling crapped on now.

I think there is a path forward, but it is entirely about building trust again. The team is a lot like family. There's an expectation that we'll all have each other's backs. And when we publicly denounce each other, even if the words of that denouncement are legitimate, we're destroying that trust.

Four or five years ago, during the big debates about how to deal with piracy in the forums tempers flared hugely, and some people even quit in anger, but nobody ever publicly denounced another team member for having differing opinions. And that's doubly true before any one opinion was set into action.

I know, as a retired team member, you are not obligated to stand by that code, but if you want the trust of the team to do things like admin, you have to do things that warrant that trust, and that includes stopping all the public denouncing of people you disagree with. If you find that morally reprehensible, and feel the community should always be aware of when you disagree with a team member or think a team member did something wrong or is acting like a bully in your opinion, that's your right. But you can't have it both ways. You can't expect the team to trust you while simultaneously feeling free to throw various team members under the bus, regardless of whether they are or are not at fault.
Yeah, I knew that back when I left the team. You call it trust and being a family, but that's the biggest issue of all. This isn't a family, but people try to treat it that way, and that causes emotion to influence policy. When someone isn't liked, they are attacked, and allowed to get away with it.

You call it different opinions, but that's not why I say things. There are things I feel much more strongly about and have never commented about, because those really are just opinions. If it gets to the point where I feel the need to say something publicly, it's because I think the community (the real one, the core community, not the mindless pirate box users) has a right to know. Their donations go towards things like the wiki, to the team, their support in helping other users, giving bug reports, and all of that, means that they have a right to decide certain things for themselves. Especially when people become someone else's punching bag.

When someone is running off people like robwebset (not the first one in that situation, mind you), then people should know about that so they can reevaluate if they want to support that kind of project. I believe the vast majority of the Kodi project, and the majority of Team Kodi, to be good people. That doesn't mean we just gloss over the bad stuff, especially when Team Kodi refuses to deal with the situation (I can't really blame them, they do this for fun, but the result is still bad for everyone). I wish there was a way to call out the bad actors (and only for their bad actions, because over all they are also great people) without grouping everyone together like that. I've tried, and it seems I've failed.

Was trust really the reason my wiki access was removed? Or was it because the "family" was angry that I insulted their brothers? I get that, it goes hand in hand. It's their site and their rules. They can make a "no Ned's allowed" rule if they wanted to. To me, that seems like a poisonous situation that isn't healthy. I should be glad that I can finally make a clean break from "official" kodi websites. It wasn't good for anyone.
(2016-10-04, 01:26)Ned Scott Wrote: [ -> ]Was trust really the reason my wiki access was removed? Or was it because the "family" was angry that I insulted their brothers?

It was 100% trust, though those two things are related. Part of trust is that you aren't going to publicly take down a team member. If you had privately insulted ronie or anyone else else, I'm sure it would have pissed some people off, but it likely wouldn't have resulted in admin rights lost. Oops, seeing a switch to instant message so I'll leave off here.
(2016-10-03, 13:35)wsnipex Wrote: [ -> ]edit: As a consequence of this, admin rights on the wiki were stripped from almost all team members as well.

All but five people, it seems. That's really damn stupid. Wiki admin is not like a forum mod. You can't think of it the same way, and limiting wiki admin access is pants-on-head retarded. Trusted editors need admin access because that is the only way to edit the hundreds of protected pages (mostly technical templates) and approve new accounts. Those five sure as heck aren't going to bother with that.

Again, you should give Gamester17 his acress back. He's been a wiki admin and user longer than I have, and might have written more content there than anyone else. Not to mention being a team member longer than probably anyone else who's even semi-active.
(2016-10-05, 17:58)Ned Scott Wrote: [ -> ]Again, you should give Gamester17 his acress back. He's been a wiki admin and user longer than I have, and might have written more content there than anyone else. Not to mention being a team member longer than probably anyone else who's even semi-active.

+1
(2016-10-05, 17:58)Ned Scott Wrote: [ -> ]All but five people, it seems. That's really damn stupid. Wiki admin is not like a forum mod. You can't think of it the same way, and limiting wiki admin access is pants-on-head retarded. Trusted editors need admin access because that is the only way to edit the hundreds of protected pages (mostly technical templates) and approve new accounts. Those five sure as heck aren't going to bother with that.

please allow me to remind you to keep our forum rules in mind when posting on our forum, especially section 2.1:
http://kodi.wiki/index.php?title=Forum_r...al_conduct

i'm sure a bit of respect towards the efforts of team kodi members will be appreciated by all of us :-)
You want to talk about a lack of respect in this situation? Or maybe abuse of power? Huh.
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