History of Charas

From Charas Project

Revision as of 20:36, 18 January 2007

(this is a history of the forum, pieced together as best as possible from my own rambling memory and available posts that haven’t been deleted or something. Site history will be on a separate page and likely about 100 times harder to research…)

SaiKar wrote the core of this article. Have pity on his strained memory and add/clarify anything you can think of! Especially in the early days. Check the lingering questions part for specific holes I'm aware of.

The Beginning

The forum was established on January 19th, 2003 with this likely as its first post . Alex was (and remains) the webmaster and owner. De KoFfie , also known as Steven Rombauts, and Ralph Rombauts apparently coded the forum script itself. What SMB’s role in everything isn’t entirely clear, but it seems he was a sort of global Moderator and a keeper of the peace.

Apparently the forums were established as support for the Charas Generators and character set creation in general. Most of the original posts are questions about how to use and submit the generators and announcements on new generator features, though even early on there were off topic posts in the All of All.

For roughly a year, Charas stuck to the focus of the generators and RPG Programming. Three resource contests were held to gather resources. Non-RPGMaker talk was light. Moderator positions were relatively unimportant. There was essentially no drama between anyone that can be seen today. Alex frequented the boards most every day, and the generators were upgraded often.

It is an interesting piece of trivia that all languages were welcome on Charas at the beginning, but almost immediately English became the only accepted language. Alex himself conducted all business in English despite being Italian himself, and did this “Because this is an INTERNATIONAL forum!!!!”

RRWP and the First New Mods

Enter into paradise in January 2004 RRWP, a somewhat tragic historical figure. To understand RRWP you need to understand Charas at this point in time. The atmosphere was one of almost construction and optimism. Literally not a disparaging word could be seen anywhere on the forum. Every change of any kind was greeted with cheering and enthusiasm. And Charas maintained this for an entire year. I know this sounds surreal, but it’s true. Read 2003 posts if you don’t believe it.

RRWP was a talented spriter and game maker that had come to Charas for basically the same reason everyone else did at this point; to share resources. The difference was that RRWP was a critic. If he thought something was poorly done, he said so, but in a very constructive criticism-type way. Likewise, if he thought something was good, he said so. He wasn’t even mean about it or anything. But the very fact that he dared speak his mind in a negative way threw Charas into turmoil.

The forum at large was revolted by RRWP’s criticisms, of which he gave out often. He was basically branded as a troll and became very disliked quickly. Midnight had a small fight with him, the details of which that are lost. Gary, a well respected moderator that had been at the forum from near the beginning, got into a larger fight with him, the details of which are also lost. Most everyone didn’t like RRWP except for one spriter named SaiKar who sympathized with him. Yet the forum wasn’t entirely on Gary’s side either, for he was being rather dirty in the fight.

The culmination of all this happened when Alex created a “Gary vs. RRWP” thread and them promptly went on vacation. In the thread Alex encouraged people to “vote” on who was better, RRWP or Gary, in sort of a tongue-and-cheek manner. Long story short, all hell broke lose. Both RRWP and Gary got real dirty and lots of other people didn’t help much. Sai tried to defend his friend RRWP and end the fighting so Alex wouldn’t come back to a mess of a forum. It didn’t help much, but this made Alex notice Sai as a community figure.

In the aftermath, RRWP left the forums, saying (rightly so) that the immaturity was appaling. Gary got demoted from being a moderator. And Alex appointed several new mods to better watch over the forum. The new moderators were announced on Febuary 29th, 2004. Leap day! I’m sure that’s symbolic somehow. The appointment thread was deleted at some point, but as follows are Alex’s appointmens from the Private forum.

Saikar - All of All and requests

• Because he demonstrates good feeling with many users, really active on the forum and wise in calming down "riots" when needed.

Kairou - Magazine team

• It's his Team, and he is an old user of Charas (he knows how the forum works)

Reain_ - Beta Testers Team

• It's his Team, he's an active member, often good also in difficult discussions.

Smo or Midnight - Net Hunters Team

• Again, it's their team, but better to have just one mod per Team.
• I think they've to talk between themselves to say me who will become Mod here. (note from editor – Smokey won this position)

GaryCXJk - Movie Team

• It's his Team, he never left it. Plus he's the only one who really takes care of it, i think it should be better if he can manage it.

FFL2and3rocks - Resources and Gallery

• Old user, incredible "recolorer" and huge BMP hunter.
• I think he can helps a lot with new users and their first "graphics experiences" on these boards.

Rowan - Tutorials

• Active memeber, plus the tutorial section was an idea of him.
• Mainly here he can check the goodness of posted things and add eventual addons.

Things generally calmed down, though RRWP’s legacy became permanent. Gone were the days of absolute optimism and a total focus on the generators, and replacing them was the rise of All of All and off-topic discussion as the main focus of Charas’s forums. Some were bitter to see the old days go, but on the upside the non-RPGMaker focus drew a lot of oddball people that would have probably found the forum too boring to hang around otherwise.

Chaos and the Tightening Fist

Broken out of the “all RPGMaker all the time” mold, the spring and summer of 2004 brought Charas considerable growth, but not all of it entirely good. Spam and personal attacks began to become a major problem and it didn’t take very long for the off-topic aspect of Charas to reach a boiling point. By mid summer most everyone’s nerves began to fry. Even with three All of All moderators (Kijuki, Darkfox, and SaiKar) the influx of bad feelings became overwhelming. Even Forum Gaming was full of more spam than usual.

Several moderators such as Kairou and Smokey lost their modship for stupid reasons. The whole Pop incident, the details of which still confuse me, happened around this time. Naysayers declared the end of Charas, as naysayers are wont to do. To quote Sai in the private forum, “It seems like half the topics are spam and the other half are people complaining spam.” Also, a lot of people created joke accounts to confuse and spam with impunity.

Tired of watching Charas slip away down a dark road, Alex made a few adjustments. One of the first was in April and countered smiley overuse by limiting posts to a total of 8 smileys maximum. On July 3rd, 2004 he promoted Darkfox and Kijuki to Global Mods; moderators of all forums, so that they could better watch over the forum as a whole and fight increasing spam. To replace them at All of All Alex held elections for moderators that Reain and Trevlac won. A few people, mainly Apex, annoyed the hell out of Trevlac by posting a lot of spam, but it was later revealed to be a test authorized by Alex.

Things didn’t really calm down; it was more like there were enough people watching to lock or delete the spam before too much piled up. Also, Darkfox began doing very odd things with his new powers. He deleted apparently random posts in odd places and edited other posts to make the original poster look stupid. There was a big controversy surrounding deletion of Seth Aechi’s posts, though it’s rather disturbing and best not to go into. Darkfox also started a lot of arguments on the forums he was supposed to be modding. Tired of cleaning up after his messes in All of All, SaiKar retired from that forum on July 23rd, preferring to focus more on Requests and real-life concerns. On the other hand, Trevlac changed his forum profile to female and started hitting on people (including Alex) and also created two fake accounts himself. Needless to say the two didn’t get along very well, and Trevlac and Darkfox fought often in the shadows of the Private forum.

Wahba (who later admitted to being Osmose) spammed the absolute crap out of some forums on August 25th and the “one post per minute” rule was implemented to prevent further such actions. Kairou continued to make vague threats about killing people and got banned September 6th. These were the signs of the times.

And in one was probably record bad timing, Alex announced in mid September 2004 that he wasn’t going to be on the forum much due to his impending marriage. In reality, this was the last time he would be on the forum much at all other than to check in with people. But before taking off to start his new life with his wife, on September 28th he appointed Request mod SaiKar as an Administrator of the forums, a move that would alter how the forums were run forever.

Life After Alex

It’s not like Alex is dead or anything. In fact he will pop up quite often in the next two years of history, even including the more recent stuff. Today if we really needed to we could probably get him to show up in a day or so. However the promotion of SaiKar as an administrator was effectively the end of Alex’s frequent visits to the forum.

The key here is that none of the staff knew or expected this at all. Alex had mostly been around for the past two years and the staff assumed he’d be back soon. They assumed very wrong. SaiKar received a very fancy title on September 28th but no immediate actual power to back it up. Only after it became more increasingly obvious that Alex was taking more than a honeymoon off did Sai begin to take on some roles that had previously been held by Alex, and these often came with bloody battles between the staff in the Private forum.

Darkfox immediately objected to Sai’s promotion from mere moderator straight to administrator, skipping over the global mod level that he and Kijuki held and bypassing SMB, the “uncle of the forum” and long standing member. This lead to a rather long Darkfox vs. SaiKar feud which, since they both had high positions on the staff, highly crippled the staff’s ability to get along. Ghostclown, a newer moderator, also expressed reluctance to the choice. SMB wanted to protest himself being skipped but eventually realized that his lack of mastery over English would have gotten in the way and consented. Kijuki largely supported the appointment. Most of the other mods didn’t care one way or the other. Even so, the only thing that kept the staff together was largely Alex’s faith in his decision and Sai’s ability, but even so, staff tensions would only grow for the next year and a half without Alex’s presence.

What also didn’t help the situation was that Sai’s appointment didn’t mystically solve a lot of the bad feeling that were going on at the time. The staff was still very concerned about the falling away from days of RPGs and general respect. Carmen, at the time the moderator of the magazine team, asked Alex to make her a global mod because, according to her, SaiKar was doing an awful job (and in fact said such to Sai in the private forum), but Alex refused. A staff already saturated with feuds gained another.

Finally, after some time of bickering, the staff as a whole largely agreed on two points. One, Sai needed the ability to hire, fire, and promote mods while Alex was gone. And two, at Carmen’s suggestion, the mods needed to take a more hardliner approach. Simply asking people to shape up wasn’t working. Shows of force through editing, locking, and deleting posts and topics were necessary. Alex approved all these changes assuming the staff agreed as a whole in the future.

Carmen’s hardliner approach would be a major problem later, but not until 2006. In the fall of 2004 this policy was actually quite necessary to beat some sense into what was becoming an unreadable forum. The staff agreeing on everything would also be a major problem later, but for the time an uneasy truce existed. But enough about the bickering staff for now.

The event that largely ended the unorganized spam and general doom and gloom was, without a doubt, the second All of All moderator elections in mid October 2004.

At this point Reain and Trevlac, the previous All of All mods, were both inactive and blaming them for the problems in All of All was the latest trend among staff and general population alike. Reain seemed to realize this and gracefully retired. Trevlac, though not being allowed on the computer, stubbornly refused to quit and promised activity eventually, but Sai fired him anyway and opened up the second spot.

Most of the election threads have been deleted, but it’s clear this was a MAJOR event that was essentially the center of Charas’s talk for weeks. Public elections! For the most popular mod position! Wealth and power, hell yeah! There were propaganda images drawn up supporting various people and slamming others. Good times were had by all.

The actual election process was almost comically drawn out however. First a nominee needed to announce they wanted the job and get at least one person to support them. This removed at least half the candidates that couldn’t get a supporter. Next the six finalists needed to answer a few questions about their future policies and how to fix the All of All’s current situation. And then there was the final showdown to see who would get the job.

By the finals it became clear that it was a race between Red Giant and Carmen. MrMister had some third party support but threw it behind Carmen and dropped out. The final tally was taken in a Charas poll which, we know now, let people vote more than once and even vote if not signed in. So the results were bunk and the vote redone by people manually posting their votes. Members were actively keeping up with who was winning throughout the whole thread, and a few people were disqualified because they registered in between or didn’t follow obscure rules or something. In the end Red Giant won by a very small margin.

But! But! There is that second spot open from firing Trevlac! Originally the (unofficial) plan was for the winner to pick the second mod, but because of the closeness of the vote Sai awarded it to Carmen. So both popular candidates won and everyone was happy. Yay!

The elections essentially ended most of the major problems with Charas by themselves. The entire staff, Alex included, worked together on the event and most everyone enjoyed the fun. There were a few unimportant problems but they were mostly droned out by a renewed wave of optimism. At least until December 1st, the day Lord Raffles joined.

The Dark Ages

History is written by the victors, or at least the people with the most time. And the person with the most time right now is SaiKar. So while a goodly number of nice people joined and great number of awesome things happened between December 1st 2004 and August 1st 2005, Sai didn’t enjoy this period entirely too much, which is why it is being labeled as the dark ages.

The dates for this age and the main reason for its name unquestionably involve Lord Raffles. December 1st is when he registered. August 1st is when he was banned by Alex. For a whole eight months he was on the forums.

Lord Raffles, we now know, was a malicious troll having a good time laughing with other trolls on a faraway forum about how much trouble he was causing Charas. He, like most trolls, is also an ego whore and will delight from having a large section of history about him. But unfortunately it can’t be helped; to skip over this is to ignore extremely vital parts of Charas’s development.

That said, every single post by Lord Raffles has been deleted. Every one, down to the last. Probably by Raffles himself. So it falls to looking at the wake of destruction to piece things together.

Nobody knew that Raffles was intentionally trying to destroy Charas back then. Oh sure, a lot of people had their guesses, mainly Osmose, but we had no proof of anything. All people knew is that Raffles was posing a lot of interesting and disturbing questions and that a goodly number of members were getting rilled up about it. Raffles’s main arguments were why moderators were punishing threads that were out of line instead of the specific people that were causing trouble. To be fair, that held a ring of truth. Some of the rest of his stuff was more nonsensical, such as the moderators getting great delight out of lording over common members and the plight of the average guy just trying to post online. Almost everything he said was a carefully calculated attempt to divide and fragment the forum.

It was disturbingly effective. Though almost everyone universally disliked him, the bigger question of what to do with him was a major raging issue. Should we ban him? On what grounds; he hasn’t broken any specific rules. Should the mods try to talk with him? They did, nothing meaningful was accomplished? What does Raffles want? Why is he asking so many questions? Doesn’t he have a point with some them? These issues and others built a great deal of tension.

The lesser problem, but still a crippling one, was the staff’s continued inability to get along. Well, that’s not entirely true. Everyone was getting along except for SaiKar, whom became the next scapegoat. Sai was assuming more of Alex’s roles in managing the forum but there was growing resentment and discontent in his ability to manage as an admin. Sai began to resent the hardliner approach of locking a lot of threads and tried to come down on Carmen and the other mods, but they all universally opposed lightening up on moderation, even SMN and Kijuki that had previously supported Sai. Everyone feared a return to the previous summer so much that they were willing to go to any lengths to keep the forum under control. Bizarrely, as some sort of disturbance in the force, the only one remotely on Sai’s side was Red Giant, who questioned fellow All of All mod Carmen’s policies of deletion often until giving up and going inactive.

A deep rift between the mods and members opened. The mods became the enemies, sort of cops to avoid, instead of people to trust. A few protests among the public about the hardliner approach sprung up, but, as said previously, this wouldn’t become a major issue until 2006. The hardliners won out and continued to lock and delete stuff, and Sai essentially left the forum to play FFXI mostly, popping in every so often for the next year to try to sort out policy and meeting the same hostile reactions. A lot of people sent messages to Sai to try to set things right and send the heavy-handed moderation, and try he did several times over the period, but to no avail. Essentially Sai was stuck between a frustrated population and a staff that resented an outsider meddling with their policies. It sucked pretty hard.

If you’re clever at reading, you see the strange irony here. Though Sai was an admin attempting to save the forum and Lord Raffles was an evil troll trying to destroy it, they were essentially on the same “side” against the hardliner mods. Yeah, that’s why I didn’t ban him quickly. Sorry about that, I was getting desperate. Though in retrospect it did help get a lot of people to see how whack the staff was getting.

With Sai fallen entirely off the planet, the staff had to combat Raffles by themselves. The fact that a few key members such as Carmen and SMB didn’t see him as a threat in the slightest didn’t help them reach a decision. Kijuki lead the camp favoring letting Raffles get things out of his system and locking threads if they became too close to being flames. Alex showed up to add the Almost Banned feature in early March, which didn’t really help either. Long story short, the staff spent their fighting energies fighting themselves instead of Raffles and ever-increasing spam. Except when Sai showed up, of course; they’d unite against him. And the months ticked by.

More to the point, the staff saw Sai’s absence as a good time to get him kicked out of his admin position. They nominated Kijuki as a replacement but for reasons not entirely clear he never actually got the job. Again and again the issue came up until, on May 6th, Sai gave in the Private forum one of the most self-satisfying things he ever said (the “you” refers to Darkfox):

I'd resign in disgust and let you try to moderate (HAHAHA!) the forums, but I'm not going to for three reasons. One, I don't want to give you the satisfaction of finally getting rid of me. Two, I actually don't think anyone, with the exception of Kijuki, could do the job and I'm not willing to let you get the job and grind the forum into the ground. I like Charas more then that. And three, because I have hopes that eventually I can get rid of the people that are dragging this place down and focus more on the real problems of this community outside this little private forum. - SaiKar

The fourth reason being that he knew how much of the general population supported him against the mods if he could only figure out a way to remove some of them without so many accusations of power abuse that Alex would demote him. And so Sai kept his job against a tide of opposition but was forced to wait a bit longer.

All this staff drama must be boring. Facts are, during this time, the staff didn’t organize any contests nor appoint any new mods. All their efforts were focused on locking and deleting threads. Many members left Charas claiming the fun was gone, and though a few joyously would return, a good number did not. The naysayers claiming the end of Charas started up again (and got their stuff deleted, naturally) but it actually seemed they were right this time. Darkfox tried to combat Raffles as best as he could and, the longer he did, the more personal it became until his mental health was in danger. All this because of one stupid troll and a few stubborn mods.

Eventually the gnashing of teeth reached Alex, and he proved himself awesome again by talking to Raffles, researching him, deciding he was an evil jerk, and banning him on August 1st. Though many were still fearful because the day before, July 31st, word came out that Darkfox allegedly had tried to kill himself. For real. But thankfully he didn’t and came back smiling and everyone was happy.

Except about that whole topics getting locked thing.

Lingering Questions (and other sections)

• Does anyone really remember Pop and Kairou and the whole conspiracy there? I think I missed that entirely.
• Why do I need some cheese?
• Didn't Asakura Hao have something going on? Something to do with Kairou, and he and Charaman agreeing with Raffles, setting the whole forum off at them or something?

Sources

In pseudo-chronological order

• Alex's first post - http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2
• Gary’s “A history of Charas” - http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15958&forumid=12&catid=6
• My own LiveJournal, an oddly good source for events and dates back then - http://saikar.livejournal.com/tag/charas
• Several other CharasWiki pages - RRWP, Pop, and Trevlac
• Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you can’t read.