Charas Project - User contributions [en]

History of Charas

SaiKar — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:50:46 GMT

SaiKar:

{{Memory}}

(this is a history of the forum, pieced together as best as possible from my own rambling memory and available posts that havenâ��t been deleted or something. Site history will be on a separate page and likely about 100 times harder to researchâ�¦)

[[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.

==2003==
===The Beginning===
[[Image:AlexAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Alex]], the MASTER, was around near every day|right]]
The forum was established on January 19th, 2003 with this likely as its [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2 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]]â��s role in everything isnâ��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 ''â��Because this is an INTERNATIONAL forum!!!!â��''

==2004==
===RRWP and the First New Mods===
:''Main Article: [[RRWP]]''
Enter into paradise in January 2004 [[RRWP]], a somewhat tragic historical figure. Notable for breaking the atmosphere of constant optimism that had been a major part of the forum for nearly a year, he and several older members were at odds due to his criticism. This culminated in a thread called "RRWP vs Gary", after which he deleted all of his posts and vowed to leave the forum forever. Though the opinion of RRWP has changed over the years, he still remains oe of the most referred-to and known forum members.

===Chaos and the Tightening Fist===
Broken out of the â��all [[RPG Maker]] all the timeâ�� 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 didnâ��t take very long for the off-topic aspect of Charas to reach a boiling point. By mid summer most everyoneâ��s nerves began to fry. Even with three All of All moderators ([[Kijuki Magazaki]], [[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 Locs]] lost their [[Moderator|modship]] for stupid reasons. The [[Pop]] incident, and the first instance of someone being banned, happened around this time. Naysayers declared the end of Charas, as naysayers are wont to do. To quote Sai in the private forum, â��It seems like half the topics are spam and the other half are people complaining spam.â�� 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 the [[First Moderator Elections|first]] public [[Moderator Elections]] for moderators, resulting in [[Reain_|Reain]] and [[Trevlac]] winning. 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 didnâ��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 Aechiâ��s posts, though itâ��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 didnâ��t get along very well, and Trevlac and Darkfox fought often in the shadows of the Private forum.

[[Double_account#wahba|Wahba]] (who later admitted to being [[Osmose]]) spammed the absolute crap out of some forums on August 25th and the â��one post per minuteâ�� rule was implemented to prevent further such actions. Kairou continued to make vague threats about killing people and got banned September 6th (for publicly posting his password). These were the signs of the times.

And in one was probably record bad timing, Alex announced in mid September 2004 that he wasnâ��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===
[[Image:SaiKarAvatar.png|100px|thumb|Seeing [[SaiKar]]'s name in admin yellow caused a stir!|right]]
Itâ��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 Alexâ��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 heâ��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 Saiâ��s promotion from mere moderator straight to administrator, skipping over the global mod level that he and Kijuki held and bypassing SMB, the â��uncle of the forumâ�� 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 staffâ��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 didnâ��t care one way or the other. Even so, the only thing that kept the staff together was largely Alexâ��s faith in his decision and Saiâ��s ability, but even so, staff tensions would only grow for the next year and a half without Alexâ��s presence.

What also didnâ��t help the situation was that Saiâ��s appointment didnâ��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 Carmenâ��s suggestion, the mods needed to take a more hardliner approach. Simply asking people to shape up wasnâ��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.

Carmenâ��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.

'''Main Article: [[Second Moderator Elections]]'''

The elections, which resulted in [[Red Giant]] and [[Carmen]] becoming the new All of All mods, ended most of the spam on the forums. Generally, everyone was happy around this point - until another event that would redefine Charas.

==2005==
===The Dark Ages===
:''Main Article: [[Lord Raffles]]''
A user by the name of Lord Raffles registered around December 2004. Though he was a slight nuisance, he would later grow to become quite the annoying pest, as detailed in the main article.

===Oppression and Conspiracy===
Despite being banned, Raffles didnâ��t get the hint. He registered a number of other logins and immediately started doing suspicious stuff on them. The staff, taking Alexâ��s banning of Raffles as precedent, banned these double accounts as well. A small-scale secret war between the mods and Raffles took place over the next few months. Darkfox and SaiKar, working as a team, became quite adept at finding a suspicious login, IP matching it to Raffles, and banning it sometimes even before its first post. The staff kept this quiet to prevent a witch hunt and return to the more panicked times.

The staff also fired the inactive Red Giant in almost the same manner as they fired Trevlac; they announced attention to remove him, Red returned and said he was sorry, the staff decided it was too late for that and fired him. Also, Ghostclown became a global mod and [[Warxe]] and [[Razor]], two well-liked and generally popular guys, joined the staff, the former as [[RPGMaker Programming]] and [[Tutorials]] mod and the latter got [[Forum Gaming]], and Carmen took over Requests in addition to All of All. Oddly enough, having to be on the constant watch meant the staff was working together better then they had since Saiâ��s admin appointment.

The rest of the forum was mostly uneasy because of Raffles. Despite the best work of the staff a few Raffles logins spread around word that Raffles was still sneaking onto the site. [[Charaman]], a then-Raffles supporter, also posted messages from Raffles and that added to the tension.

Eventually though Rafflesâ��s attempts to disrupt the site became less potent and people relaxed. And they began to wonder about a few things. Why were the hardliner mods still cracking down so hard on spam? When Raffles was around it was easier to justify, but now that he was gone, it began to look less like security and more like needless squeezing the fun out of things.

[[Image:CarmenAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Carmen]], the most influential mod at the time, went a bit too far|right]]
Ghostclown, though a hardliner, stayed mostly under the radar and did a decent job as global mod. Carmen though almost went out of her way to make enemies in blatant shows of moderator force. Osmose, who had hated her essentially since he joined the forum, had a field day pointing out her stranger moves. [[Midnight]], a once popular member that had dropped out for a while before coming back, had one hell of a feud with her that ended with Carmen saying disturbing things like â��Don't get in a fight with me, you won't win.â��

Carmen made other enemies, but the reason these two people are being mentioned is that they are the best friends of SaiKar on Charas. The private forum had a discussion where Kijuki was trying to call Carmen on the point and Sai jumped in to try to emphasize how bad moderators fighting was getting, but Carmen shrugged it off and accused everyone of ganging up on her. A new resolve began to burn in Sai to gain his control over policy back. At this point Sai was more-or-less resigned to not being able to sway the staff through diplomacy, but the abuses became so blatant that he decided to take a more forceful approach if only the circumstances would present themselves.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between August 1st 2005 and March 2006
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

==2006==
===The Charas Judgment===
The Charas Judgment itself is one of the smallest pieces of history time-wise, taking place over a few weeks at the end of March 2006 and was essentially the violent reaction to months of built up population annoyance against tight moderator control over the forum. Several relatively unimportant people quickly rose in power while others fell from high in a matter of days and drastically different policies on what would be allowed were put into effect. Depending on which side you supported, it was either a revolution or a mutiny, but itâ��s hard to argue against the long-term effects it had on how Charas is run today.

For a year Sai had stewed on how to remove the oppressive moderators without getting himself fired without any real good ideas until one landed right in front of him. Razor and [[Robotam]], the community contest moderator (a very minor position) discussed on MSN how bad the lockings were getting and decided to seek help. Robotam approached Sai and asked for some sort of action. Sai decided that the time was right and encouraged Robotam to create a public thread on the All of All forum asking for an investigation. Knowing this would immediately get locked, Sai promised Robotam his admin protection of the thread to prevent people from mucking with it.

[[Image:RobotamAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Robotam]], dissatisfied with Carmen's modding, took action|right]]
On March 14th, 2006 Robotam posted [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15936&forumid=12&catid=6 the thread] bringing attention to the massive number of moderator actions by Carmen and Ghostclown that month alone (70!) including the aforementioned permission from Sai. Carmen and Ghostclown locked it anyway, saying essentially that they didnâ��t care what Sai said; this sort of moderator criticism was highly inappropriate. Sai showed up, unlocked it, told everyone it was okay to speak their mind, and gave them both a stern warning to the mods not to touch that thread at all until it was done. Carmen and GC edited (and later deleted) their posts and said nothing more. And the fun began!

A whole 12 pages, and the uncharacteristic part is, the vast majority of it is actually civil debate between people with somewhat different viewpoints. Except for MrMister, who was mainly trying to use weird examples to make the whole thing seem stupid. Most of the people that responded found that the lockings and deletions were. Sleepy users that hadnâ��t been seen much showed up for the event and tossed in their two cents. [[DragonBlaze]] is largely credited for making some of the best points, as is [[Arcanagirl]].

Naturally, behind the scenes, there was a lot of shady MSN talk, mostly between conspirators Osmose, Midnight, SaiKar, and probably a few other trusted mods like Razor and FFL. Most everyone supported some sort of revolution? But what? And would word reach Alex and he react harshly? Sai hesitated for a bit, but decided meh, what the hell, and posted the [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15968&forumid=12&catid=6 Judgment] thread on March 17th.

As far as fire and brimstone on the mods went, it was light. Carmen was removed from All of All mod but kept Requests and GC got off with only a sideways glare. More revolutionary were the policies put down that effectively countered a lot of Carmen and GCâ��s moderator actions; posts would no longer be edited and topics locked or deleted for â��poor reasonsâ��, with poor reasons being most anything that wasnâ��t illegal in some way. Also that topics that went off topic but stayed civil would be allowed to remain open. The damage to Carmen and GC was done though. Carmen essentially said her peace and gave herself a fair defense, then left immediately. Ghostclown more or less consented to the changes for a few weeks before going AWOL himself. They both resigned in May but played no further part in any Charas events.

If Sai miscalculated anything during the power play, it was how SOLID the forum was behind him on the changes. Though there was understandable nervousness for the future and a bit of regret at how badly Carmen and GC were getting smeared by it, as a whole the forum greatly praised the policies that reduced moderator actions and gave more freedom to the average, non-spammy guy that was just trying to talk on the forum.

Probably the best thing to give validation to the whole deal was when Alex himself showed up and [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=16019&forumid=12&catid=6 expressed approval] to the changes. ALWAYS a huge relief when the boss tells you youâ��re doing a good job!

Trying to ride on the success of the revolution, on the 25th Sai appointed Robotam, the real instigator of the whole deal, as the new All of All mod. He also snuck in Osmose and Midnight in as [[General Programming]] and [[Test and Welcome]] mods since those two helped with the whole thing in ways that donâ��t really show up well in this history, but they helped a lot, darn it. Oh and Warxe got his old jobs back. Sai also said he would appoint another All of All mod after a month had passed, but this decision was forgotten in the absolute chaos of the next month (see below section)

(purely biased aside from [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]: at this point Iâ��m supposed to admit I treated them badly and regret the whole thing, since time heals all wounds, or something. Well Iâ��m not going to. My only major regret is that I waited so long and had so many people leave the forum before acting with strength. Itâ��s sort of funny reading about how Carmen was defensive about everyone ganging up on her when all I did was finally stop her from silencing people and let them speak their mind. She said with her last words as a mod how she was just a person with feelings, but didnâ��t seem to care about the feelings of others when she said their posts were useless topics nobody wanted to read. And there is a junk bin for a freakin reason. And Alex said he didnâ��t want things locked or deleted unless they were totally unsalvageable. Meh. I donâ��t want to turn this into a Carmen and GC bash, but I mean, ''damn''. Though, to be fair to Carmen, she among everyone figured out that I had essentially planned the whole event to fire her. Which was true and it worked brilliantly.)

And so the conspirators won the day, and there was general dancing in the streets, and things eventually calmed down a bit while the staff tried to put some of their speeches into policy. But they would only get just over two weeks before the largest outside attack in Charasâ��s history would threaten to destroy it all.

===Troll Invasion and Sanctuary Fortress===
The Troll Invasion was a coordinated attack on Charasâ��s forums; the only one the forum has ever seen. It was one of our lowest moments as Charas had to face a situation that they really had no plan for.

As many online veterans know, attacking people and forums online is partially an exercise in futility. Honestly, there is only so much you can do. Saying â��I stab you in the face!â�� wonâ��t make you many friends and sure wonâ��t be taken seriously. On the other hand, using hacking methods to disrupt or delete online files can bring real legal consequences and is generally suicidal to even talk seriously about. And so forum wars are largely a joke.

However, there is one way to attack a forum that doesnâ��t break the law but still does damage. Forums are run by people, and people enjoy certain aspects of talking online: comfort, security, freedom, and a general lack of worry. It is possible to disrupt these things and cause the forumâ��s inhabitants a good deal of stress. This was the sort of assault Charas faced in April 2006.

On April 9, 2006 an oddball group of weirdos began to trickle in. A mother concerned about violence in video games, an anti-environmentalist, a bible thumper, and others. Oh those trolls! Always so original with their personas! Immediately the anti-Raffles warning lights went off and all the logins were IP traced. One matched and was banned, but the others, for lack of serious evidence against them, were left alone for a while. But something definitely seemed wrong.

A day later it was clear that they had no intentions of playing nice. All of the threads they created were obviously designed to stir up opinions on controversial topics. One by one they were all banned until only Omega Weapon (the least offensive of the group) was left. Problem was, more accounts were created the following two mornings. These too were given a chance to prove that they werenâ��t trolls, these too failed, and they were banned as well. By now most everyone on Charas knew that there was some sort of massive troll invasion taking place. Once again complaints about how unfun Charas was began to surface and people drift away from the site.

On April 11th, while experimenting with forum security late at night, Sai created [[Sanctuary Fortress]], a semi-secret forum that required 800 posts to view. The following day many Charites discovered Sanctuary and its purpose and began to discuss plans to thrart the invaders. These varied from diplomatic solutions of talking to the trolls to shutting down the forums to an outright attack, but in the end everyone agreed to wait longer. More practically, Charaman, a previous Raffles-supporter, redeemed himself and threw his lot in with the mod staff to reveal Troll Kingdom as the source of the invaders with, of course, Lord Raffles as its protagonist. The staff began to watch TKs forums while TK remained ignorant that they had been discovered. Many trolls revealed their troll login names on their forums and these names were banned from Charas often before a single post. This greatly increased the defense of the forum but the energy drain of having to be constantly on the ball to ban the next troll took its toll on the staff and they began to search for a permanent solution.

The next day yet more troll logins were banned: the total of which was nearing 15. Sanctuary continued to debate the invasion but reached no reasonable conclusions. The most popular ideas involved shutting down easy resignation, but after researching TK lead the staff to ExIsle, a forum that TK had also trolled that was now a barren inactive shell, Sai vowed to never restrict registration. Still, something needed to be done. Realizing it was only a matter of time before their vigilance gave out, the staff talked with Alex and Trevlac about forum security, a discussion that lead to the implementation of an IP ban feature that, while useful against certain people like Raffles, didnâ��t exactly provide much defense against multiple invaders.

The staff plotted to use undercover operatives in TK to undermine the attack, but before any serious plans were made up a TKer named CHARAS UNITED posted a â��victoryâ�� thread that had a link to TK itself. With all hope of subtlety out the window, on April 13th SaiKar authorized what he judged the least awful of all the awful plans: the invasion of TKs forums. A dozen or so Charas members spammed up TK. Some tried to debate, some flung insults, some just posted really long portions of random text. The TK response was more amused than anything else and everyone waited for the inevitable counterattack.

Said counterattack never happened. A few TK members registered on Charas but didnâ��t troll and eventually lost interest. Likewise a few Charas members stayed over at TK but themselves got bored. A bunch of strippers (of all thingsâ�¦) joined TK and the trolls mostly forgot about us. What seemed to be an uneasy peace began between the sites. The staff declared victory.

Yet, in the days that followed, no such peace could be said to take place within Sanctuary and on Charas in general though. Despite inexplicitly ending the invasion, many people were outraged at the lows Charas had sunk to get the job done. Osmose, frustrated by both his lack of duties as a mod and lack of voice on the staff, resigned in protest. Many people loudly proclaimed everyone else was acting childish or blowing it all out of proportion. Several members loudly declared that they were no longer participating in Sanctuary and were leaving Charas for a time. Facing increasing opposition, SaiKar, the only active admin with banning powers, also left for several days between the 18th and 23rd. SaintLucifer, a troll from TK that had gotten himself banned, apparently caught wind of Charas and trolled the forums most of the time Sai was away as the single unbanned troll remaining.

SaiKar returned to on the 23rd and revealed he wanted to take some time off to see of the forum could handle itself. No words can describe the hostility that met him. SaintLucifer himself was quickly dispatched but the anger lasted nearly a week. Arcanagirl posted a big thread in the All of All about what a bad job the staff (specifically Sai) was doing. In Sanctuary, many users, the most vocal of which was DragonBlaze, declared that Saiâ��s actions were totally unacceptable. Charaman and Midnight supported their friend, if not all his actions, in his dark hour, but basically everyone else was firmly upset.

Damned if you do, damned if you donâ��t. Taking action made Sai enemies. Not taking action made Sai enemies. Most everyone wanted Sai to stay as an admin but definitely didnâ��t want him to do essentially anything he did during the entire Troll Invasion ever again. Sai began to wonder if all the time he was spending on Charas was worth it if he had so little support and announced his resignation, which sobered the hostility a little, but not much.

Finally, on April 29th, Sai announced that Kijuki was going to be promoted to administrator as his replacement. Sai himself stayed an administrator but with greatly reduced activity for some time and only a few token appearances. And on May 2nd, Sai made the following speech in Sanctuary.

{{Quote|name=[[SaiKar]]|text=Sanctuary Fortress will be closed soon. I'll make it a forum invisible to all but admins and there will be no activity here.

The trolls have been repelled through a combination of good strategy, bad ideas, and dumb luck. Though far too often the real enemies are ourselves and our inabilities to listen or compromise or admit we're wrong. No no, don't feel guilty. I'm just sayin'.

This forum will shut down officially some time tomorrow. Copy any threads you want for blackmail purposes soon. Some day, maybe, the fortress will arise again.}}

And so the Troll Invasion ended. Perhaps ironically, the trolls did far less damage to Charas than the Charites did to themselves. Though eventually most people got over it and resumed business as normal, trying to forget the chaos of March and April as best they could, with Kijuki mostly handling site affairs.

==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?
* Anyone have logs of all the MSN chats from spring 2006? I know some important stuff was decided there.

==Sources==

This section will get integrated into the history eventually.

* Alex's first post - http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2
* Garyâ��s â��A history of Charasâ�� - 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
* Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you canâ��t read.

==Related articles==
* [[RRWP]]
* [[Pop]]
* [[Trevlac]]

[[Category:Charas Forums]][[Category:History of Charas]]

Talk:CharasVerse

SaiKar — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:28:05 GMT

SaiKar:

Is there any particular reason we're using random reality numbers rather than, say, "Micras Mythos" or "Iseo Reality" or something considerably easier to navigate? - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 11:28, 7 March 2007 (EST)

Charasverse: SaiKar

SaiKar — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:36:59 GMT

SaiKar:

The following [[Charasverse]] entry is about the fictional story created by the member [[SaiKar]] to explain the origins and background history of the girl and her home planet of Micras that is the setting of the Control of Destiny games.

==Background==

===Fate and Micras===
Acording to the Control of Destiny mythos, the Gods created an entity known as '''Fate''' to restart the universe in the event of an irrevokable corruption. However, Fate began its mission early for reasons unknown. Slowly and methdically, Fate consumed planet after planet by breaking down all matter into its most basic components. Entire star systems were annihilated by Fate as were uncountable living things.

An accident on the planet Micras sent several mortals through time and space to a place where they witnessed Fate's destruction of all life. These mortals gained immortality and great power and vowed to destroy Fate, and took the name '''Time Distortionists'''. After a time of trying to fight with pure violence they found that only the most pure time energies could directly harm the great beast. Meanwhile, Fate tracked the mortals to their origins and discovered the planet Micras as their homeworld.

The Time Distortionists spent great effort wrapping Micras in time energy - energy that Fate could not pass without great harm to itself. They also searched for special people that could directly control the time energy needed to kill Fate. Fate meanwhile tried to work out how to destroy Micras from beyond the time energy shield and also how to kill the mortal resistance during their missions. And so a great stalmate began, and the otherwise unimportant planet of Micras became the center stage for the fate of the universe.

===Fall of the Micron Empire===
One of the people that could control time energy turned out to be a young micron woman named '''Sai'Kar'''. Sweet and naive, Sai'Kar's life out in the provinces of the prosperous Micron Empire got turned upside down when Fate drastically altered history by using his powers to convince an alien species to invade Micras. Realizing the threat to their young hero Sai'Kar, the Time Distortionists personally came down to Micras to train and protect the young girl.

Despite the wishes of the Time Distortionists, Sai'Kar personally got involved in the resistance against the aliens. She studied ancient theology of the Gods and became a new-age prophet, inspiring her people into renewed faith for the Gods and for their own survival. She quickly became a micron celebrity, a hero in the race's darkest hour. She also became quite competant in combat, channeling her holy abilities to heal allies and greatly harm the outsider aliens. When it came time to sabotage the main enemy battlecruiser, Sai'Kar joined the attack team and helped guide it to success.

Yet, even though they won the battle, they lost the war. The aliens were repelled but the Micron Empire was in shambles. A particularly deadly plague decimated the survivors. With the Empire's medical research mostly destroyed a cure was not developed in time to save most of the inhabitants. Rather then let her people go exinct, Sai lead them into stasis sleep. And there they stayed for thousands of years while humans slowly rebuilt the world.

===Jasonia and Control of Destiny===
Sai"Kar and the survivors of the micron race awoke as part of country of Jasonia - a powerful coutry created entirely out of flying islands. They couldn't have found better humans to ally with. Together the Jasonians and the microns helped change the world for the better, founding the legendary '''Control of Destiny''' team. The Time Distortionists observed this and decided to incorporate the Control of Destiny team into their plans as an elite combat unit.

Eventually Fate worked a way through the time energies surrounding Micras and sent down an avatar of himself. Powerful and charismatic, Fate's avatar made war against Jasonia, eventually defeating the nation despite the best efforts of the Control of Destiny team. Realizing their back was to the wall, the Time Distortionists lead the Control of Destiny team, including Sai'Kar, to Fate's main fortress and launched their final assault. The effort was a success - wielding pure time energy, Sai'Kar and the other empowered mortals slew the great monster, ending its wave of destruction forever.

Sai'Kar returned to life on Micras and became political. She helped end several wars and established organizations to help benefit future generations. At the end of her life, when she died, she was visisted by the god Mithaniel. For her extrodinary efforts in making the universe a better place she became Radiance, the demigoddess of empathy and compasion.

==Character Information==

===Physical===

* Roughly 5 ft, 9 in tall
* Exact weight unknown, but very light - micron bodies are less dense than human ones
* Deep purple hair, a common micron hair color
* Large blue eyes, widely spaced - again, common for microns
* Right-handed
* Frail build - not exactly thin, but definately unmuscular. She looks like she'd blow away in a strong breeze.

===Personality===

Despite the horrors she's been through, Sai retained a bit of her naivity. She believes in the best of people and does her part to help out. She is very understanding and is an excellent friend. Even so, her personality can clash with others, in particular people with strong egos. Sai utterly despites "ego whoring" of any sort.

Sai'Kar is firmly lawful good: she utterly refuses to aid any task that is done for selfish or petty reasons. But once she begins a task she sees it through to the bitter end, even at personal risk or loss.

She can be somewhat melancoloy at times, even somewhat bordering on emo. Remember that this poor girl had to watch everything she's ever known, the Micron Empire and Jasonia, be destroyed by evil. She's a little jaded.

===Magical Abilities===

All microns naturally produce Hypon: an organic type of energy created by micron body functions. Sai'Kar is exceptionally adept at harnessing it and combines it with more traditional magic to heal allies or harm enemies.

Some of her signature moves:
* Shikam - the micron word for silence, this spell disrupts magical energies around an area, making spellcasting impossible.
* Teleport - Sai'Kar can teleport short distances (less than 100 feet). She does not need to see her desination if she knows what it looks like.
* Concussion - a powerful Hypon shockwave that catches basically everyone off-balance. A very useful move for escaping or quicky healing onesself.
* Power Blast - a Hypon-charged blast of holy energy that breaks through most defenses, even things specifically warded against magic or holy powers. One of Sai'Kar's most useful attacks.
* Judgment - the strongest holy magic ever recorded, this spell summons a fragment of Sai'Kar's god's strength to annihilate all that oppose her. This often has wide-reaching destructive effects and is mostly a last resort.
* Time Freeze - concentrating furiously on her own time powers, Sai'Kar can halt local time long enough to do a few quick tasks. Again, a panic move, and one she steadfast won't admit to having.

===Equipment===

* Sealormaokar - a special rod created to amplify Sai'Kar's Hypon channeling abilies
* The Sun Sword - a powerful ancient micron weapon, the Sun Sword is actually a living weapon. The sword essentially lets her "God mod" and do pretty impossible things. When she wields the blade is is nigh unstoppable.
* Golden Tiara - a symbol of micron royalty, the tiara is also warded against anything that might try to read or influence Sai's mind.

==Sai as a Cameo==

The exact details of what Sai'Kar does after the Control of Destiny games but before her death are intentionally vague. For people wanting to incorporate Sai into their own stories, many things are possible. Her government has access to emergency dimensional travel machines so she may be sent as some sort of operative to assess a risk in another dimension.

For people worried about her power being unbalancing, most of it comes from her equipment. Leaving the Sealormaokar and Sun Sword at home forces her to rely on her quick wits and reasonably strong holy powers. In settings without magic something local could strip away these abilities as well, making her very normal (as far as a purple-haired woman can be normal) and very vulnerable.

Sai makes a good operative for the good guys, a religious leader or priestess, or perhaps just a knowledgable, sweet, kind local girl.

Talk:Lord Raffles

SaiKar — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 03:41:40 GMT

SaiKar:

==Notice==
Originally, we agreed to not make a Lord Raffles article, as it would only fuel his ego - but I now feel that it is unavoidable.

This is bound to be a very controversial article. For now, I am protecting it, so any edits that you want made to the article will have to go here first. If you don't like it, then screw you: it's my wiki, and I'll do whatever the hell I want with it. [[User:Admin|Admin]] 23:41, 5 March 2007 (EST)

:Actually, to make this Wiki as accurate and objective as possible, I think we should even add such articles, even though it might "fuel someone's ego".
:But I do think the article looks horrid. It doesn't appeal to get read.--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 14:11, 6 March 2007 (EST)
::One of the problems with it is that Warxe also ripped out the rest of the things that were going on during the Raffles era, namely the staff's inability to get along, and just stuck it with the Raffles article for some reason. He did the same thing with the RRWP + new mods. Don't know why. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 22:41, 6 March 2007 (EST)

Talk:History of Charas

SaiKar — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:30:03 GMT

SaiKar:

Just so everyone knows, this article is a massive work in progress. It ends right now still in 2004. I'm going to try to take it up to the present and will be using the topic created on the forums to supliment my own research/rambling memories. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]

Oh, and I've essentially given up trying to avoid putting my bias into the article. The section labeled "The Dark Age" pissed me off to no end and caused a ton of trouble for the forum. [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]

:I'll try to get rid of some bias, if needed, and I will try to add some more light in it.--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 09:58, 19 January 2007 (EST)
:Okay, never mind. Somehow this article is too messed up to fix.--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 09:59, 19 January 2007 (EST)

::It's not really messed up. It's just very long. <_< [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 10:32, 19 January 2007 (EST)
:::Dude, you really need a life. And from what I've read about this whole TrollKingdom thing, I really don't like it. It's like, when I'm not around, things get really whack. As if the whole forum's on crack. Ya dig?--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 10:37, 19 January 2007 (EST)
::::I like typing, so what? And I dig about TK. Not some of my better moments. But I didn't see any bright ideas from anyone else on how to stop an infinite influx of Raffles-esque trolls. We did the best we could. [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 10:39, 19 January 2007 (EST)
:::::Actually, I did like how you handle it. It's just that I didn't like the whole "ZOMG IT R TEH FAULT OF TEH MODERATORZ UND SAIKARZ DAT WE R IN TEH SHITZ". They basically put blame on others of their own failure. That is so weak. And you really had the right to leave, seeing as moderators and administrators can't do everything.--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 10:54, 19 January 2007 (EST)

Oh, and I would also like to add this, because it is a great quote which should be used for this article, to conclude the troll article:

{{Quote|name=SaiKar|text=Sanctuary Fortress will be closed soon. I'll make it a forum invisible to all but admins and there will be no activity here.

The trolls have been repelled through a combination of good strategy, bad ideas, and dumb luck. Though far too often the real enemies are ourseleves and our inabilities to listen or compromise or admit we're wrong. No no, don't feel guilty. I'm just sayin'.

This forum will shut down officially some time tomorrow. Copy any threads you want for blackmail purposes soon. Some day, maybe, the fotress will arise again.}}

Maybe just the center part, but it's really a good closure for the article.
--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 11:39, 19 January 2007 (EST)

: Kay. When I finish the troll article that is next that will go on there. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 12:20, 19 January 2007 (EST)

==Bonk!==
After the troll wars, you've got to mention the bonking thing. It's amazing how such a simple idea of keeping people inline exploded so terribly, with absolutely no help from Kijuki. Wait. Except, he was helping the exploding. But he wasn't helping us. And that's what I meant.[[User:Razor|Razor]] 05:14, 21 January 2007 (EST)
: In good time, in good time. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 06:29, 21 January 2007 (EST)

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just EAGERLY AWAITING THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF SAI'S FANTASTICALLY WRITTEN UP TEXT. [[User:Razor|Razor]] 18:41, 1 February 2007 (EST)
: Ok that was pretty awesome. But it lacked a cliffhanger, for the next exciting installment! Whatever that is. ... What did happen next? [[User:Razor|Razor]] 02:01, 7 February 2007 (EST)
:: Kijuki's appointments and increasing moderator / member tensions that finally erupted into the Bonk argument / Kijuki getting banned. I think. I haven't researched it that much yet.

History of Charas

SaiKar — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 04:09:24 GMT

SaiKar:

{{Memory}}

(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.

==2003==
===The Beginning===
[[Image:AlexAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Alex]], the MASTER, was around near every day|right]]
The forum was established on January 19th, 2003 with this likely as its [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2 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!!!!”''

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between January 2003 and January 2004
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

==2004==
===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.

[[Image:GaryCXJkAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Gary]]'s feud with RRWP dominated the forum|right]]
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, including at one point him joking about hentai involving her avatar. Many battles of words were conducted through AIM buddy chats,which were generally immature in nature. [[Gary Kertopermono|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 “RRWP vs Gary Kertopermono, Welcome in the arena!!!” 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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between January 2004 and Feburary 29th, 2004
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

===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.

[[Double_account#wahba|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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between Feburary 29th, 2004 and September 28th, 2004.
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

===Life After Alex===
[[Image:SaiKarAvatar.png|100px|thumb|Seeing [[SaiKar]]'s name in admin yellow caused a stir!|right]]
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.

[[Image:ElectionProp2.png|300px|thumb|Propaganda was the best part of the election (click the image for full size and better color depth)|right]]
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.

[[Image:ElectionProp1.png|300px|thumb|More propaganda|right]]
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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between September 28th, 2004 and December 1st, 2004.
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

==2005==
===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.

[[Image:LordRafflesAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Trolls%2C_tools_and_other_rejects#Lord Raffles|Lord Raffles]] is a jerk|right]]
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 [[trolls|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 SMB 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):

{{Quote|name=[[SaiKar]]|text=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.}}

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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between December 1st, 2004 and August 1st, 2005
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

===Oppression and Conspiracy===
Despite being banned, Raffles didn’t get the hint. He registered a number of other logins and immediately started doing suspicious stuff on them. The staff, taking Alex’s banning of Raffles as precedent, banned these double accounts as well. A small-scale secret war between the mods and Raffles took place over the next few months. Darkfox and SaiKar, working as a team, became quite adept at finding a suspicious login, IP matching it to Raffles, and banning it sometimes even before its first post. The staff kept this quiet to prevent a witch hunt and return to the more panicked times.

The staff also fired the inactive Red Giant in almost the same manner as they fired Trevlac; they announced attention to remove him, Red returned and said he was sorry, the staff decided it was too late for that and fired him. Also, Ghostclown became a global mod and [[Warxe]] and [[Razor]], two well-liked and generally popular guys, joined the staff, the former as [[RPGMaker Programming]] and [[Tutorials]] mod and the latter got [[Forum Gaming]], and Carmen took over Requests in addition to All of All. Oddly enough, having to be on the constant watch meant the staff was working together better then they had since Sai’s admin appointment.

The rest of the forum was mostly uneasy because of Raffles. Despite the best work of the staff a few Raffles logins spread around word that Raffles was still sneaking onto the site. [[Charaman]], a then-Raffles supporter, also posted messages from Raffles and that added to the tension.

Eventually though Raffles’s attempts to disrupt the site became less potent and people relaxed. And they began to wonder about a few things. Why were the hardliner mods still cracking down so hard on spam? When Raffles was around it was easier to justify, but now that he was gone, it began to look less like security and more like needless squeezing the fun out of things.

[[Image:CarmenAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Carmen]], the most influential mod at the time, went a bit too far|right]]
Ghostclown, though a hardliner, stayed mostly under the radar and did a decent job as global mod. Carmen though almost went out of her way to make enemies in blatant shows of moderator force. Osmose, who had hated her essentially since he joined the forum, had a field day pointing out her stranger moves. [[Midnight]], a once popular member that had dropped out for a while before coming back, had one hell of a feud with her that ended with Carmen saying disturbing things like “Don't get in a fight with me, you won't win.”

Carmen made other enemies, but the reason these two people are being mentioned is that they are the best friends of SaiKar on Charas. The private forum had a discussion where Kijuki was trying to call Carmen on the point and Sai jumped in to try to emphasize how bad moderators fighting was getting, but Carmen shrugged it off and accused everyone of ganging up on her. A new resolve began to burn in Sai to gain his control over policy back. At this point Sai was more-or-less resigned to not being able to sway the staff through diplomacy, but the abuses became so blatant that he decided to take a more forceful approach if only the circumstances would present themselves.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between August 1st 2005 and March 2006
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

==2006==
===The Charas Judgment===
The Charas Judgment itself is one of the smallest pieces of history time-wise, taking place over a few weeks at the end of March 2006 and was essentially the violent reaction to months of built up population annoyance against tight moderator control over the forum. Several relatively unimportant people quickly rose in power while others fell from high in a matter of days and drastically different policies on what would be allowed were put into effect. Depending on which side you supported, it was either a revolution or a mutiny, but it’s hard to argue against the long-term effects it had on how Charas is run today.

For a year Sai had stewed on how to remove the oppressive moderators without getting himself fired without any real good ideas until one landed right in front of him. Razor and [[Robotam]], the community contest moderator (a very minor position) discussed on MSN how bad the lockings were getting and decided to seek help. Robotam approached Sai and asked for some sort of action. Sai decided that the time was right and encouraged Robotam to create a public thread on the All of All forum asking for an investigation. Knowing this would immediately get locked, Sai promised Robotam his admin protection of the thread to prevent people from mucking with it.

[[Image:RobotamAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Robotam]], dissatisfied with Carmen's modding, took action|right]]
On March 14th, 2006 Robotam posted [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15936&forumid=12&catid=6 the thread] bringing attention to the massive number of moderator actions by Carmen and Ghostclown that month alone (70!) including the aforementioned permission from Sai. Carmen and Ghostclown locked it anyway, saying essentially that they didn’t care what Sai said; this sort of moderator criticism was highly inappropriate. Sai showed up, unlocked it, told everyone it was okay to speak their mind, and gave them both a stern warning to the mods not to touch that thread at all until it was done. Carmen and GC edited (and later deleted) their posts and said nothing more. And the fun began!

A whole 12 pages, and the uncharacteristic part is, the vast majority of it is actually civil debate between people with somewhat different viewpoints. Except for MrMister, who was mainly trying to use weird examples to make the whole thing seem stupid. Most of the people that responded found that the lockings and deletions were. Sleepy users that hadn’t been seen much showed up for the event and tossed in their two cents. [[DragonBlaze]] is largely credited for making some of the best points, as is [[Arcanagirl]].

Naturally, behind the scenes, there was a lot of shady MSN talk, mostly between conspirators Osmose, Midnight, SaiKar, and probably a few other trusted mods like Razor and FFL. Most everyone supported some sort of revolution? But what? And would word reach Alex and he react harshly? Sai hesitated for a bit, but decided meh, what the hell, and posted the [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15968&forumid=12&catid=6 Judgment] thread on March 17th.

As far as fire and brimstone on the mods went, it was light. Carmen was removed from All of All mod but kept Requests and GC got off with only a sideways glare. More revolutionary were the policies put down that effectively countered a lot of Carmen and GC’s moderator actions; posts would no longer be edited and topics locked or deleted for “poor reasons”, with poor reasons being most anything that wasn’t illegal in some way. Also that topics that went off topic but stayed civil would be allowed to remain open. The damage to Carmen and GC was done though. Carmen essentially said her peace and gave herself a fair defense, then left immediately. Ghostclown more or less consented to the changes for a few weeks before going AWOL himself. They both resigned in May but played no further part in any Charas events.

If Sai miscalculated anything during the power play, it was how SOLID the forum was behind him on the changes. Though there was understandable nervousness for the future and a bit of regret at how badly Carmen and GC were getting smeared by it, as a whole the forum greatly praised the policies that reduced moderator actions and gave more freedom to the average, non-spammy guy that was just trying to talk on the forum.

Probably the best thing to give validation to the whole deal was when Alex himself showed up and [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=16019&forumid=12&catid=6 expressed approval] to the changes. ALWAYS a huge relief when the boss tells you you’re doing a good job!

Trying to ride on the success of the revolution, on the 25th Sai appointed Robotam, the real instigator of the whole deal, as the new All of All mod. He also snuck in Osmose and Midnight in as [[General Programming]] and [[Test and Welcome]] mods since those two helped with the whole thing in ways that don’t really show up well in this history, but they helped a lot, darn it. Oh and Warxe got his old jobs back. Sai also said he would appoint another All of All mod after a month had passed, but this decision was forgotten in the absolute chaos of the next month (see below section)

(purely biased aside from [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]: at this point I’m supposed to admit I treated them badly and regret the whole thing, since time heals all wounds, or something. Well I’m not going to. My only major regret is that I waited so long and had so many people leave the forum before acting with strength. It’s sort of funny reading about how Carmen was defensive about everyone ganging up on her when all I did was finally stop her from silencing people and let them speak their mind. She said with her last words as a mod how she was just a person with feelings, but didn’t seem to care about the feelings of others when she said their posts were useless topics nobody wanted to read. And there is a junk bin for a freakin reason. And Alex said he didn’t want things locked or deleted unless they were totally unsalvageable. Meh. I don’t want to turn this into a Carmen and GC bash, but I mean, ''damn''. Though, to be fair to Carmen, she among everyone figured out that I had essentially planned the whole event to fire her. Which was true and it worked brilliantly.)

And so the conspirators won the day, and there was general dancing in the streets, and things eventually calmed down a bit while the staff tried to put some of their speeches into policy. But they would only get just over two weeks before the largest outside attack in Charas’s history would threaten to destroy it all.

====Other Charas happenings during March 2006====

===Troll Invasion and Sanctuary Fortress===
The Troll Invasion was a coordinated attack on Charas’s forums; the only one the forum has ever seen. It was one of our lowest moments as Charas had to face a situation that they really had no plan for.

As many online veterans know, attacking people and forums online is partially an exercise in futility. Honestly, there is only so much you can do. Saying “I stab you in the face!” won’t make you many friends and sure won’t be taken seriously. On the other hand, using hacking methods to disrupt or delete online files can bring real legal consequences and is generally suicidal to even talk seriously about. And so forum wars are largely a joke.

However, there is one way to attack a forum that doesn’t break the law but still does damage. Forums are run by people, and people enjoy certain aspects of talking online: comfort, security, freedom, and a general lack of worry. It is possible to disrupt these things and cause the forum’s inhabitants a good deal of stress. This was the sort of assault Charas faced in April 2006.

On April 9, 2006 an oddball group of weirdos began to trickle in. A mother concerned about violence in video games, an anti-environmentalist, a bible thumper, and others. Oh those trolls! Always so original with their personas! Immediately the anti-Raffles warning lights went off and all the logins were IP traced. One matched and was banned, but the others, for lack of serious evidence against them, were left alone for a while. But something definitely seemed wrong.

A day later it was clear that they had no intentions of playing nice. All of the threads they created were obviously designed to stir up opinions on controversial topics. One by one they were all banned until only Omega Weapon (the least offensive of the group) was left. Problem was, more accounts were created the following two mornings. These too were given a chance to prove that they weren’t trolls, these too failed, and they were banned as well. By now most everyone on Charas knew that there was some sort of massive troll invasion taking place. Once again complaints about how unfun Charas was began to surface and people drift away from the site.

On April 11th, while experimenting with forum security late at night, Sai created [[Sanctuary Fortress]], a semi-secret forum that required 800 posts to view. The following day many Charites discovered Sanctuary and its purpose and began to discuss plans to thrart the invaders. These varied from diplomatic solutions of talking to the trolls to shutting down the forums to an outright attack, but in the end everyone agreed to wait longer. More practically, Charaman, a previous Raffles-supporter, redeemed himself and threw his lot in with the mod staff to reveal Troll Kingdom as the source of the invaders with, of course, Lord Raffles as its protagonist. The staff began to watch TKs forums while TK remained ignorant that they had been discovered. Many trolls revealed their troll login names on their forums and these names were banned from Charas often before a single post. This greatly increased the defense of the forum but the energy drain of having to be constantly on the ball to ban the next troll took its toll on the staff and they began to search for a permanent solution.

The next day yet more troll logins were banned: the total of which was nearing 15. Sanctuary continued to debate the invasion but reached no reasonable conclusions. The most popular ideas involved shutting down easy resignation, but after researching TK lead the staff to ExIsle, a forum that TK had also trolled that was now a barren inactive shell, Sai vowed to never restrict registration. Still, something needed to be done. Realizing it was only a matter of time before their vigilance gave out, the staff talked with Alex and Trevlac about forum security, a discussion that lead to the implementation of an IP ban feature that, while useful against certain people like Raffles, didn’t exactly provide much defense against multiple invaders.

The staff plotted to use undercover operatives in TK to undermine the attack, but before any serious plans were made up a TKer named CHARAS UNITED posted a “victory” thread that had a link to TK itself. With all hope of subtlety out the window, on April 13th SaiKar authorized what he judged the least awful of all the awful plans: the invasion of TKs forums. A dozen or so Charas members spammed up TK. Some tried to debate, some flung insults, some just posted really long portions of random text. The TK response was more amused than anything else and everyone waited for the inevitable counterattack.

Said counterattack never happened. A few TK members registered on Charas but didn’t troll and eventually lost interest. Likewise a few Charas members stayed over at TK but themselves got bored. A bunch of strippers (of all things…) joined TK and the trolls mostly forgot about us. What seemed to be an uneasy peace began between the sites. The staff declared victory.

Yet, in the days that followed, no such peace could be said to take place within Sanctuary and on Charas in general though. Despite inexplicitly ending the invasion, many people were outraged at the lows Charas had sunk to get the job done. Osmose, frustrated by both his lack of duties as a mod and lack of voice on the staff, resigned in protest. Many people loudly proclaimed everyone else was acting childish or blowing it all out of proportion. Several members loudly declared that they were no longer participating in Sanctuary and were leaving Charas for a time. Facing increasing opposition, SaiKar, the only active admin with banning powers, also left for several days between the 18th and 23rd. SaintLucifer, a troll from TK that had gotten himself banned, apparently caught wind of Charas and trolled the forums most of the time Sai was away as the single unbanned troll remaining.

SaiKar returned to on the 23rd and revealed he wanted to take some time off to see of the forum could handle itself. No words can describe the hostility that met him. SaintLucifer himself was quickly dispatched but the anger lasted nearly a week. Arcanagirl posted a big thread in the All of All about what a bad job the staff (specifically Sai) was doing. In Sanctuary, many users, the most vocal of which was DragonBlaze, declared that Sai’s actions were totally unacceptable. Charaman and Midnight supported their friend, if not all his actions, in his dark hour, but basically everyone else was firmly upset.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Taking action made Sai enemies. Not taking action made Sai enemies. Most everyone wanted Sai to stay as an admin but definitely didn’t want him to do essentially anything he did during the entire Troll Invasion ever again. Sai began to wonder if all the time he was spending on Charas was worth it if he had so little support and announced his resignation, which sobered the hostility a little, but not much.

Finally, on April 29th, Sai announced that Kijuki was going to be promoted to administrator as his replacement. Sai himself stayed an administrator but with greatly reduced activity for some time and only a few token appearances. And on May 2nd, Sai made the following speech in Sanctuary.

{{Quote|name=[[SaiKar]]|text=Sanctuary Fortress will be closed soon. I'll make it a forum invisible to all but admins and there will be no activity here.

The trolls have been repelled through a combination of good strategy, bad ideas, and dumb luck. Though far too often the real enemies are ourselves and our inabilities to listen or compromise or admit we're wrong. No no, don't feel guilty. I'm just sayin'.

This forum will shut down officially some time tomorrow. Copy any threads you want for blackmail purposes soon. Some day, maybe, the fortress will arise again.}}

And so the Troll Invasion ended. Perhaps ironically, the trolls did far less damage to Charas than the Charites did to themselves. Though eventually most people got over it and resumed business as normal, trying to forget the chaos of March and April as best they could, with Kijuki mostly handling site affairs.

===Other Charas happenings during April 2006====

==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?
* Anyone have logs of all the MSN chats from spring 2006? I know some important stuff was decided there.

==Sources==

This section will get integrated into the history eventually.

* 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
* Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you can’t read.

==Related articles==
* [[RRWP]]
* [[Pop]]
* [[Trevlac]]

Talk:Carmen

SaiKar — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:16:13 GMT

SaiKar:

Discushuns

== discushuns ==

i ? teh validitey of dis articul

cuz

u suck

::SaiKar? Is that you? [[User:Razor|Razor]] 22:03, 6 February 2007 (EST)
::: Um, no. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 22:16, 6 February 2007 (EST)

New members on Charas

SaiKar — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:24:38 GMT

SaiKar:

{{cleanup}}

== Noob vs Newbie: the Common Misconception ==
On Charas, and indeed on most forums, there is a certain disrespect for newer members or people with less knowledge of the forum. A few young egotistical kids that have no respect for any rules or standards of the forum get on everyone's nerves. These people get labelled as noobs (or n00bs). In short, a noob is someone who doesn't have a clue, much common sense, or any respect for anyone or anything on the forum.

Not everyone has this attitude while joining the forum of course. Newbies, newcomers to the forum, still don't really understand what is going on but aren't a jerk about it. It's not that hard to tell the difference between the two.

The following are common descprtions of noob and newbie behavior and how they compare.

* Noobs post without THOROUGHLY understanding the rules, expecting to know them already. Newbies may post without knowing the rules, but when said rules are pointed out, they generally read them and understand the basics.

* Noobs claim superiority over those who clearly are superior of them. Newbies are usually too lost or uncomfortable to get involved much at the beginning.

* In comic threads, Noobs plead for cameos, despite only being a member for 2 weeks. Newbies generally don't and just compliment the comics they like.

* Usually Noobs try to be cool by imitating other members or mentioning something that's always talked about. One example would be having Sephiroth in their name and/or having Cloud in their avatar and/or signature. (Sephiroth Rocks being a notable exception)

Everyone is a newbie at one point. It's not really a bad thing. Being a newbie just means you're new to the forum. Once some time passes and these people get comfortable the label goes away.

Being a noob is an attitude. Being a newbie is measure of time. The two labels are only partially related. Some new people avoid being noobs because they aren't insulting or egotistical. Other noobs stay noobs even long after they're no longer considered newbies simply because they keep the attitude of being a jerk.

==Mistreatment of Noobs and Newbies==
Unfortunately all newbies suffer under the shadow of the noobs. Noobs leave bitter memories in the minds of older members and they view every newcomer with some suspicion even if those people have done absolutely nothing wrong. The mistreatment of newbies is a major problem on Charas and is largely blamed for a slowing down of newer membership.

Noobs are a different story. Although this article may lead you to believe all those labeled as "noobs" are free game, this is hardly the case. The only group of people larger than noobs are the people who hate them and feel it's their responsibility to insult these people to either shape them up or, ideally, make them leave.

In the minority, however, are people who believe that all new people should be treated with just as much respect as older members. They see the flaming of these people as cruel and unnecessary. The idea is this: At one point in everyone's life, they were inexperienced with the internet. They didn't know the proper way to act online and simply wanted to have fun on the internet. Instead of driving potential users away, these few people believe that newbies should be pointed towards the rules and encouraged to shape up, rather than berated for their mistake.

Sadly, the number of people dedicated to helping newcomers to the website is too small to combat the excessively large amount of people who think their ridicule is acceptable. The fact that the noobs are almost BEGGING people to mock them doesn't help the problem either.

Tutorials:Save Point Names Tutorial

SaiKar — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:31:43 GMT

SaiKar:

'''Save Point Names Tutorial''' 
'''Written by: [[Sai'Kar]]'''

Have you noticed that when you save games with RPGMaker2000 or 2003 the name of the saved game is the name of the first character in the party? Wouldn't it be a lot cooler if the name of the saved game was the town or dungeon the game was saved in? Sure it would! Well, this tutorial will help you set that up.

I am going to explain a few things first. If you do not really care about why this works, just skip down to the coding.

Okay. Now, it seems like it should be pretty easy to do this, right? You just set up some code like this and it works fine, right? Well, no.

Note: '''this code does not really work''' and is only being included for explination 
<> Show choices: Save Game/Don't Save 
: [Save Game] Handler 
<> Change Hero Name: Alex's Name Town 
<> Open Save Menu 
: [Don't Save] Handler 
<> 
: End 
<> Change Hero Name: Alex's Name Alex

This code appears to give you the choice to save, change Alex's name to "Town" (an example for this tutorial) and then change the name back after you save. If you use this in-game, it will work just fine. HOWEVER, if you try to load that saved game, Alex's Name will stay "Town" forever... or at least until you try to save again. That's bad.

Why? Because when RPGMaker loads games, all events that were running when you saved the game are no longer running. That means that the event script never gets to the point where you change the name back.

However, if you are clever, you can fix this problem. The code to make it work is as follows:

Note: this code '''does''' work 
<> Show choices: Save Game/Don't Save 
: [Save Game] Handler 
<> Change Hero Name: Alex's Name Town 
<> Switch Operation [001: SAVING] ON 
<> Open Save Menu 
: [Don't Save] Handler 
<> 
: End

That is your save point. It turns the switch SAVING on before the game is saved. Then, you need a second event either on the same map or in a common event. Make sure that it has the trigger condition SAVING: ON (that is, the switch SAVING is ON) and is a PARALLEL PROCESS.

<>Wait 0.5 Sec 
<> Change Hero Name: Alex's Name Alex 
<> Switch Operation [001: SAVING] OFF

That event always activates when you are saving and will activate when you load your saved game because the switch SAVING is always active when you load the game! Thus Alex's name will be switched back to Alex and everthing is good.

If you understand all that, then you are ready to put this in your game! It really helps out and gives a game a more "professional" look, and is also really useful when you are looking at your saved game files.

Potential problems:

* If is possible, although unlikely, that the player will get into a random battle between when the name is switched to "Town" and before 0.5 seconds pass so it is switched back to "Alex". But it is only for one battle anyway and rarely happens, so do not worry about it.

* For this to work, you need to know who the front character in the party is. In this case, it is Alex. If the player can switch their party at will, you probably want to change ALL CHARACTERS' names to "Town" and then ALL back to their proper names. A big pain really, but it *does* work.

* Character names are somewhat limited in letters so you may need to compress the name down. "The Sanctuary of the Fire Spirit" might end up just being "Fire Sanct". But it's way better than nothing.

Tutorials:Boss Battle Tutorial

SaiKar — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:23:27 GMT

SaiKar:

'''Boss Battle Tutorial''' 
'''Written by: [[Sai'Kar]]'''

==Introduction==

This is yet another one of those "tutorials no one asked for but I wrote anyway" things. It is real long but hopefully you find it useful.

I have played a few RPGs made with the maker, and I noticed something very unusual. Most of these RPGs have very interesting, deep stories. Their designers spend a good deal of time on graphics, too, making cool battle animations and detailed towns. But once I get into battle with a major enemy, it is simply a matter of choosing my strongest skills over and over again until the enemy drops dead, healing and hoping that the enemy does not randomly pick its strongest moves too many times in a row.

How terribly unepic. Boss battles are supposed to be the most exciting battles in the game, where the player has to choose wisely what moves to use when. But apparently most people make bosses like they do any other enemy: give them high stats and a few pretty strong skills and call it good.

You can do better then that. This little guide gives a few tips in how to mix it up a bit and create unique, interesting, and exciting boss battles for your games. All of these strategies are very basic and do not require a custom battle system or anything other then an understanding of skills and the battle system.

==What is a boss?==

There are basically two types of battles in a game: normal battles, and boss battles. Normal battles are the ones you get while running around on the overworld, or random battles in dungeons, or wherever you find enemies. They are not important to the plot but are used to convey a sense of danger and to give the player useful EXP, gold, and items. The player can often beat these battles with a minimum of effort using only basic strategies. For example, a group of wolves in the icy mountains can be defeated with a mid-level fire spell and a few quick physical attacks. No problem.

Boss battles, on the other hand, represent truly dangerous foes and so a new level of strategy should be required. Bosses usually have higher stats then normal enemies – much higher, in fact, but that should not be the end of it. Bosses should use their skills effectively with timing and take advantage of any allies and wild cards they have in battles to pose a much greater threat. In short, they should fight like the heroes do, but ultimately still not be strong enough to beat a truly determined, skillful, prepared player.

Not all bosses require all of the steps below to be effective. Some bosses can be quite strong but dumb. Others can have lower stats but use their moves effectively. And still others can be nothing but a long cut scene designed to explain some new skill or plot element. How you make these battles is up to you.

==Before you open the database==

Bosses are more then stats and a listing of skills: they are characters in your game, and should be treated like you would treat the heroes, but to a lesser degree. How do you want your boss to fight? Do they specialize in a particular technique? Do they use mostly physical attacks or do they blow stuff up with magic? Are they smart enough to use skills at the right time, or do they just haphazardly attack with whatever they have?

Going even further, what does the boss want to accomplish? Is he really trying to kill the heroes? Is this just a test of some sort? Maybe the party is attacking the boss and he is trying to buy time to get away. Or perhaps he is trying to complete a ritual and you are interfering.

Treat your bosses like NPC characters. They have goals and ideas. Even the simplest guardian of a tunnel can be made more interesting by thinking a bit about how he would fight. If you give your bosses some real development before you start making stats then you will end up with a much cleaner and more exiting encounter.

==Using stats effectively==

The stats you give your bosses in RPGMaker can go a long way between making an encounter too easy or ridiculously difficult. I cannot tell you what stats to make your bosses but I can give general tips.

Hit points are a measure of how long the battle will last. Since bosses are supposed to be exciting and tense encounters they should have more HP then normal foes. 5-10 times the HP of a normal monster works well. Any less and the battle ends before the suspense can build, and any more and it can drone on a bit too long.

MP limits your bosses ability to use his skills. Unless you have a good reason for wanting the boss to run out of MP (a very strong boss that you might have to wear down, for example) give them a lot of MP and do not worry about it.

Attack, defense, mind, and speed should all be above the level of a normal enemy. How much above is dependent on how you want the boss to fight. Good swordsman should have a nice, high attack stat. Fast ninjas should be very quick in the speed area to get in more attacks. Mages should have high mind: this will make their spells more effective and also make skills that depend on the mid stat do less damage.

Do not be frustrated if you need to tweak your skills after testing the boss. Changing the numbers the easiest way to adjust an encounter. Fight your boss a few times, then make adjustments if you think you need them.

==Interesting skills==

As an example boss, let us say that you are making a mage that specializes in fire spells. You could give him a single-enemy fire spell, and a stronger one, and maybe an all-enemy fire spell or two. The boss would be able to do damage and he might be difficult to defeat.

But that just would not be any fun, would it? Heroes get special skills, so why not give your bosses some too!

Following the fire mage example, what about a skill that does not do a whole lot of damage, but lowers the party’s fire resistance? That is easy to program: just check the box under attributes marked “reduce resist”. So if your boss uses that skill early, then all his fire spells will do more damage and he will be stronger overall.

Perhaps you could make a fire-based spell that inflicts a status effect too. You could make a “burned” status that lowers defense or does damage over time. Or maybe a “berserk” would be appropriate: a spell that ignites the fires within the heart and makes your characters attack in a blind rage.

There are many, many types of skills you can give your bosses and your heroes too. Check the “absorb” box and the skill will not only do damage, but the user will gain that much life as well. You can absorb MP, attack, defense, or any other stat too! Or maybe you could add a support character in the boss fight that does nothing but heal the main boss, or perhaps give him more MP.

Even if you want to stick with pure damage spells, mix it up a bit. If the character specializes in a unique sword art, give him some unique moves that do varying damage and have different effects. Sure you can shoot a fireball at an opponent, but you can also cause a volcano to erupt, make a flaming meteor crash down, cause the ground to rip apart and shoot up fire, and much more. Be creative with your skills! Just the descriptions and animations alone can go a long way towards improving the feel of the battle.

By varying the way a boss fights, you can make a player think about how to counter him. Is it better to keep doing damage or cure poison right away? If the boss lowers your stats, should you use some of your skills to up them back up or not waste the time? These questions make the encounter vastly more interesting as it forces the player to stop just using their strongest skill and '''think'''.

==Fight Smarter, not Harder==

Ah. Here we come to the crux of the matter. No matter how cool your bosses skills are, or how balanced their stats, if they are using skills randomly it will still seem like you are fighting a stupid computer. Fortunately for us, RPGMaker lets really creative programmers have a lot of fun.

When adding a skill to an enemy’s list, the two items at the top of the box are of particular interest in boss battles: preconditions and priority. Preconditions allow you to set the conditions that a boss will use a move under. Priority is a number between 1 and 99 that balances how often the enemy will use this move.

Preconditions are explained briefly below.

None – the default. This means that, no matter what is going on, the boss can choose this move. If they actually choose it or not is dependent on the priority of this move and all other possible moves. Using none adds an element of randomness to your bosses actions, which can make them seem more chaotic. Overusing none makes all the bosses moves random though, which is what we are trying to avoid. Still, it has its uses.

Switch – this allows you to have the enemy use a move if a certain switch is on. As an example, lets say that getting a certain item, the Nullifier, turns a switch OFF. If you did not get that item the switch will still be on. So you could make the boss use a powerful move unless you got the Nullifier and turned the switch off. This precondition can be sneaky but is not used a lot except in cutscenes and in examples such as above.

Turns Elapsed – very powerful command. This lets you make a boss use a move exactly when you tell them to. Two numbers determine when the move will be used in Ax + B form. The first number, A, is how many turns you want between the move. The 2nd number, B, is when you want the move to be used first. So if you want a boss to use a move every 4th turn, starting with the 2nd (turn 2, 6, 10, etc), put in 4 and 2. If you want a boss to use a move only on the 5th turn of battle, put in 0 and 5.

Monsters Present – this command allows you to adjust how a boss will perform depending on how many other enemies are in the battle. If you make an encounter with two enemies, and one dies, then this could be used to give the remaining boss a powerful move. In that example, you would want to set the monsters present from 1 to 1.

Monster HP – this command lets you make a boss use different moves as he starts losing HP. So if you want a boss to use his most powerful moves when he is at 25% HP or less, set the numbers in this precondition from 0 to 25.

Monster MP –same as above, but with MP. This could be used to have the boss replenish his MP when it gets low, or maybe start using skills that require less MP. Keep in mind that when an enemy is out of MP any skills they have cannot be used, so be sure to give them an attack command or they will just sit there.

Party Level Average – this command can let you scale the boss depending on the party’s level. If the party’s level is lower then you expect then maybe the boss should not be so harsh. If it is higher then you can use this command to make the boss uses more powerful spells. The numbers are the range of levels that the average must be for this command to activate.

Party Exhaustion – like monster HP, but for the party. If you want to make a boss that changes strategy after he softens up the party, then this command can be useful.

Using these commands can be tricky, but even using one or two can make your boss seem very smart. Remember that move above that lowers your fire resist? The boss could use that on turn two, and then use a powerful fire move on turn 3! Wow! That alone makes the boss seem clever even though you knew he would do exactly that.

All that said, DO NOT IGNORE THE PRIORITY! If you really really want the boss to use a move on the 15th turn, make a Turns Elapsed precondition but make the priority very high – like 90, to ensure that the boss does that move. On the other hand, it is very easy to overscript your bosses and make them predictable. I would suggest keeping the priorities in the 40 to 60 range unless you really want otherwise.

==Double the Bosses, Double the Fun==

Squaring off against the antagonist can be fun, but when it is four against one the guy is pretty badly outnumbered. Even if he is fast, if you heal effectively it can be very difficult to kill you outright. By having more then one enemy in the encounter, however, the party is dealt more damage quickly and has to focus on defeating more then one foe at a time.

When dealing with multiple enemies you need to be careful about stats. Two normal bosses in one battle is harder then twice as hard. A single boss should challenge the player well, but two can easily overwhelm them if care is not taken. Be sure to lower the stats of your enemies a bit to make it at least somewhat fair.

Keep in mind that most players will focus entirely on one enemy first, killing it and then moving on. Make sneaky use of the Monsters Present command to add new skill as enemies die, keeping the players on their toes.

==Sample bosses==

All of these bosses are actually from my game CoD2, but I have distilled them down to their essence for this tutorial. You can steal the bosses, modify them, do whatever you want to them; they're yours. I am including them to give good examples of how you can make boss battles seem different and more exciting and to make the computer seem more intelligent and less random. I have included some basic moves that the enemies might use. Obviously real bosses should have a few more, but these are just to give you an idea of what I am thinking here.

Unless I say otherwise, all the priorities are set to the default 50. This helps the battles be less scripted by giving the boss multiple options at any given point. Keep in mind that a priority 50 can be chosen over a priority 60, but it not too likely.

===Twin Golems===

Background: A nameless sorcerer created these two golems long ago to defeat his pursuers, and for many years they have guarded the only underground route through a section of mountains. As the heroes approach they see the bones of those two tried to make it through the pass before the golems attack suddenly.

Strategy: A basic “guardian of the dungeon” boss. The encounter includes two rock golems that are actually the same monster put into the battle twice. Thus they are identical in every way from attack patterns to HP. They are a typical "stupid" boss that doesn't fight very wisely but can still be challenging. The golems were created to attack anyone that comes through the pass so they have no sense of strategy at all other then to defeat everyone. If one falls they become more desperate to continue guarding the pass and use stronger moves.

They have high attack and defense but magic hurts them greatly and they are quite slow.

Basic move ideas:
*Attack – no precondition
*Double attack – no precondition, priority 40
*Throw rock (single enemy earth attack) every 3rd turn, starting with the first.
*Collapse Roof (all enemy earth attack) – Monsters Present from 1 to 1 (i.e. one golem has died), priority 45

Defeating the Twin Golems:
The player would probably try to kill one golem first, using physical attacks and magic until they realize magic works better. After the first golem falls the Collapse Roof move will force them to heal more, but with only one golem alive the rest of the battle is not too hard.

===Mithia the Assassin===

Background: The Todama Corporation hired this assassin to kill the heroes while they sleep in a hotel. Unbeknowest to Mithia, the heroes were still awake when she came through the window. She tries to escape but a battle begins.

Strategy: This is more of a cutscene encounter then a real boss, but it can still be very effective. Mithia wants to run but would not mind killing the heroes instead if they prove weak. She is very fast and has good attack but has almost no defense. If too much time goes by she will abandon her mission and flee.

Basic Move Ideas:
* Attack – no precondition
* Double attack – every 2rd turn, starting with 2nd, priority 55
* Deadly Strike (can kill instantly) – turn 1, priority 60
* Deadly Strike – Party Exhaustion between 0 and 25% (the party still has a lot of health)
* Escape – turn 12, priority 99

Defeating Mithia:
Mithia is defeatable only if the players start doing damage quickly. If they heal, use status effects, up their stats, or otherwise play it too safe then they probably will not do enough damage to defeat Mitha before turn 12. If they do defeat her, in addition to EXP, she drops her Katana before escaping out the window.

===Devanz, The Orb User===

Background: Devanz is a high-ranking leader of an evil mage clan trying to take over the world. After destroying a town with lightning from the sky, the heroes storm his base to kill him and exact revenge. Devanz is in his element and is ready.

Strategy: This makes a fairly challenging mid-game boss by using both multiple opponents, well-programmed timing, and skills that work well together. Devanz specializes in thunder magic and knows some powerful spells. His greatest asset in the battle, however, are two orbs. These magical orbs have no intelligence but will blast the party with magic until destroyed. Devanz takes advantage of his orbs by lowering the party’s thunder resistance but otherwise plays it safe. When they are smashed he does what he can to defeat the party alone. Because Devanz defends often until the orbs are destroyed this can be a pretty long encounter.

Basic Moves List (Devanz):
* Attack – no precondition, priority 10
* Thunder Shield (ups lighting resist of user) – turn 1, priority 70
* Lightning (single enemy lighting attack) – no precondition
* Defend – Monsters Present between 2 and 3, priority 55
* Mana Shatter (single enemy, lowers all magic resistances) – every 5th turn starting with the 2nd, priority 45
* Shock Wave (all enemy lighting attack) – Monsters present between 1 and 1

Basic Moves List (Orb):
* Lightning – no precondition
* Shock Wave – Monster HP from 0 to 25% (they use this when they become heavily damaged) – priority 45

Defeating Devanz:
The players will quickly find the orbs annoying and figure (correctly) that they have less HP then Devanz and focus on one first, then the other. After seeing his orbs destroyed Devanz will stop defending and use his Shock Wave move often to try to blast the party into submission. The hard part of the battle is surviving against three enemies; once Devanz is alone unless the party is very low on resources the battle shouldn't be that difficult. Putting a cap on Devanz’s MP might make this battle a bit more fair.

===Gororath, Avatar of the Woods===

Background: Gororath was a normal druid in the woods before he was accepted by the very heart of the forest itself. There he became the wood’s avatar – a powerful man that can command the forces of the land itself. He seeks out those that defile the woods, and it just happens the heroes are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Strategy: This might make a good boss for upper-level parties that are powerful and think they can handle anything. Gorotath is alone 1 vs 4 but has a plan. By slowly lowering the parties HP and resistance with subtle tactics he makes himself look weak until the party is cocky but somewhat vulnerable. Then he uses his strongest move, Overrun, to attempt to destroy the party in one big attack or at least knock out some of the weaker members.

Basic Move List:
* Rose’s Thorns (all-enemy earth attack that can poison) – Party Exhausion between 0 and 20%
* Brambles - (single-enemy earth attack that lowers earth resist)
* Overrun (strong all-enemy earth attack) – Party Exhaustion between 40 and 100%

Defeating Gororath:
Vigilance! Get that poison cured! Keep your HP high! If you see through his strategy then he will never get a chance to lull the party into a false sense of security and will be fairly easy to defeat.

===Crimson Dragon===

Background: For many a century this vile worm has gathered his hoarde in a mountain cave. Although scarred by many battles he has never been defeated and thinks himself invincible. The heroes hear about the rare artifacts he has collected and decide to try their luck.

Strategy: The Crimson Dragon makes a good optional boss. His stats are high to the point of being unfair and requires the party to have fire-resistant equipment to survive. The dragon attacks with his claws for a while until unleashing his Meteor Swarm move right before using his overwhelming Eternal Flame breathe attack for massive damage. If the party has not properly prepared this combo should be able to kill them all outright.

Basic Move List:
* Attack – no precondition
* Double attack – no precondition, priority 55
* Meteor Swarm (all enemy fire move that lowers fire resist) – Every 10th turn, starting with turn 9.
* Eternal Flame (very powerful all-enemy fire attack) – Every 10th turn starting with turn 10.

Defeating the Crimson Dragon:

This battle empasizes using the active battle system to survive. Once the player figures out the Meteor Swarm / Eternal Flame combo, the main healer should be ready to use their strongest whole-party cure spell right after they see Meteor Swarm. The player should also absolutely NEED that fire resistant equipment, which could be from a subquest or just wise shopping in a nearby city. Even so, depending on who was attacked last and how well they are curing, the Meteor Swarm / Eternal Flame might kill two or three people and while the player is trying to heal the claws could finish them off. This is an optional boss battle though, so feel free to make him tough.

===Glory===

Background: Glory is a being of pure holy power and is the guardian of an ancient temple of light. She tests all that seek her for worthiness.

Strategy: I am probably cruel for even suggesting this one. Glory does not have too much HP but can cure herself. She bogs the party down with blindness and silence status effects and does some damage. If the party hurts her greatly she uses her Concussion move to stun them and then heals. After a good amount of time she abandons this approach and just tries to kill the party outright with overwhelming magic.

Basic Move List:
* Attack – no precondition, priority 10
* Blind – Monster HP between 50 and 100%
* Silence – Monster HP between 50 and 100%
* Holy Spark (single enemy holy attack) – No preconditions
* Concussion (all enemy stun move that does minor damage) – Monster HP between 0 and 50%. Turns the switch HEAL on. Priority 70
* Mega Cure (heals user) – If switch HEAL is on. Turns switch HEAL off. Priority 70
* Enlightenment (all enemy holy attack) – Every turn starting with turn 25, priority 99

Defeating Glory:
YOU CANNOT! Fwa ha ha! Well okay, of course you can. Silencing Glory would make her utterly useless so she should be very resistant to that. If the player can do a lot of damage then they can keep hurting her for more then she can cure and break through that way. Or they player could wait out the 25 turns and try to kill her while she stops curing, assuming they can survive the onslaught of Enlightenment. In its current form Glory is a very mean battle but is a good example of how to make a boss difficult without giving them high stats or overwhelming power; even status effects can be deadly if used by smart enemies.

==Grab Your Sword and Fight!==

Well, that is about it for this tutorial. It's long enough, huh? And this only emcombases basic startegies; there is a lot more you can do using in-battle events! Anyway, I hope you found some of this useful. Remember that your bosses, like the rest of the game, are only as exciting as you make them be. Have fun and think of some cruel ideas!

[[Category:Tutorials]]

Talk:Midnight

SaiKar — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:31:38 GMT

SaiKar:

Why did you even start this page if you had nothing to say about it?

Talk:Gary Kertopermono

SaiKar — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:30:34 GMT

SaiKar:

==This page==
In theory, Gary's page should be /Gary CXJK instead of his last name.

GaryCXJk. Capital CXJ, lower case k. Get it right. Also, it doesn't really matter, since I lately often use Gary Kertopermono for my work.
--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 08:06, 18 January 2007 (EST)

:Yeah but I thought the idea was to have the name of the page the same as the member name.[[User:Razor|Razor]] 15:32, 18 January 2007 (EST)

: You do realize that having the lowercase k makes no damn sense if it's an initial for your last name, right? If anything it should be capitalized and your CXJ title thing in lowercase. I was just reading this article and thought it was so funny you'd snap at people for completely backwards convensions. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]

Talk:RRWP

SaiKar — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:28:45 GMT

SaiKar:

==Judgment==
{{quote|text=and people always believed that RRWP will return for the final judgement}}
What.
: Yeah. People need to stop making totally random unfunny crap.

Talk:History of Charas

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 11:29:15 GMT

SaiKar:

Just so everyone knows, this article is a massive work in progress. It ends right now still in 2004. I'm going to try to take it up to the present and will be using the topic created on the forums to supliment my own research/rambling memories. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]

Oh, and I've essentially given up trying to avoid putting my bias into the article. The section labeled "The Dark Age" pissed me off to no end and caused a ton of trouble for the forum. [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]

:I'll try to get rid of some bias, if needed, and I will try to add some more light in it.--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 09:58, 19 January 2007 (EST)
:Okay, never mind. Somehow this article is too messed up to fix.--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 09:59, 19 January 2007 (EST)

::It's not really messed up. It's just very long. <_< [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 10:32, 19 January 2007 (EST)
:::Dude, you really need a life. And from what I've read about this whole TrollKingdom thing, I really don't like it. It's like, when I'm not around, things get really whack. As if the whole forum's on crack. Ya dig?--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 10:37, 19 January 2007 (EST)
::::I like typing, so what? And I dig about TK. Not some of my better moments. But I didn't see any bright ideas from anyone else on how to stop an infinite influx of Raffles-esque trolls. We did the best we could. [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 10:39, 19 January 2007 (EST)
:::::Actually, I did like how you handle it. It's just that I didn't like the whole "ZOMG IT R TEH FAULT OF TEH MODERATORZ UND SAIKARZ DAT WE R IN TEH SHITZ". They basically put blame on others of their own failure. That is so weak. And you really had the right to leave, seeing as moderators and administrators can't do everything.--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 10:54, 19 January 2007 (EST)

Oh, and I would also like to add this, because it is a great quote which should be used for this article, to conclude the troll article:

{{Quote|name=SaiKar|text=Sanctuary Fortress will be closed soon. I'll make it a forum invisible to all but admins and there will be no activity here.

The trolls have been repelled through a combination of good strategy, bad ideas, and dumb luck. Though far too often the real enemies are ourseleves and our inabilities to listen or compromise or admit we're wrong. No no, don't feel guilty. I'm just sayin'.

This forum will shut down officially some time tomorrow. Copy any threads you want for blackmail purposes soon. Some day, maybe, the fotress will arise again.}}

Maybe just the center part, but it's really a good closure for the article.
--[[User:GaryCXJk|GaryCXJk]] 11:39, 19 January 2007 (EST)

: Kay. When I finish the troll article that is next that will go on there. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 12:20, 19 January 2007 (EST)

--Bonk!--
After the troll wars, you've got to mention the bonking thing. It's amazing how such a simple idea of keeping people inline exploded so terribly, with absolutely no help from Kijuki. Wait. Except, he was helping the exploding. But he wasn't helping us. And that's what I meant.[[User:Razor|Razor]] 05:14, 21 January 2007 (EST)
: In good time, in good time. - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 06:29, 21 January 2007 (EST)

SaiKar

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 09:07:29 GMT

SaiKar: Personal articles about ourselves are SO allowed to be biased :p

{{CharasUserInfo|name=SaiKar|pic=SaiKarAvatar.png|join=Feb 2003|stat=Active|pos=Administrator|profile=http://charas-project.net/forum/viewmember.php?userid=261|bday=December 23, 1982|gender=Male}}
'''SaiKar''' (AKA '''Harvey/Jason Steffke''') is the oldest (as of registration date) active member of [[Charas-Project|Charas]]. He became a Request mod, then All of All mod, and finally Administrator of the forums. Though he owns nothing on the site directly, he generally takes care of affairs when [[Alex]], the site owner, is not around. Which is all the time basically.

==Charas History==

===Early Days===
Harvey joined Charas under the login SaiKar upon suggestion of his friend to share his battlecharacter sets that he had created for his own game. Receptions to the sprites was very positive and Sai started to get requests, which he answered for a time before burning out. Sai joined the [[VG Reapers]], the largest spriting group on Charas at the time. The image of someone trying to help the community was enhanced with Sai tried to solve the [[RRWP]] vs [[Gary Kertopermono|Gary]] arguments that were raging at the time. When Alex decided to appoint new moderators, Sai was appointed [[Moderator]] of [[All of All]] and [[Requests]] forum on Feb 29, 2004. Some of his policies set in the Requests forum are still in use today.

===Growing Power===
Sai resigned from All of All moderator on July 23rd, 2004. The actual reason wasn’t public knowledge until now, but it was in reality him being tired of cleaning up after Darkfox; the latter was starting a great number of personal feuds at the time that were spilling into the forum.

When the first global moderators were chosen, Sai was on the list but declined Alex due to growing real life concerns. Yet he saw the general state of Charas deteriorating under Darkfox and Kijuki’s global modship; the former has already been discussed and the latter was much more well-minded but rarely around when he was needed. [[Reain]] and [[Trevlac]], new All of All mods, were also doing little. In his panic, Sai sent a private message to Alex asking for a global moderator position himself. Instead, Alex made him an [[Administrator]]; someone with access to the control panel to appoint moderators, create new forums, and ban members!

===Quarrels with the Staff===
Darkfox immediately objected to SaiKar’s insane jump of power, making many accusations of impending power abuse. Several other moderators murmured in discontent, but with Alex supporting Sai nothing really could be done.

Sai took over his duties rather quickly. When Reain resigned as All of All moderator, Sai organized a public election to replace him. He also fired Trevlac for continued lack of presence and expanded the election to two winners. [[Red Giant]] and [[Carmen]] became part of the staff as All of All mods.

For many months afterward Sai was playing Final Fantasy XI, an online game that takes up the full screen. As such Sai wasn’t on the site very much and missed several rather important events, such as the coming of [[Lord Raffles]]. The staff ([[GhostClown]] and Carmen in particular) grew discontented with his lack of being around and began to criticize his policies, claiming he was “out of touch.” Which, to be fair, had some truth to it. The staff often complained at his actions, saying that Alex wanted him to run everything by the private forum first, and yet other staff members went ahead with their policies and complained of “ganging up” when they were called on it later. Some called for a new administrator but there weren’t any willing candidates that could be trusted. The staff became polarized and no meaningful decisions were made as a group, and the progress of the site stagnated.

===The New Charas===
However Carmen and GhostClown’s policies were not terribly well liked and they made a number of enemies, in particular [[Osmose]] and [[Midnight]]. They had a heavy-handed moderation style to them, and eventually people got rather annoyed at things being locked or deleted for no real particular good reason. [[Robotam]] approached Sai’Kar and asked for his permission to start an investigation. Sai granted it, seeing a public hearing as a good way to get rid of his rebellious staff.

Public opinion strongly sided against the two and Sai made his decision to remove some of Carmen’s powers in the infamous [[Charas Judgment]] on March 17th. Co-conspirators Osmose and Midnight were appointed moderators on March 22nd. Many new policies on why threads would be locked and the future were introduced. GhostClown and Carmen retired shortly afterward.

This point essentially marks the time when Sai took a much more active role in the development on Charas, now that he had a staff that wouldn’t fight him on every point.

===The Troll Invasion===
TrollKingdom began sending trolls to stir up trouble on April 9th, mere days after the little revolution. Essentially, the entire reason there was a [[Troll Invasion]] was because Sai got sick of having to cross-check IPs and writing styles and always be on active alert to ban troublemakers. In order to counter the trolls tactics, a new forum [[Sanctuary Fortress]] was established to discuss the situation and try to keep the general population from making the situation worse. Behind the scenes, almost four solid days of MSN chats between staff members tracked down the source, located another forum that had been attacked, and tracked down of Alex to implement an IP ban feature.

On April 13th the trolls were still coming despite everything done, and, weary of constantly being ready to ban someone, Sai authorized a Charas flood on TrollKingdom, the only such action in Charas’s history, of which many are thankful for.

Bizarrely, the attack stopped the invasion, but Charas itself was fragmented by the actions. The situation was made worse when Sai took a few days off. People accused him of acting irresponsibly, of abandoning the forum. Sai decided to resign as administrator, but was talked out of it at basically the last moment by Midnight. Eventually everyone calmed down anyway.

===Aftermath to Present===
Other stuff happened, but nothing of it really defining of Sai, and so I’ll leave what happens next for a history article. Sai is still the administrator and still deals with stuff on occasion, and there haven’t been any sightings of lynch mobs in record time!

==Personality Stuff==

===Administrative Style===
Sai occasionally preaches a “new Charas” style of administration; rules designed so that the members don’t need the moderators and function on their own. This rarely works in practice as there is often someone out to stir up trouble or oblivious to the fact that they’re being annoyed. But it’s a goal!

SaiKar is something of a narcissist and enjoys typing up large triumphant speeches whenever possible to introduce a new forum feature or some judgment on a current issue. If anyone actually reads these speeches is unknown.

Sai administers the site mostly from afar, letting individual moderators handle as many problems as they can and work them out without management hanging over their heads. However when the situation gets out of control Sai has no problem diving into the action, often in the form of another big speech. Generally people listen when Sai gets involved; those that don’t tend to get threatened, or worse.

Sai believes he is a fair administrator, though since he’s writing his own wiki article that’s hardly unbiased.

===Art and Programming===
Sai is a spriter and dabbles in making all sorts of resources for RPGMaker, though his best and most commonly known one is battlecharacter sets. He has made at least 15 sets based off of either Mack and Blue characters or generated characters from scratch and about the same number of RTP characters with added attack animations and status effect poses. He submitted a few resources to the battlecharacter generator.

Sai is also an artist, but a bad one. He never practices to get any better and occasionally complains about this. Perhaps ironically, at least a dozen people are better at drawing Sai'Kar than he is.

He has been working sporadically on several RPGs over the years. Control of Destiny 2 is a traditional questing RPG and is what the vast majority of his spriting work was created for. Outpost was an experiment in sim to manage a city that was partially successful. Control of Destiny Tactics is a more recent project to create a Final Fantasy Tactics-type engine that is still in the development phase (and by the looks of it will be there for a very long time to come).

===Friends===
Midnight and Osmose are Sai’s two closest friends on the site and are largely responsible for him not going nuts at some point and retiring for good. Over the years they have acted as advisors to Sai in making administrative decisions and the three clocked about 34 trillion hours in MSN chats since becoming friends. Realizing that they were essentially the “power behind the throne”, he finally gave in to their constant nagging to make them real moderators during the Charas Judgment. They were both given weak positions so that nobody would complain about appointing friends as mods too much, and then both upgraded of All of All mods, the positions they currently hold.

SaiKar is generally good friends with most of the rest of the moderation staff, particularly [[Warxe PhoenixBlade]], [[Razor]], and [[FFL2and3rocks]]. There isn’t really anyone on the site that Sai strongly dislikes anymore.

To the best of his knowledge, Sai is the only part of the moderation staff that Alex trusts explicitly.

===The Sai’Kar Character===
SaiKar’s login is based on Sai’Kar, a female character in the RPG Control of Destiny 2 that he has been working on for the past forever. Sai is probably one of the most recognizable faces on Charas, and several forum members have included Sai in their own arts of work.

===Gender Confusion===
Because of his female avatar, many '''many''' people thought he was a girl, and it's a common mistake even recently. It is rumored (and almost certainly true) that the "gender" field of the Charas profile was added because so many people thought Sai was a girl in real life.

===Historical Trivia===
* First post: http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=1657&forumid=2&catid=2
* In the original battlecharacter request topic, Sai only fulfilled three of four actual requests before quitting. But the reputation as a spriter stuck for years and was only really replaced by a reputation as part of the staff.
* Sai actually “hacked” into threads in the private forum and also read private messages by using URL abuse. Sai told Alex both of these things after a time, who patched up the bugs.

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:People who have submitted Generator resources]][[Category:People who have submitted Complete Resources resources]][[Category:Charas-Project SysOps]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

History of Charas

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:54:58 GMT

SaiKar: Spicing it up with avatars and better formatting for adding minor events

{{Memory}}

(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.

==2003==
===The Beginning===
[[Image:AlexAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Alex]], the MASTER, was around near every day|right]]
The forum was established on January 19th, 2003 with this likely as its [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2 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!!!!”''

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between January 2003 and January 2004
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

==2004==
===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.

[[Image:GaryCXJkAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Gary]]'s feud with RRWP dominated the forum|right]]
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 Kertopermono|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 “RRWP vs Gary Kertopermono, Welcome in the arena!!!” 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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between January 2004 and Feburary 29th, 2004
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

===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.

[[Double_account#wahba|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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between Feburary 29th, 2004 and September 28th, 2004.
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

===Life After Alex===
[[Image:SaiKarAvatar.png|100px|thumb|Seeing [[SaiKar]]'s name in admin yellow caused a stir!|right]]
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.

[[Image:ElectionProp2.png|300px|thumb|Propaganda was the best part of the election (click the image for full size and better color depth)|right]]
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.

[[Image:ElectionProp1.png|300px|thumb|More propaganda|right]]
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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between September 28th, 2004 and December 1st, 2004.
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

==2005==
===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.

[[Image:LordRafflesAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Trolls%2C_tools_and_other_rejects#Lord Raffles|Lord Raffles]] is a jerk|right]]
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 [[trolls|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 SMB 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):

{{Quote|name=[[SaiKar]]|text=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.}}

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.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between December 1st, 2004 and August 1st, 2005
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

===Oppression and Conspiracy===
Despite being banned, Raffles didn’t get the hint. He registered a number of other logins and immediately started doing suspicious stuff on them. The staff, taking Alex’s banning of Raffles as precedent, banned these double accounts as well. A small-scale secret war between the mods and Raffles took place over the next few months. Darkfox and SaiKar, working as a team, became quite adept at finding a suspicious login, IP matching it to Raffles, and banning it sometimes even before its first post. The staff kept this quiet to prevent a witch hunt and return to the more panicked times.

The staff also fired the inactive Red Giant in almost the same manner as they fired Trevlac; they announced attention to remove him, Red returned and said he was sorry, the staff decided it was too late for that and fired him. Also, Ghostclown became a global mod and [[Warxe]] and [[Razor]], two well-liked and generally popular guys, joined the staff, the former as [[RPGMaker Programming]] and [[Tutorials]] mod and the latter got [[Forum Gaming]], and Carmen took over Requests in addition to All of All. Oddly enough, having to be on the constant watch meant the staff was working together better then they had since Sai’s admin appointment.

The rest of the forum was mostly uneasy because of Raffles. Despite the best work of the staff a few Raffles logins spread around word that Raffles was still sneaking onto the site. [[Charaman]], a Raffles supporter, also posted messages from Raffles and that added to the tension.

Eventually though Raffles’s attempts to disrupt the site became less potent and people relaxed. And they began to wonder about a few things. Why were the hardliner mods still cracking down so hard on spam? When Raffles was around it was easier to justify, but now that he was gone, it began to look less like security and more like needless squeezing the fun out of things.

[[Image:CarmenAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Carmen]], the most influential mod at the time, went a bit too far|right]]
Ghostclown, though a hardliner, stayed mostly under the radar and did a decent job as global mod. Carmen though almost went out of her way to make enemies in blatant shows of moderator force. Osmose, who had hated her essentially since he joined the forum, had a field day pointing out her stranger moves. [[Midnight]], a once popular member that had dropped out for a while before coming back, had one hell of a feud with her that ended with Carmen saying disturbing things like “Don't get in a fight with me, you won't win.”

Carmen made other enemies, but the reason these two people are being mentioned is that they are the best friends of SaiKar on Charas. The private forum had a discussion where Kijuki was trying to call Carmen on the point and Sai jumped in to try to emphasize how bad moderators fighting was getting, but Carmen shrugged it off and accused everyone of ganging up on her. A new resolve began to burn in Sai to gain his control over policy back. At this point Sai was more-or-less resigned to not being able to sway the staff through diplomacy, but the abuses became so blatant that he decided to take a more forceful approach if only the circumstances would present themselves.

====Other Events====
Other Charas happenings between August 1st 2005 and March 2006
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

==2006==
===The Charas Judgment===
The Charas Judgment itself is one of the smallest pieces of history time-wise, taking place over a few weeks at the end of March 2006 and was essentially the violent reaction to months of built up population annoyance against tight moderator control over the forum. Several relatively unimportant people quickly rose in power while others fell from high in a matter of days and drastically different policies on what would be allowed were put into effect. Depending on which side you supported, it was either a revolution or a mutiny, but it’s hard to argue against the long-term effects it had on how Charas is run today.

For a year Sai had stewed on how to remove the oppressive moderators without getting himself fired without any real good ideas until one landed right in front of him. Razor and [[Robotam]], the community contest moderator (a very minor position) discussed on MSN how bad the lockings were getting and decided to seek help. Robotam approached Sai and asked for some sort of action. Sai decided that the time was right and encouraged Robotam to create a public thread on the All of All forum asking for an investigation. Knowing this would immediately get locked, Sai promised Robotam his admin protection of the thread to prevent people from mucking with it.

[[Image:RobotamAvatar.png|100px|thumb|[[Robotam]], dissatisfied with Carmen's modding, took action|right]]
On March 14th, 2006 Robotam posted [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15936&forumid=12&catid=6 the thread] bringing attention to the massive number of moderator actions by Carmen and Ghostclown that month alone (70!) including the aforementioned permission from Sai. Carmen and Ghostclown locked it anyway, saying essentially that they didn’t care what Sai said; this sort of moderator criticism was highly inappropriate. Sai showed up, unlocked it, told everyone it was okay to speak their mind, and gave them both a stern warning to the mods not to touch that thread at all until it was done. Carmen and GC edited (and later deleted) their posts and said nothing more. And the fun began!

A whole 12 pages, and the uncharacteristic part is, the vast majority of it is actually civil debate between people with somewhat different viewpoints. Except for MrMister, who was mainly trying to use weird examples to make the whole thing seem stupid. Most of the people that responded found that the lockings and deletions were. Sleepy users that hadn’t been seen much showed up for the event and tossed in their two cents. [[DragonBlaze]] is largely credited for making some of the best points, as is [[Arcanagirl]].

Naturally, behind the scenes, there was a lot of shady MSN talk, mostly between conspirators Osmose, Midnight, SaiKar, and probably a few other trusted mods like Razor and FFL. Most everyone supported some sort of revolution? But what? And would word reach Alex and he react harshly? Sai hesitated for a bit, but decided meh, what the hell, and posted the [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15968&forumid=12&catid=6 Judgment] thread on March 17th.

As far as fire and brimstone on the mods went, it was light. Carmen was removed from All of All mod but kept Requests and GC got off with only a sideways glare. More revolutionary were the policies put down that effectively countered a lot of Carmen and GC’s moderator actions; posts would no longer be edited and topics locked or deleted for “poor reasons”, with poor reasons being most anything that wasn’t illegal in some way. Also that topics that went off topic but stayed civil would be allowed to remain open. The damage to Carmen and GC was done though. Carmen essentially said her peace and gave herself a fair defense, then left immediately. Ghostclown more or less consented to the changes for a few weeks before going AWOL himself. They both resigned in May but played no further part in any Charas events.

If Sai miscalculated anything during the power play, it was how SOLID the forum was behind him on the changes. Though there was understandable nervousness for the future and a bit of regret at how badly Carmen and GC were getting smeared by it, as a whole the forum greatly praised the policies that reduced moderator actions and gave more freedom to the average, non-spammy guy that was just trying to talk on the forum.

Probably the best thing to give validation to the whole deal was when Alex himself showed up and [[http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=16019&forumid=12&catid=6 expressed approval]] to the changes. ALWAYS a huge relief when the boss tells you you’re doing a good job!

Trying to ride on the success of the revolution, on the 25th Sai appointed Robotam, the real instigator of the whole deal, as the new All of All mod. He also snuck in Osmose and Midnight in as [[General Programming]] and [[Test and Welcome]] mods since those two helped with the whole thing in ways that don’t really show up well in this history, but they helped a lot, darn it. Oh and Warxe got his old jobs back. Sai also said he would appoint another All of All mod after a month had passed, but this decision was forgotten in the absolute chaos of the next month (see below section)

(purely biased aside from [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]: at this point I’m supposed to admit I treated them badly and regret the whole thing, since time heals all wounds, or something. Well I’m not going to. My only major regret is that I waited so long and had so many people leave the forum before acting with strength. It’s sort of funny reading about how Carmen was defensive about everyone ganging up on her when all I did was finally stop her from silencing people and let them speak their mind. She said with her last words as a mod how she was just a person with feelings, but didn’t seem to care about the feelings of others when she said their posts were useless topics nobody wanted to read. And there is a junk bin for a freakin reason. And Alex said he didn’t want things locked or deleted unless they were totally unsalvageable. Meh. I don’t want to turn this into a Carmen and GC bash, but I mean, ''damn''. Though, to be fair to Carmen, she among everyone figured out that I had essentially planned the whole event to fire her. Which was true and it worked brilliantly.)

And so the conspirators won the day, and there was general dancing in the streets, and things eventually calmed down a bit while the staff tried to put some of their speeches into policy. But they would only get just over two weeks before the largest outside attack in Charas’s history would threaten to destroy it all.

Other Charas happenings during March 2006
* These sections are for any significant history that doesn't really fit well above.
* Everyone is encouraged to add stuff to this part!
* Probably best to keep them in bulleted format, though they can be a few sentences long.
* Try to include an external link to a thread if one can be found.

===TrollKingdom and Sanctuary Fortress===
After these events things went good for a while. However, as it turns out, Charas wasn't completely out of trouble, as there would be a troll invasion. (this section is next - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]])

==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?
* Anyone have logs of all the MSN chats from spring 2006? I know some important stuff was decided there.

==Sources==

This section will get integrated into the history eventually.

* 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
* Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you can’t read.

==Related articles==
* [[RRWP]]
* [[Pop]]
* [[Trevlac]]

File:RobotamAvatar.png

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:51:37 GMT

SaiKar:

File:CarmenAvatar.png

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:48:22 GMT

SaiKar:

File:LordRafflesAvatar.png

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:44:27 GMT

SaiKar: There there.

There there.

File:ElectionProp2.png

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:34:02 GMT

SaiKar:

File:ElectionProp1.png

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:27:23 GMT

SaiKar:

File:GaryCXJkAvatar.png

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:18:48 GMT

SaiKar:

File:AlexAvatar.png

SaiKar — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:05:16 GMT

SaiKar: The MASTER!

The MASTER!

Talk:History of Charas

SaiKar — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:20:58 GMT

SaiKar:

Talk:History of Charas

SaiKar — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:39:04 GMT

SaiKar:

Talk:History of Charas

SaiKar — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:32:57 GMT

SaiKar:

History of Charas

SaiKar — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:31:53 GMT

SaiKar:

{{Memory}}

(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.

==2003==
===The Beginning===
The forum was established on January 19th, 2003 with this likely as its [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2 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!!!!”''

==2004==
===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 Kertopermono|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.

[[Double_account#wahba|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.

==2005==
===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 [[trolls|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 SMB 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):

{{Quote|name=[[SaiKar]]|text=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.}}

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.

===Oppression and Conspiracy===
Despite being banned, Raffles didn’t get the hint. He registered a number of other logins and immediately started doing suspicious stuff on them. The staff, taking Alex’s banning of Raffles as precedent, banned these double accounts as well. A small-scale secret war between the mods and Raffles took place over the next few months. Darkfox and SaiKar, working as a team, became quite adept at finding a suspicious login, IP matching it to Raffles, and banning it sometimes even before its first post. The staff kept this quiet to prevent a witch hunt and return to the more panicked times.

The staff also fired the inactive Red Giant in almost the same manner as they fired Trevlac; they announced attention to remove him, Red returned and said he was sorry, the staff decided it was too late for that and fired him. Also, Ghostclown became a global mod and [[Warxe]] and [[Razor]], two well-liked and generally popular guys, joined the staff, the former as [[RPGMaker Programming]] and [[Tutorials]] mod and the latter got [[Forum Gaming]], and Carmen took over Requests in addition to All of All. Oddly enough, having to be on the constant watch meant the staff was working together better then they had since Sai’s admin appointment.

The rest of the forum was mostly uneasy because of Raffles. Despite the best work of the staff a few Raffles logins spread around word that Raffles was still sneaking onto the site. [[Charaman]], a Raffles supporter, also posted messages from Raffles and that added to the tension.

Eventually though Raffles’s attempts to disrupt the site became less potent and people relaxed. And they began to wonder about a few things. Why were the hardliner mods still cracking down so hard on spam? When Raffles was around it was easier to justify, but now that he was gone, it began to look less like security and more like needless squeezing the fun out of things.

Ghostclown, though a hardliner, stayed mostly under the radar and did a decent job as global mod. Carmen though almost went out of her way to make enemies in blatant shows of moderator force. Osmose, who had hated her essentially since he joined the forum, had a field day pointing out her stranger moves. [[Midnight]], a once popular member that had dropped out for a while before coming back, had one hell of a feud with her that ended with Carmen saying disturbing things like “Don't get in a fight with me, you won't win.”

Carmen made other enemies, but the reason these two people are being mentioned is that they are the best friends of SaiKar on Charas. The private forum had a discussion where Kijuki was trying to call Carmen on the point and Sai jumped in to try to emphasize how bad moderators fighting was getting, but Carmen shrugged it off and accused everyone of ganging up on her. A new resolve began to burn in Sai to gain his control over policy back. At this point Sai was more-or-less resigned to not being able to sway the staff through diplomacy, but the abuses became so blatant that he decided to take a more forceful approach if only the circumstances would present themselves.

==2006==
===The Charas Judgment===
The Charas Judgment itself is one of the smallest pieces of history time-wise, taking place over a few weeks at the end of March 2006 and was essentially the violent reaction to months of built up population annoyance against tight moderator control over the forum. Several relatively unimportant people quickly rose in power while others fell from high in a matter of days and drastically different policies on what would be allowed were put into effect. Depending on which side you supported, it was either a revolution or a mutiny, but it’s hard to argue against the long-term effects it had on how Charas is run today.

For a year Sai had stewed on how to remove the oppressive moderators without getting himself fired without any real good ideas until one landed right in front of him. Razor and [[Robotam]], the community contest moderator (a very minor position) discussed on MSN how bad the lockings were getting and decided to seek help. Robotam approached Sai and asked for some sort of action. Sai decided that the time was right and encouraged Robotam to create a public thread on the All of All forum asking for an investigation. Knowing this would immediately get locked, Sai promised Robotam his admin protection of the thread to prevent people from mucking with it.

On March 14th, 2006 Robotam posted [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15936&forumid=12&catid=6 the thread] bringing attention to the massive number of moderator actions by Carmen and Ghostclown that month alone (70!) including the aforementioned permission from Sai. Carmen and Ghostclown locked it anyway, saying essentially that they didn’t care what Sai said; this sort of moderator criticism was highly inappropriate. Sai showed up, unlocked it, told everyone it was okay to speak their mind, and gave them both a stern warning not to touch it at all until the thread was done. Carmen and GC edited (and later deleted) their posts and said nothing more. And the fun began!

A whole 12 pages, and the uncharacteristic part is, the vast majority of it is actually civil debate between people with somewhat different viewpoints. Except for MrMister, who was mainly trying to use weird examples to make the whole thing seem stupid. The vast majority of the people that responded found that the lockings and deletions were. Sleepy users that hadn’t been seen much showed up for the event and tossed in their two cents. [[DragonBlaze]] is largely credited for making some of the best points, as is [[Arcanagirl]].

Naturally, behind the scenes, there was a lot of shady MSN talk, mostly between conspirators Osmose, Midnight, SaiKar, and probably a few other trusted mods like Razor and FFL. Most everyone supported some sort of revolution? But what? And would word reach Alex and he react harshly? Sai hesitated for a bit, but decided meh, what the hell, and posted the [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15968&forumid=12&catid=6 Judgment] thread on March 17th.

As far as fire and brimstone on the mods went, it was light. Carmen was removed from All of All mod but kept Requests and GC got off with only a sideways glare. More revolutionary were the policies put down that effectively countered a lot of Carmen and GC’s moderator actions; posts would no longer be edited and topics locked or deleted for “poor reasons”, with poor reasons being most anything that wasn’t illegal in some way. Also that topics that went off topic but stayed civil would be allowed to remain open. The damage to Carmen and GC was done though. Carmen essentially said her peace and gave herself a fair defense, then left immediately. Ghostclown more or less consented to the changes for a few weeks before going AWOL himself. They both resigned in May but played no further part in any Charas events.

If Sai miscalculated anything during the power play, it was how SOLID the forum was behind him on the changes. Though there was understandable nervousness for the future and a bit of regret at how badly Carmen and GC were getting smeared by it, as a whole the forum greatly praised the policies that reduced moderator actions and gave more freedom to the average, non-spammy guy that was just trying to talk on the forum.

Probably the best thing to give validation to the whole deal was when Alex himself showed up and [[http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=16019&forumid=12&catid=6 expressed approval]] to the changes. ALWAYS a huge relief when the boss tells you you’re doing a good job!

Trying to ride on the success of the revolution, on the 25th Sai appointed Robotam, the real instigator of the whole deal, as the new All of All mod. He also snuck in Osmose and Midnight in as [[General Programming]] and [[Test and Welcome]] mods since those two helped with the whole thing in ways that don’t really show up well in this history, but they helped a lot, darn it. Oh and Warxe got his old jobs back. Sai also said he would appoint another All of All mod after a month had passed, but this decision was forgotten in the absolute chaos of the next month (see below section)

(purely biased aside from [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]: at this point I’m supposed to admit I treated them badly and regret the whole thing, since time heals all wounds, or something. Well I’m not going to. My only major regret is that I waited so long and had so many people leave the forum before acting with strength. It’s sort of funny reading about how Carmen was defensive about everyone ganging up on her when all I did was finally stop her from silencing people and let them speak their mind. She said with her last words as a mod how she was just a person with feelings, but didn’t seem to care about the feelings of others when she said their posts were useless topics nobody wanted to read. And there is a junk bin for a freakin reason. And Alex said he didn’t want things locked or deleted unless they were totally unsalvageable. Meh. I don’t want to turn this into a Carmen and GC bash, but I mean, damn. Though, to be fair to Carmen, she among everyone figured out that I had essentially planned the whole event to fire her. Which was true and it worked brilliantly, so booyah!)

And so the conspirators won the day, and there was general dancing in the streets, and things eventually calmed down a bit while the staff tried to put some of their speeches into policy. But they would only get a week before the largest outside attack in Charas’s history would threaten to destroy it all.

===TrollKingdom and Sanctuary Fortress===
After these events things went good for a while. However, as it turns out, Charas wasn't completely out of trouble, as there would be a troll invasion. (this section is next - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]])

==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?
* Anyone have logs of all the MSN chats from spring 2006? I know some important stuff was decided there.

==Sources==

This section will get integrated into the history eventually.

* 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
* Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you can’t read.

==Related articles==
* [[RRWP]]
* [[Pop]]
* [[Trevlac]]

History of Charas

SaiKar — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:31:40 GMT

SaiKar:

Talk:Osmose

SaiKar — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:35:10 GMT

SaiKar:

Discussion about Osmozesz

== Mistormistor ==

yeah I dunno dis guy ain't tat imporant
shudn't have his own page

God DAMN. Would it kill you to use the "show preview" button before saving so you don't add like 15 minor revisions to an article? - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]]

Talk:History of Charas

SaiKar — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:54:39 GMT

SaiKar:

History of Charas

SaiKar — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:36:29 GMT

SaiKar:

History of Charas

SaiKar — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:31:05 GMT

SaiKar:

Talk:History of Charas

SaiKar — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:23:18 GMT

SaiKar:

History of Charas

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:47:31 GMT

SaiKar:

Main Page

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:21:45 GMT

SaiKar:

==WELCOME TO CHARAS PROJECT WIKI!==

This is where all of your Charas-related facts and stuff can be found. Unfortunately, we are still in the process of getting set up, so check back often for new stuff.

If you want to help out, check the [[current events|Stuff to Do]] and [[Special:Wantedpages|Pages We Need Made]] pages.

'''''Recent Changes''''':
'''15 January 2007''': Wiki created.

[[:Category:Charas Forums|Charas Forums]] | [[:Category:Charas Forums members|Charas Forums members]] | [[:Category:Charas Forums moderators|Charas Forums moderators]]| [[History of Charas]] 
[[:Category:Articles that need more information|Articles that need more information]] | [[:Category:Wankers who need to make their article|Wankers who need to make their article]]

History of Charas

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:47:57 GMT

SaiKar:

{{Addplz}}
{{Memory}}

(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 [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2 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 Kertopermono|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.

(more to come, give me some more time - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 11:33, 17 January 2007 (EST))

==Lingering Questions==
* What were Kijuki and Darkfox's titles before becoming global mods? I know they were mods of some forum, but of what?
* Does anyone really remember Pop and Kairou and the whole conspiracy there? I think I missed that entirely.
* Why do I need some cheese?

==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
* Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you can’t read.

History of Charas

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:33:56 GMT

SaiKar:

{{Addplz}}

(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.

==The Beginning==
The forum was established on January 19th, 2003 with this likely as its first post: http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2&forumid=2&catid=2 . [[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 Kertopermono|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.

(more to come, give me some more time - [[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 11:33, 17 January 2007 (EST))

==Sources==

Gary’s “A history of Charas” - http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15958&forumid=12&catid=6
Lots of sneaky Private forum threads you can’t read.

Trolls

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:33:08 GMT

SaiKar:

#redirect [[Trolls, tools and other rejects]]

SaiKar

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:23:54 GMT

SaiKar:

{{CharasUserInfo|name=SaiKar|pic=SaiKarAvatar.png|join=Feb 2003|stat=Active|pos=Administrator|profile=http://charas-project.net/forum/viewmember.php?userid=261|bday=December 23, 1982|gender=Male}}
'''SaiKar''' (AKA '''Harvey/Jason Steffke''') is the oldest (as of registration date) active member of [[Charas-Project|Charas]]. He became a Request mod, then All of All mod, and finally Administrator of the forums. Though he owns nothing on the site directly, he generally takes care of affairs when [[Alex]], the site owner, is not around. Which is all the time basically.

==Charas History==

===Early Days===
Harvey joined Charas under the login SaiKar upon suggestion of his friend to share his battlecharacter sets that he had created for his own game. Receptions to the sprites was very positive and Sai started to get requests, which he answered for a time before burning out. Sai joined the [[VG Reapers]], the largest spriting group on Charas at the time. The image of someone trying to help the community was enhanced with Sai tried to solve the [[RRWP]] vs [[Gary Kertopermono|Gary]] arguments that were raging at the time. When Alex decided to appoint new moderators, Sai was appointed [[Moderator]] of the [[Requests]] forum on Feb 29, 2004. Some of his policies set in the Requests forum are still in use today.

===Growing Power===
No data exists on when it happened, but some time in May/June Sai was appointed as an [[All of All]] moderator along with [[Darkfox]], but resigned from All of All moderator on July 23rd, 2004. The actual reason wasn’t public knowledge until now, but it was in reality him being tired of cleaning up after Darkfox; the latter was starting a great number of personal feuds at the time that were spilling into the forum.

When the first global moderators were chosen, Sai was on the list but declined Alex due to growing real life concerns. Yet he saw the general state of Charas deteriorating under Darkfox and Kijuki’s global modship; the former has already been discussed and the latter was much more well-minded but rarely around when he was needed. [[Reain]] and [[Trevlac]], new All of All mods, were also doing little. In his panic, Sai sent a private message to Alex asking for a global moderator position himself. Instead, Alex made him an [[Administrator]]; someone with access to the control panel to appoint moderators, create new forums, and ban members!

===Quarrels with the Staff===
Darkfox immediately objected to SaiKar’s insane jump of power, making many accusations of impending power abuse. Several other moderators murmured in discontent, but with Alex supporting Sai nothing really could be done.

Sai took over his duties rather quickly. When Reain resigned as All of All moderator, Sai organized a public election to replace him. He also fired Trevlac for continued lack of presence and expanded the election to two winners. [[Red Giant]] and [[Carmen]] became part of the staff as All of All mods.

For many months afterward Sai was playing Final Fantasy XI, an online game that takes up the full screen. As such Sai wasn’t on the site very much and missed several rather important events, such as the coming of [[Lord Raffles]]. The staff ([[GhostClown]] and Carmen in particular) grew discontented with his lack of being around and began to criticize his policies, claiming he was “out of touch.” Which, to be fair, had some truth to it. The staff often complained at his actions, saying that Alex wanted him to run everything by the private forum first, and yet other staff members went ahead with their policies and complained of “ganging up” when they were called on it later. Some called for a new administrator but there weren’t any willing candidates that could be trusted. The staff became polarized and no meaningful decisions were made as a group, and the progress of the site stagnated.

===The New Charas===
However Carmen and GhostClown’s policies were not terribly well liked and they made a number of enemies, in particular [[Osmose]] and [[Midnight]]. They had a heavy-handed moderation style to them, and eventually people got rather annoyed at things being locked or deleted for no real particular good reason. [[Robotam]] approached Sai’Kar and asked for his permission to start an investigation. Sai granted it, seeing a public hearing as a good way to get rid of his rebellious staff.

Public opinion strongly sided against the two and Sai made his decision to remove some of Carmen’s powers in the infamous [[Charas Judgment]] on March 17th. Co-conspirators Osmose and Midnight were appointed moderators on March 22nd. Many new policies on why threads would be locked and the future were introduced. GhostClown and Carmen retired shortly afterward.

This point essentially marks the time when Sai took a much more active role in the development on Charas, now that he had a staff that wouldn’t fight him on every point.

===The Troll Invasion===
TrollKingdom began sending trolls to stir up trouble on April 9th, mere days after the little revolution. Essentially, the entire reason there was a [[Troll Invasion]] was because Sai got sick of having to cross-check IPs and writing styles and always be on active alert to ban troublemakers. In order to counter the trolls tactics, a new forum [[Sanctuary Fortress]] was established to discuss the situation and try to keep the general population from making the situation worse. Behind the scenes, almost four solid days of MSN chats between staff members tracked down the source, located another forum that had been attacked, and tracked down of Alex to implement an IP ban feature.

On April 13th the trolls were still coming despite everything done, and, weary of constantly being ready to ban someone, Sai authorized a Charas flood on TrollKingdom, the only such action in Charas’s history, of which many are thankful for.

Bizarrely, the attack stopped the invasion, but Charas itself was fragmented by the actions. The situation was made worse when Sai took a few days off. People accused him of acting irresponsibly, of abandoning the forum. Sai decided to resign as administrator, but was talked out of it at basically the last moment by Midnight. Eventually everyone calmed down anyway.

===Aftermath to Present===
Other stuff happened, but nothing of it really defining of Sai, and so I’ll leave what happens next for a history article. Sai is still the administrator and still deals with stuff on occasion, and there haven’t been any sightings of lynch mobs in record time1

==Personality Stuff==

===Administrative Style===
Sai occasionally preaches a “new Charas” style of administration; rules designed so that the members don’t need the moderators and function on their own. This rarely works in practice as there is often someone out to stir up trouble or oblivious to the fact that they’re being annoyed. But it’s a goal!

SaiKar is something of a narcissist and enjoys typing up large triumphant speeches whenever possible to introduce a new forum feature or some judgment on a current issue. If anyone actually reads these speeches is unknown.

Sai administers the site mostly from afar, letting individual moderators handle as many problems as they can and work them out without management hanging over their heads. However when the situation gets out of control Sai has no problem diving into the action, often in the form of another big speech. Generally people listen when Sai gets involved; those that don’t tend to get threatened, or worse.

Sai believes he is a fair administrator, though since he’s writing his own wiki article that’s hardly unbiased.

===Art and Programming===
Sai is a spriter and dabbles in making all sorts of resources for RPGMaker, though his best and most commonly known one is battlecharacter sets. He has made at least 15 sets based off of either Mack and Blue characters or generated characters from scratch and about the same number of RTP characters with added attack animations and status effect poses. He submitted a few resources to the battlecharacter generator.

Sai is also an artist, but a bad one. He never practices to get any better and occasionally complains about this. Perhaps ironically, at least a dozen people are better at drawing Sai'Kar than he is.

He has been working sporadically on several RPGs over the years. Control of Destiny 2 is a traditional questing RPG and is what the vast majority of his spriting work was created for. Outpost was an experiment in sim to manage a city that was partially successful. Control of Destiny Tactics is a more recent project to create a Final Fantasy Tactics-type engine that is still in the development phase (and by the looks of it will be there for a very long time to come).

===Friends===
Midnight and Osmose are Sai’s two closest friends on the site and are largely responsible for him not going nuts at some point and retiring for good. Over the years they have acted as advisors to Sai in making administrative decisions and the three clocked about 34 trillion hours in MSN chats since becoming friends. Realizing that they were essentially the “power behind the throne”, he finally gave in to their constant nagging to make them real moderators during the Charas Judgment. They were both given weak positions so that nobody would complain about appointing friends as mods too much, and then both upgraded of All of All mods, the positions they currently hold.

SaiKar is generally good friends with most of the rest of the moderation staff, particularly [[Warxe PhoenixBlade]], [[Razor]], and [[FFL2and3rocks]]. There isn’t really anyone on the site that Sai strongly dislikes anymore.

To the best of his knowledge, Sai is the only part of the moderation staff that Alex trusts explicitly.

===The Sai’Kar Character===
SaiKar’s login is based on Sai’Kar, a female character in the RPG Control of Destiny 2 that he has been working on for the past forever. Sai is probably one of the most recognizable faces on Charas, and several forum members have included Sai in their own arts of work.

===Gender Confusion===
Because of his female avatar, many '''many''' people thought he was a girl, and it's a common mistake even recently. It is rumored (and almost certainly true) that the "gender" field of the Charas profile was added because so many people thought Sai was a girl in real life.

===Historical Trivia===
* First post: http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=1657&forumid=2&catid=2
* In the original battlecharacter request topic, Sai only fulfilled three of four actual requests before quitting. But the reputation as a spriter stuck for years and was only really replaced by a reputation as part of the staff.
* Sai actually “hacked” into threads in the private forum and also read private messages by using URL abuse. Sai told Alex both of these things after a time, who patched up the bugs.

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:People who have submitted Generator resources]][[Category:People who have submitted Complete Resources resources]][[Category:Charas-Project SysOps]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

Warxe PhoenixBlade

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:51:54 GMT

SaiKar:

{{CharasUserInfo|
pic=goingtoeatyou.png|
name=Tourauds Warxe Shorus|
join=March 2004|
stat=Active|
pos=[[Moderator]] -
*[[RPG Maker Programming]]
*[[Tutorials]]
*[[Forum Gaming]]
*[[Complete Resources Uploader Team]]
[[Moderator#Complete Resources Uploader|CR Uploader]] 
[[Charas Wiki Admin]]|
bday=July 26, 1989|
gender=Male|
profile=http://charas-project.net/forum/viewmember.php?userid=6771
}}

'''Warxe_PhoenixBlade''', most commonly known as '''Warxe''' or '''Warxe PB''', is a [[List of Charas moderators|moderator]] at the [[Charas Forums]]. He currently is moderator over the [[RPG Maker Programming]], [[Tutorials]], [[Forum Gaming]] and [[Complete Resources Uploader Team]] forums. He is also a [[Complete Resources]] [[Moderator#Complete Resources Uploader|uploader]], and about 2/5 of the submitted Battle Weapons are by him.

==History==
Warxe originally joined under the name odinthealmighty on December 13, 2003. As well as a doing a bunch of stuff like any normal member, he made the extremely popular "^ < v" game, which for a very long time was extremely popular. It is now dead, with a grand total of 136 pages. It should be noted that as of this writing, the next person to post in it is "a human oozinator", courtesy of [[Blaze Shinigami]].

Odinthealmighty made his last post on February the 5th, 2004. By this time he had claimed he was going insane and had decided to leave, to the dismay of [[Razor|friends]] and [[User:Darkfox|Darkfox]] who was given some cryptic last words via AIM. His last visit took place later that month, on the 25th.

==Rebirth. Get it? Cause his name is ''Phoenix''Blade, and phoenixs are reknown for dying and then coming back? Ahh, screw you.==
The following month of March, Warxe signed up as Warxe_Phoenixblade and [[double account|began posting as if he were new]]. Later on at some point he began slowly telling people that he was infact odinthealmighty.

==Around the Community==
Despite his rocky start, Warxe has gone on to make a name for himself. He is known across the forums for his various contributions to Charas.

===Forum Gaming===
Warxe has probably made lots of Forum Gaming games. Warxe is one of the better posters in the Charas Pub, bringing many of his characters ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_(Mega_Man) and some that aren't]) and injecting his own brand of humour. His dedication to forum gaming eventually paid off - he was given it to mod after [[Razor]] was promoted.

===RPG Maker===
Warxe is the [[moderator]] of RPG Maker Programming and Tutorials, meaning he knows a lot about programming in RPG Maker. Though he often claims to have coded spectacular systems, actual work by him is rare - however, he does seem to know a lot about the programs themselves, and often helps people out with their problems. He has also posted several tutorials in both forums.

===Animations===
Warxe was also somewhat famous for making a series of simple animations titled Warxe VS Zero. Most of these animations were lost, however, and attempts to revive it have been unsuccessful.

===Art===
Warxe is also a [[spriter]], evident by his large amount of submitted Battle Weapons - 189 in all. He also does custom charsets, and is one of the few who can create RTP-style Battle Characters. Currently, he is working on some new stuff, which he may submit later.

===Reputation===
Warxe is known for his unique brand of humour. However, he is serious at certain times, and tends to give long-winded speeches about already stated or pointless topics. He also tends to be somewhat lazy.

==See Also==
[[YOUR MAMA]]

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:People who have submitted Generator resources]][[Category:People who have submitted Complete Resources resources]][[Category:Charas-Project SysOps]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

Trevlac

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:50:55 GMT

SaiKar:

{{CharasUserInfo|name=Trevlac|pic=TrevlacAvatar.png|join=December 2003|stat=AWOL|pos=Member|profile=http://charas-project.net/forum/viewmember.php?userid=5170|bday=October 8, 1987|gender=Male}}
'''Trevlac''' is an [[List of Charas moderators|iron fisted tyrant]] from the [[Charas-Project]] [[website]], an ex-moderator type [[Members of charas|member]]. He is known at Charas as '''The Executioner''' for his swift and decisive action taken against rogue spam threads on charas. Trevlac co-moderated the '''All of All''' forum with [[Reain_]] during his time of power late 2004 through early 2005.

===The Test===
Trevlac was a non-renowned member until one fateful night in late 2005. A Moderator election was held for the '''All of All''' forum. After much voting and drama had ensued, Trevlac came out on top of the election and was granted moderation by [[Alex]]. However, the road ahead would not be an easy one for the new member. [[Apex]] hatched an evil plan to test the noobly Trevlac's worth. All of the current members participated in a large spam and flaming thread in which there was no recovery. Trevlac instantly locked the thread and was told he had "passed".

===The Reign===
Shortly after the test on Trevlac, a rogue group of charas members formed a secret organization with the sole priority of taking him out of office. They posted several spam threads to which Trevlac quickly and decisively shut down. Soon, however, the moderator began closing relatively normal threads and refusing to re-open them at the request of the community. This earned him the name '''The Executioner'''. Amongst waging a war on spam and all things useless, Trevlac and his co-moderator Reain_ also deleted a hefty history of charas in the All of All forum. It was their belief that it would "clean up the forum", but in fact it only further enraged the community and Alex.

===The Fall===
Trevlac's reign came to an abrupt end in early 2005 when [[SaiKar]] was newly appointed Administrator of Charas. A part of the community was pushing for Trevlac's instant dismissal from office while another part wanted him to remain a moderator since Reain_ had recently resigned for personal reasons. SaiKar decided that the best course of action was to fire Trevlac and it was done. [[Carmen]] and [[Red Giant]] took his place as the new All of All moderators with open arms from the community.

===Mortal Enemy===
It is said that the mortal enemy of Trevlac was [[Trolls, tools and other rejects#Lord Raffles|Lord Raffles]] due to several occasions where Trevlac was pwned by this forum troll. It was not, however, released to the public that Trevlac was actually a friend of Lord Raffles (whos network of Charas friends extended far into the active members).

Later in Charas history, a member named [[Trolls, tools and other rejects#Lord Raffles|Col. Mustard]], who was believed to be Lord Raffles, donned the persona of the popular [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluedo|Cluedo]] character '''Colonel Mustard''' and Trevlac followed suit by donning the persona of '''Professor Plum''' in order to stop this evil murderous madman.

==Reputation==
Trevlac is known for his '''pwning''' of the other Charas members. On one such occasion, [[Midnight]] had been on her usual three month '''period''' and mouthed off repeatedly to members. Trevlac called her a '''bitch''' and shortly after, much drama ensued. He also went under the alias [[Koori_Ryu]] for a time and attempted to play as a female member. '''Detective''' [[Ghost Clown]] caught him and sent Trevlac off with his tail between his legs. For most of charas, you either love Trevlac or hate Trevlac; or you think he's "okay".

Recently, Trevlac has been a forum phantom. He disappears off the face of the Earth and reappears only to quickly '''pwn''' someone and then vanishes for at least another month or two. No one knows if it is the ghost of Trevlac or if he is still alive.

==Aliases==
* Ermac
* Lord Trevlac
* V
* Koori_Ryu

==See also==
[[List of Charas moderators]]

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:People who have submitted Complete Resources resources]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

Osmose

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:50:17 GMT

SaiKar:

{{CharasUserInfo|name=Osmose(Moose)|pic=osmose_avatar.gif|join=July 2004|stat=Active|pos=Generators Manager All of All Mod|profile=http://charas-project.net/forum/viewmember.php?userid=9329|bday=March 7th, 1989|gender=Male}}

Osmose is a prominent member and moderator of [[Charas Project]]. He is usually referred to by his nickname, "Moose".

==Early Days==
Osmose first came to Charas after being disillusioned from programming due to a series of incidents at another game making site. He saw that Charas focused on spriting, and decided that he would practice his spriting skills for a while on the site. Most of his work during this period was not that great, although he did create much of the content for the FF5 style of [[BattleCharaset|battlecharas]].

==A Chance Meeting==
Then-Requests-Moderator, [[Sai'Kar]], created a thread offering to do a single battlechara, as he had stopped making them for awhile, and was quite famous in the community for his skill. By a stroke of luck, Osmose was the first to reply to the offer, and began a chain of private messages specifying what he wanted in the battlechara. To make things easier, they switched over to instant messager communication. This switch eventually led to a friendship which would later help Osmose attempt to sway forum policy and eventually aid in his attaining a moderator position.

==Feud with Carmen==
Around December 2004, Osmose began to make posts complaining about the then-moderator of All of All, [[carmen|Carmen]]. He accused her of locking threads unfairly, deleting posts, and brushing off any criticism without taking it into consideration. Although his efforts were not successful in rallying support against her, he would continue to hold the grudge and try to accuse her of being a bad moderator up until her demotion and afterwards.

==2005==
2005 was an eventful year, that saw not many changes in Osmose himself, but rather the things he did. He was a major participant in the [[Rendersa]] RP in [[Forum Gaming]], he created [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=8275&forumid=30&catid=6 a webcomic] based on forum events and the ridiculousness of some members, he created [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=8697&forumid=33&catid=9 an issue of the dormant Charas Magazine Project] in an attempt to revive it, and was one of the most outspoken members against Lord Raffles (although since the first incident he has taken on a policy of ignorance, refusing to post to or about him or anyone associated with him).

Throughout 2005 Osmose maintained his friendship with Sai'Kar, and several times suggested actions that he wished Sai'Kar to take now that he had been promoted to active administrator for the forums. Although few of these were ever fully executed, he had still become a sort of advisor to Sai'Kar, in much the same way [[Midnight]] was, as they were all close friends.

==2006==
2006 was filled mostly with promotions for Osmose. At the beginning of the year he was promoted to the position of Programming moderator, on the condition that he would be considered for the All of All mod position after a month if he could manage the forum well enough. However, Programming rarely sees and posts, and any attempts to revive it failed. To make matters worse, Sai'Kar, now the active administrator, stated that he did not feel like appointing anyone as All of All moderator after the month had passed. In response to this, and in protest of actions by the staff concerning a troll invasion, Osmose resigned his position.

This did not stop his attempts, however. As time passed, his constant nagging, along with similar efforts by Midnight, led to the both of them being promoted to the All of All position. Osmose attempted to hold a more common-sense policy, refusing to lock threads that did not '''need''' to be locked, and allowing a change of topic, only stepping in to halt outright spam.

When [[Alex]] resigned as site head to focus on his personal pursuits, he appointed Osmose as the new generators manager, giving him the power to approve and deny resources for the generators, as well as create new generatosrs, although access to site code was still restricted to Alex only. The option of choosing an aide for the generators was left open to Osmose, but it has yet to be seen whether he will appoint one or not.

[[Category:Charas Forums members]]
[[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

MrMister

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:49:32 GMT

SaiKar:

{{CharasUserInfo|name=MrMister|pic=MAGNOLIA.gif|join=March 2003|stat=Active|pos=Test and Welcome Mod|profile=http://charas-project.net/forum/viewmember.php?userid=1062|bday=May 6th, 1983|gender=Male}}

'''MrMister''' is a [[List of Charas moderators|bad dude]] from the [[Charas-Project]] [[website]], a bad dude type [[Members of charas|member]]. He is known at Charas as '''The Baddest Dude'''. He also invented the Moon, and has eaten over 10,000 packets of '''beef jerky'''.

===Controversy===
MrMister has gotten in trouble with the law a fewe times.
He totally has pwned Sai'Kar and Midnight over a million times each, and Osmose over 200,000 times.

===Moderation===
In 2006, MrMister was made [[moderator]] of Test and Welcomes.
Long overdue.
It is foretold, that, being the greatest member of all time, that MrMister will one day be admin, and Sai'Kar will be his bitch.

===The Pwner===
The pwner is an identity that MrMister stole from an IRC buddy.
When he dons the awesome ident, he speaks in ironic noobspeak, and 'pwnz noobs'. It's pretty awesome.

===Being Ahead of the Curve===
MrMister is world renowned for having his hand on the pulse of the community, unlike everyone else. This is how he exposed the world to Cave Story. Osmose owes his life to MrMister for this.

===Avatars===
MrMister has many famous avatars.
His first ever avatar was a penguin.
Eventually he discovered the magical essence of the Magnolia.
Many members know the magnolia as ''the egg''.
He always eventually returns to the egg, but periodically switches to other awesome avatars.
His other avatars have included animated gifs of '''Slippy the Frog''', '''Cactaur''', and '''Super Human Samurai Cyber Squad'''.

==See also==
[[ticegeronda pencils]]

==References==
* [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=17253&forumid=12&catid=6 Cooking Thread], How to eat like a not-slob with MrMister.
* [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=10385&forumid=12&catid=6 Cave Story thread], How Cave Story was released to the masses of Charas.

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

GhostClown

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:49:07 GMT

SaiKar:

{{bias}}
{{CharasUserInfo|name=GhostClown|pic=GhostClownAvatar.png|join=?|stat=AWOL|pos=Member|profile=dunno, lol|bday=forever|gender=Male}}
'''GhostClown''' is an [[Former Charas moderators|awesome member]].

===Public Attacks===
GhostClown has been publically attacked by many members of Charas, along with [[Carmen]].
An evil man named [[Robotam]] decided to ruin Charas one day, and called out them both for being fantastic mods. 12 pages of bashing ensued, with only their bestest friend [[MrMister]] defending them. Eventually both GhostClown and Carmen lost their jobs.

==See also==
[[Former Charas moderators]]

==References==
* [http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=15936&forumid=12&catid=6 Carmen and GhostClown thread], teh bash.

==External links==
http://rpgartisans.com/

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:People who have submitted Generator resources]][[Category:People who have submitted Complete Resources resources]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

Carmen

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:47:56 GMT

SaiKar:

{{CharasUserInfo|name=Carmen|pic=Carmen.png|join=?|stat=AWOL|pos=Member|profile=dunno, lol|bday=forever|gender=Female}}

[[Carmen]] was a [[moderator]] of the forums. She is also a talented artist and musician.
Nowadays she posts infrequently on the forums due to a series on incidents which caused her to be de-modded.

Below is an example of her, liek, awesum art. I hope she doesn't mind.

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b377/Jimeth/Carmen1.png

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:People who have submitted Complete Resources resources]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

Category:Charas Forums moderators

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:47:23 GMT

SaiKar:

Moderators of Charas's forum, past or present.

Alexander Boniverto

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:46:58 GMT

SaiKar:

{{Addplz}}

{{CharasUserInfo|name=Alex|pic=AlexAvatar.png|join=The Beginning|stat=Appears when Needed|pos=Creator|profile=http://charas-project.net/forum/viewmember.php?userid=1|bday=December 3, 1976|gender=Male}}
'''Alexander Boniverto''' (commonly known by his nickname of '''Alex''') is the Webmaster and founder of [[Charas-Project|Charas]]. He designed the [[Generators]], [[Complete Resources]] and most of the [[Charas main page|main site]]. 
Also he got married at some point. Master harpist.

[[Category:Charas Forums members]][[Category:People who have submitted Generator resources]][[Category:People who have submitted Complete Resources resources]][[Category:Charas developers]][[Category:Alex]][[Category:Charas Forums moderators]]

Main Page

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:45:57 GMT

SaiKar: Bah

==WELCOME TO CHARAS PROJECT WIKI!==

This is where all of your Charas-related facts and stuff can be found. Unfortunately, we are still in the process of getting set up, so check back often for new stuff.

If you want to help out, check the [[current events|Stuff to Do]] and [[Special:Wantedpages|Pages We Need Made]] pages.

'''''Recent Changes''''':
'''15 January 2007''': Wiki created.

[[:Category:Charas Forums|Charas Forums]] | [[:Category:Charas Forums members|Charas Forums members]] | [[:Category:Charas Forums moderators|Charas Forums moderators]] 
[[:Category:Articles that need more information|Articles that need more information]] | [[:Category:Wankers who need to make their article|Wankers who need to make their article]]

Talk:Main Page

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:41:11 GMT

SaiKar:

==Wiki creation date==
You know, it happened on the 16th in Australia. [[User:Razor|Razor]]
:You don't need to get all technical about it. [[User:Darkfox|Darkfox]]
::''Someone'' doesn't know me well. :p [[User:Razor|Razor]]
==New pages dramatically required!==
We need a "recent changes" page!
Also, a "what pages doesn't this wiki have that we need" page. I forget what that's called.[[User:Razor|Razor]]
:Ok I found the recent pages one, now we need to edit the navigation side bar. [[Special:Recentchanges]][[User:Razor|Razor]]
:Also I found the other one, and another.[[Special:Wantedpages]], [[Special:Wantedcategories]] [[User:Razor|Razor]]
::Ok I've implimented them. Glorious victory![[User:Razor|Razor]]
==Major Categories==
Since it's getting hard to find stuff I put the major category headings on the main page. Someone else can make it look pretty.[[User:SaiKar|SaiKar]] 09:41, 17 January 2007 (EST)

Main Page

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:40:07 GMT

SaiKar:

==WELCOME TO CHARAS PROJECT WIKI!==

This is where all of your Charas-related facts and stuff can be found. Unfortunately, we are still in the process of getting set up, so check back often for new stuff.

If you want to help out, check the [[current events|Stuff to Do]] and [[Special:Wantedpages|Pages We Need Made]] pages.

'''''Recent Changes''''':
'''15 January 2007''': Wiki created.

Major categories:
* [[Charas Forums]]
* [[Charas Forums members]]
* [[Charas Forums moderators]]
Categories for articles that need improvments:
* [[Articles that need more information]]
* [[Wankers who need to make their article]]

Private

SaiKar — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:26:35 GMT

SaiKar:

The '''Private forum''' is a secret forum on [[Charas-Project|Charas]] where the staff meets to discuss major issues regarding the function of the site and forums and discuss plans for the future. Only [[Moderator]]s or higher can enter and discuss issues in the Private forum. Being able to read the Private forum is considered one of the highlights of being a mod.

The drunken parties are highly exaggerated and only happen once a week, at best.

The Private forum is actually one of the best sources of Charas-related knowledge and trivia, since almost every major event (new moderator appointments, some [[Trolls, tools and other rejects|trolls]] causing trouble, exploitation of a bug in the software, etc) has a thread and a discussion with no spam posts in between. Well, very few spam posts.

Topics in the Private forum used to have normal topic names, but after someone found that topic names show up in the [[Who is Online?]] page, topics were given nonsensical names to prevent the rest of the site to figure out what the staff was up to. Among the best are “Fluffy Kittens” (named by [[SaiKar]]), “YOUR FACE” ([[Warxe]]), and “The best freaking brownies you’ll ever make” ([[Razor]]).

You can’t read what’s in the Private forum. And you never will be able to. Nyah!

[[Category:Charas Forums forums]]