Whats happening ?

[SanyaWaffles]

Wish I could upvote Cali's post because it sums up how I feel about this "stolen valor" nonsense.

[Enjay]

it was just to quell early rumors and misinformation, since a lot was starting to spread there

Which I can see, and I'm not surprised by it (especially if some of it was Graf related, Doomwold does love a Graf pile-on). Athough, I was following the chats on Discord, and there certainly seemed to be a little more to it than merely quashing rumours. Maybe I picked up more than there was.

Regardless, ZDoom's home forum was left hanging, without even a courtesy link to the Doomworld thread and, as a result, rumours, misinformation and confusion started here instead (though no doubt more peacefully than at Doomworld). Unless you are observant enough to spot some of the changes, apparently nothing is going on according to ZDoom.org. - despite it, arguably, being right in the middle of events.

Some of the cornerstones that UZDoom is building itself on are community, trust, and respect. It's hard to see total radio silence on the ZDoom home forum, while carrying on a lively discussion elsewhere as being consistent with that.

Like I said. It seems like a mis-step to me.

[Enjay]

Sorry, to be clear, that was an official statement but not the official statement. We were in a mad dash and the entire internet was starting to pop off so we wanted to get something out ASAP to stomp speculation, but knew the main site needed something way more formal. We weren't expecting to do this at all so nothing was really prepared and we've been working out the details on how we want to handle this. And to be honest, things were still pretty hot and it's probably better to have waited for things to cool off a bit. Now that we have a plan we feel much more comfortable making an announcement that isn't just vaguely gesturing towards what the future will hold. We want to give concrete answers and reasoning to these decisions lest we only fuel more speculation.

Thank you for the additional context, and the reasoning makes sense. But saying something elsewhere and NOTHING here, despite the fact that information was bound to bleed over and leave some people confused and feeling isolated, wasn't the best.

Like I said, even a courtesy link (perhaps with a sentence like "full statement to follow") would have been better than tumbleweed blowing past.

[Caligari87]

Some of the cornerstones that UZDoom is building itself on are community, trust, and respect. It's hard to see total radio silence on the ZDoom home forum, while carrying on a lively discussion elsewhere as being consistent with that.

Like I said. It seems like a mis-step to me.

You're not wrong.

The unfortunate reality seems to be that most of the people involved with the issue simply are not active on the forums anymore. This isn't the "hub" where these kinds of discussions organically take place, and given how frenetic the situation has been it's hard to say at what point someone should be expected to split attention to yet another space, especially since no one person has been driving this.

(Honestly it should have been me, but even I was days late finding out about the split and it seemed like every time I nearly had a handle on the situation, a new wrinkle would happen)

[Boondorl]

I'm sorry, man. We're exhausted. This is happening at probably the worst possible time for a lot of us and we were all flashbanged by what Graf did, but knew it could not go on any longer. I've been trying my best to be as open as possible, but I can only be open about stuff I actually know about. I'm not going to throw out a bunch of speculation at a time like this, we needed to discuss this with all the administration and work with them because this is a huge deal. I've been working like two evenings in a row trying to get this announcement together and out the door and I need to make sure it's all verified and stamped lest we make even bigger mistakes.

The only thing I can say in response is that all of us are stressed out at the moment and absolutely none of us would want to pull a stunt like this unless we knew everyone involved with the ZDoom administration was on board.

[SanyaWaffles]

I don't really get why y'all are being so hard on everyone for being exhausted trying to deal with this mess. It's not easy dealing with any of this. As someone who's current projects rely on this family of source ports, I'm watching optimistically and cautiously, and even I feel a smidge of stress. I can't imagine what the UZDoom devs are going through.

Plus it has been discussed "openly" - from the ZDoom Discord to my publisher's discord to Doomworld to probably comment sections on sloppy news websites to the Github.

While I will concede it being discussed here would have been ideal - I can't blame them. This place is a ghost town as of late, no disrespect to Cali and the administration here. The last major discussion I saw was Imgur being shitty and that wasn't that much.

[Nash]

Thank you for the additional context, and the reasoning makes sense. But saying something elsewhere and NOTHING here, despite the fact that information was bound to bleed over and leave some people confused and feeling isolated, wasn't the best.

Like I said, even a courtesy link (perhaps with a sentence like "full statement to follow") would have been better than tumbleweed blowing past.

Enjay, all of this happened so fast and dropped like a brick upon all of us. Personally, I was in the middle of a digital detox vacation, only came back briefly to address a few things and was quite literally ready to go off the grid again until this whole thing happened. I may have very well been completely absent from all of this had The Thing happened a few hours later than it did.

It was that sudden of an event.

Yeah, all of us are quite exhausted from having to handle this on-the-dot. None of us had any plans. We didn't know what to do.

[Enjay]

Thank you for all the replies. I appreciate them, I really do. I also have huge sympathy for everyone closer to the storm than me. It must be a very stressful time, I get that, I recognise it from situations that I have been in and I understand.

But, I still have to come back to the fact that a post and discussion was created and supported by UZDoom team members, and no one thought about "hey ZDoom forum, just a heads up, there's a major discussion over at [insert link here] that might be of interest."

I saw some of the discussion that led up to the Doomworld post on Discord ( despite how much I hate that platform - have no idea how anyone can follow anything on it) and there were discussions leading up to the post. People were talking about out "when Nash makes his post" and that came a little time before the post was actually made. A post was made on Doomworld, a storm erupted, and there was radio silence here.

I know I'm just making the same point over, and over, but I feel it's quite a critical one. There was time to make a minimal post here, on the traditional home of ZDoom (ghost town or not) and it didn't happen . It's hardly the crime of the century, but (I accept unintentionally) one of the first public actions by the UZDoom team was to snub it's home community and leave it on the periphery of a discussion that affects it deeply.

[Enjay]

I noticed that the forum is now "ZDF" which while correct I suppose is not an abbreviation that I recall being aware of previously.

One thing I have noticed is that heading looks quite good on a phone screen. So maybe that was the intention.

[SanyaWaffles]

I think you've made your point quite clear. But the discussion is happening now. I am neither a mod here nor a core contributor/dev on UZDoom nor GZDoom, but I'd advise everyone across the board to try to do better here on out. We can't change the past week, but we can learn from it.

This week has been rough, let's not make it rougher.

[Major Cooke]

The government's official line is "doesn't matter, you're still liable for any fines for breaches committed before you banned UK users".

That'll work out as well as them going after and fining 4chan.
I hope they fight back.

[Enjay]

Indeed. What's done is done, and, to be clear I'm certainly not attributing anything to malice. Tiredness and stress are the main culprits.

And remember: "This too shall pass."

Edit: that was in reply to SanyaWaffles.

[Enjay]

The government's official line is "doesn't matter, you're still liable for any fines for breaches committed before you banned UK users".

That'll work out as well as them going after and fining 4chan.
I hope they fight back.

While I get the sentiment, MediaLabs are a pretty shitty organisation. Their business model seems to be buy up successful sites, enshittify them to squeeze every last penny out of them, sack everyone, and dump things when the money runs out. There has already been mass protests against them at imgur because they have been doing precisely those things. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are legitimate concerns over what MediaLabs does with user data.

[Boondorl]

Also, wanted to give some important context I missed earlier because I'm a bit scatter brained atm, but Dynamo personally reached out to us if we would create a post on DoomWorld in order to get ahead of the curve on this. The admins didn't want the site to get flooded with threads of misinformation so they asked us if we could make a statement to lock things down. Personally I would've waited until we had a clearer plan of what was going on, but we understood that we couldn't just let that happen. I started drafting this new announcement shortly after the changes to the ZDoom site were confirmed which is why it took so long: the changes were confirmed the literal day they were implemented. I actually didn't know what I was going to write until then and the team was spending time debating internally what we would need to get a release out the door, so I actually started writing this as early as I reasonably could. The intent was never to hide it from the forums and we fully intended to make an announcement as soon as we thought possible.

I understand the optics of DoomWorld getting "dibs" doesn't look great, but it mostly boils down to the fact that we were between a rock and a hard place on that one. It was either leave the chaos up to the admins to figure out or at least say something to help them. This next announcement will be properly signed off and vetted by ZDoom maintainers. The silence is because we're just trying out best to get things together and out the door so we can have a proper memo.

[bimshwel]

I don't know anything about doom world but i by chance saw something about this on blue-sky apparently six days ago that linked to something on the git hub, and was surprised to see nothing going on here, but I also hardly ever check anything outside my own little space anymore so i do not know who does what for what reasons, but i definitely prefer this forum to the discord mess. at least when someone gets visibly angry here I can figure out why and whether that person is crazy.

I definitely wouldn't want to browse either on a mobile machine but I suppose it is nice if that works better now for whoever gets stuck doing that.