Reading MelMel's journal

Ok guys. I think this is it. There are some things which i need to say. I dont feel right leaving wihtout staying and i dont feel right staying with these things left unsaid. These are the things which i have noticed/been watching for the past few months. I noticed small things ages ago, butbasically i have been looking more carefully after reading between the lines in the very long thread that was oxy's and sammy's departure.

Before i go on, i want to say just how much i hope i'm wrong about all of this. I have noticed these things and there are certain conclusions that i cannot help but think of. I have been accused of being ver paranoid before. I hope this is one of those times.

1. The age old rating/ranking discussion. This is more of a ranking thing though. To my understanding you go up in ranking as your ratings improve. You then move up stars when you have over taken all others of your level. You can go down in rank when you are rated down, or others are rated better, or when you are inactive as others over take you. However you cannot go down in stars unless you are rated down.

Now it seems to me that alot of strange, strange things have been happening in the ranking situation. I am going to try to be honest here about what i have observed but i want to make it clear that i am not setting out to attack anyone, please, i ask you to tell me i am wrong as this really saddens me. Well i could be wrong but i could've sworn that when i first returned from holiday that i had two white stars and was rank twelve or so. This made me happy and surprised, ok i went up in stars, alot of people must have if i was rank twelve. Then the next day i was one white star and rank 14. I dismissed this i didn't give it another thought assuming that i had misread or that the stars had been an error and i had gone down a few more ranks as i hadn't written anything else.

But more and more things came to my attention and as i thought them through i couldn't help wondering if there was more to it. For instance, when oxy and sammy(fallenangel) left oxy went down in rank so fast it was unbelieveable. Whereas fallenangel didnt, she went down a few, but her stars didn't decrease or anything. Then i thought, well oxy left with a bang, that's for sure, maybe it was thought that it would help the community, almost removing the memory. Whereas fallenangel didnt step on to many toes. Sure she was controversial, but she rarely attacked anyone even when she was attacked she still stayed out of it. Maybe she would be welcome if she ever chose to return(as unlikely as i believe that to be)

i cant help wondering whether i am being given a subtle hint that it is time to go. I have been feeling that it is time to go for quite some time now. Maybe others did too. As i have said previously, this is no longer a community. I cant really tell the difference between the writers of the posts now. It's all blended into a meld of voices which all the say the same thing. i am reminded of a post Jaz made a while ago.

You cannot simply slap the "community" label onto something and wait for your vague idea of "community" to appear out of nowhere.

You cannot force feed community to people who are not in the least interested in each other.

it seems to me that i am not the only one who feels that is no longer a community. i don't think that it has been a deliberate thing, it has just drifted over time. now it hangs together by a few threads which grow weaker daily. it is time for me to go. my threads have been cut off, or just detached themselves. i am still unwilling to believe that it is the work of an individual or group.

but, there's always a but. here i have to come to names i'm really sorry guys if i'm wrong i'll apologise repeatedly until you forgive me just in a vague attempt to get me to shut up. recently i have been having trouble loging in. for the past 2/2.5 months or so. it took multiple(upwards of 20) attempts to log on before it would work. i didn't say anything about it at first. i figured i must have some settings enabled on my computer which prevented me from logging in, i have had similar problems on others sites which i have ben forced to leave as i am inept when it comes to computers and didn't know how to fix the problem. but as i love NAO i figured i'd send jaz an email, see if he could think of anything then delegate the problem onto my computer-intelligent brother.

the day after i wrote this email the problem stopped. however i recieved no reply to it. at first i thought that maybe my original email got lost into cyberspace. but i didn't think so. i can't help wondering if it was another subtle hint to me to get out. jaz, if this is all a mistake i am so sorry, or if there was some over looked thing which you fixed, big thank you's!!

look, i know i sound paranoid and maybe i am. i know that from my first post here i was pushing myself onto you guys, intruding. as much as you have all said that age is not an issue here, i feel that it is. i feel that there is a gap between myself and the rest of you. i notice the style of my posts changing, i no longer write TO you but FOR you, i dont even expect people to read them anymore. maybe im just using age as my excuse, and i just dont want want to face up to the fact that it is purely that you dislike me or i irritate or intrude on you.

either way, it has come to a stage where there is nothing that i can bring to this communnity, and there is little i can recieve from it. i hope that NAO continues but from my perspective NetAlive.Org is dead. someone please tell me I am wrong.

i am sitting here staring at the "post" button wondering whether or not i dare to push it. if i don't it means a quiet departure, i can pop back in whenever i like, or i can just slip away unnoticed. nobody will, how many people have noticed those who have slipped away recently? they just go forgotten.

but if i do push it, then chances are one or two people will read this. and maybe one of them will think about what i've said. i am setting myself up for a hard time. leaving will not be easy. you guys are my lifeline. when i post, i can pretend that someone listens, someone cares. now all this will be gone. i'll sink back into depression. i'll find someone else to listen. it sounds easy, and i know i will eventualy but i know it'll take time. the thing with real people is that it's harder to delude yourself into thinking that they care the way i have here.

i'll probably lurk around here for a while reading but not logging in or posting. I do care about YOU all. feel free to page me if you do happen to see me online or MSN me at ciao_bambinos@hotmail.com *shakes head and laughs* i never realised the irony of my email address before. "bye baby" - in shocking italian grammar, all the good ones were taken.

well, i guess this is it. se you NAO, its's been real.

-Mel

Look at me! I'm a prostitute robot from the future!

the day after i wrote this email the problem stopped. however i recieved no reply to it. at first i thought that maybe my original email got lost into cyberspace. but i didn't think so. i can't help wondering if it was another subtle hint to me to get out. jaz, if this is all a mistake i am so sorry, or if there was some over looked thing which you fixed, big thank you's!!

I'm so sorry about that. I just saw that your e-mail got accidently caught by the spam filters of GMX, my e-mail provider:

GMX said Hotmail screwed up by sending from an IP address not belonging to Hotmail, so it looked like the e-mail was forged and thus spam. I'm getting about 50 pieces of spam mail every day and didn't know your real name, which I always believed to be Melany or Melanie (everyone was just calling you Mel).

But whatever the technical reasons, I did not consciously ignore you, and neither am I trying to mob you out. Apart from the hapless incident with the e-mail, what did I do to make you think I could hate you? We don't know each other very closely, but when we spoke I always thought we had a, you know, nice and normal relationship. I've always read every post from you and sometimes also shifted one of them to the frontpage so more people get to read it. If I've ever appears harshly to you, I was not aware of it.

Also I'm sorry for the troubles logging on. I haven't messed with the logging in part of the site and haven't heard of someone else having similiar trouble, it was probably an issue with your computer's configuration.

it seems to me that i am not the only one who feels that is no longer a community. i don't think that it has been a deliberate thing, it has just drifted over time. now it hangs together by a few threads which grow weaker daily. it is time for me to go. my threads have been cut off, or just detached themselves. i am still unwilling to believe that it is the work of an individual or group.

You see, there is nothing like a magic bond that turns a loose group of people into something we call "community" and may disappear as misteriously as it came. The secret is, how much a place feels like a community for you depends entirely on how many friends you have there, with how many people's personal life you've touched base with.

A couple of months ago, there were several people from your school and everyday life posting here. Those posts were often very personal, and to be honest as an unknowing observer one couldn't always figure out what they were about. I still kept reading everyone's postings because all the same there were a lot I did understand and enjoyed reading.

Now that most of these people rarely come here anymore, isn't it natural that it feels a little less like a community to you. How many new people have you made friends with since?

For me this place feels like a community, because there's people like null, Orchid and MrCrash. I've been chatting a lot with MrCrash lately because we're sharing the same taste of music and video games. Or there's wizz, that guy I'm studying with. I think childeoftheblood is a man who's mind should deserve attention. My better half, Ettena is on vacation right now, but when she's home she sometimes comes here to, and sometimes we get to chat here, which is great. jbooker used to hang around on Netalive some years ago and is back now, and baexcell, well I don't actually know a lot about this baexcell guy but we chatted a bit and I know that right now he's pretty busy organizing his wedding, which is already far cry from being a total stranger.

(There are many others who should have been in this list, but my fingers hurt!)

When you know someone personally a bit, their posts immediately have a completely different notion coming with them. Friendship doesn't appear out of nowhere, you'll have to work on it a little, be interested in their lives, give them comfort, make them laugh or help them out.

How much community you get is entirely up to you. Constructs like Netalive just offer a pool of souls to pick from. This is what I meant with my post you quoted as:

You cannot simply slap the "community" label onto something and wait for your vague idea of "community" to appear out of nowhere.

You cannot force feed community to people who are not in the least interested in each other.

What I meant was, you cannot force people into a community just because you want it, or by technical means. In the end it is always up to the single individuals to decide whether to participate (and thus create) a community or not.

So finally, for your questions about rating and ranks. I'm trying to make it quick.

1. How high you are ranking is entirely independent on the ranks of others. There could be a billion people with three white stars if necessary, and there's no such concept as "having to overtake" someone.

2. To see how high you are ranking, look at your stars, not at the user directory sorted by "highest rank". Don't get worked up by someone with the same rank as you showing up higher in the user directory as you do. They just have to be listed in some order there.

   I've never fired up the directory and counted the number of people ahead of me. Ranks are only a very vague scale to measure how much effort you put into contributing. Remember it's a machine trying to figure out how many people you helped, interested or delighted. How could a machine ever figure out an exact measure for that.

3. Ratings fade out over time, which means ratings contribute less to your rank when they have been casted a long time ago. So contrary to what you said, you can go down in rank without being rated down.

   Behind the ranks imagine a measuring cup labelled "score". Everyone starts out with a score of zero, an empty cup. Nice ratings add to your score, Excellent ratings add a lot, Mediocre ratings take away only a tiny bit and Spam/Flamebait votes eat up a lot of score when they come in numbers.

   Marked on the measuring cup's scale are triples of stars. When the contents of your cup has rised over that mark, that's your rank.

   A rating counts 100% for the first 50 days of it's existence. After that it continually decreases every 20 days for a total of 300 days until it has reached a minimum of 2% of its original value.

   With ratings only beginning to fade out after 50 days, and then only in intervals of 20 days, you could explain why you lost that one white star. The inactivity of your vacation affected your ranking only after you returned.

   Strange enough I built in this "safe for 50 days" thing only to not treat people unfairly only because they go on vacation for some weeks.

4. As you said, oxygenius left with a bang, pissed off a lot of people with what he wrote and pocketed a lot of negative ratings in return. These ratings are why he moved down in rank, not a Netalive moderator batting into the fray.

I hope this helps to clear up your questions.

So Melissa, when you no longer feel comfortable here and see no chance for that to change anytime soon, it's probably better to leave. I didn't build this place for people to not enjoy it. Maybe I gave you a few things to think about in this post, and if not I hope to have at least cleared up any misunderstandings.

Sorry about that email, and take care.

Henning

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

This post was edited by Jaz on Aug 03, 2003.

Considering the length and extensiveness of Jaz's post, I don't really have much to add. Just wanted to say that I've always read your posts, and while I'm usually too lazy (or short of ideas) to write back, I've always enjoyed them. So whatever small significance my voice may have to you, please stay a while and reconsider. You'd be missed.

On a side note: I think I can confirm that nobody's messed with your score (at least the corresponding modifier is set to its default value of 100%). I also don't think Germany's nicest geek could do something as nasty as mobbing you out by stealing your stars. (He only tends to mess with some users' geek factor sometimes. :-P )

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

A couple of months ago, there were several people from your school and everyday life posting here. Those posts were often very personal, and to be honest as an unknowing observer one couldn't always figure out what they were about. I still kept reading everyone's postings because all the same there were a lot I did understand and enjoyed reading.

Just to clarify, both me and Mel regretted getting so many people in from our school. It took the "community" away from NetAlive and dumped it in our own lives. We both found it something of a relief when they stopped visiting.

Which world is Plato in?

Although I'm sure this is all a misunderstanding, there's no way for us to stop you. I just hope, as I'm sure many of us do, that you'll stick around. And if the feeling of community is gone for you, then. . . well, I dunno what to say. It's easy for us to perceive things incorrectly, but I really hope you're wrong. As far as I can see, it seems that NAO is alive and kicking: there's the two Memphians, Anduril and myself, as well as a lot of other newer-folks, like baexcell, mac, and zenbunny. We've still got a bunch of the older crowd posting, like null and Jaz. Like Jaz earlier, I know I'm skipping a lot of people, but it certainly seems like we're growing stronger.

Please stick around: even if you're right, even if NAO is hanging on by a thread, it's just as likely to get better.

Oh, and if you're wrong then it's all good anyways.

Thbbbbt

now it hangs together by a few threads which grow weaker daily.

I'm still very new here, but I absolutely don't have this impression.

Internet communities are changing fast, and the speed increases as the community grows. I think it might be the change itself that you perceive as bad. This is rather normal, I suspect the people here just aren't the same as when you came here first. Still, it's not a sign that the community as a whole is comming to an end.

i'll probably lurk around here for a while reading but not logging in or posting.

I don't understand that. If you come here you might as well log in, right? It's not as if when posting here you have an obligation to log in twice a day.
I guess it might be sometimes necessary to detach yourself from something, but in this case you wouldn't come back at all.

Actually I did the same thing only a small while ago. I didn't leave because I didn't like the place anymore, but because I was pissed of with some people there and just wanted to make a statement. I regret it.

'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman. 'Get stuffed!' the Harlequin replied, sneering.