I find the unintentional parallels between NEXON’s failings, and Basil’s failings in this blog hilarious. If you swap out NEXON for Basil and change a few events over the blog still works.
The whole feature has a security flaw that nobody should ever make. I dare not even hint at the method, because it is so obvious and easy to do. I’m truly astounded that such a flaw made it in. It’s something that even a novice PHP coder wouldn’t make. So I’ll happily vandalise the blog for profit and entertainment. NEXON makes a silly mistake in this event, mrb makes a silly mistake with this blog feature. It fits, I guess.
Anyhow, I know people seem to come down on me as being very negative on Basil, and yes, that’s true. But it’s because I rarely talk about the positives, and yes, there are some; but I find them to be fleeting. Another irony of the blog.
Remember when Maple was mostly balanced, had a nice community and NX didn’t give you advantages over others? I look back with rose tinted glasses, but there were times like that. I was there in 2006~08. But NEXON would go on and prove why the free-to-play cash shop model fails.
Remember when Basil looked nice, had a nice community and being one of the ‘popular’ people didn’t mean much? Again, I look back with rose tinted glasses, but it was like that. And I was happily a part of it. Now we have a site that looks terrible (to save on bandwidth), that’s covered in horrible adverts (apparently because the hosting is expensive), and a community that is equally obnoxious and vulgar. Parody threads, overuse of memes and the over reactionary backlash from the administration seems to be a recent thing. Hell, it’s almost daily where I find a new thing put on the filter, and wonder why. Recently, my own domain was added.
I’ve remained mostly civil to Bogdan, I know more about him than most, we talk sometimes on Meebo (BasilIM) about the highs and lows of being site admins and other topics. Call my vandalism of his blog some out of the norm hijinks.
Another daily occurrence are the random events that seem to degrade the site. Currently there are two people on the “team” that I consider to be highly inappropriate. I won’t name them here, but you can probably guess who I am referring to. It seems that having a personality of a professional troll is okay as long as you can perform your other duties. I disagree, I think a good personality is required for such a role.
The site used to be pretty ugly in 2005, improved a lot by 2006, peaked in 2007, and then went down hill fast. Look at it now, the menu is probably one of the most unfriendly interfaces I’ve ever seen on a site. mrb doesn’t seem to care. My theme, with help from a friend, restores the dropdowns and colour to the site. Makes the site appeal to the eyes again.
Nobody really quits, I half heartedly tried in July, and it didn’t really happen. Since November of last year, I’ve made over 1900 posts, more than any other site I’m a member of. But my post count isn’t increasing as fast as it once did. A shame. I miss the site I once knew.
Apologies in advance for spelling and grammar. It’s 4am right now.
