A Year Too Late

If I really cared any more I could get depressed at the poor standard of admin on UESP these days. A good example is this post from TheRealLurlock expressing concern at the block settings he's been using on IPs. In a nutshell, Lurlock tells us that he doesn't know what he's doing and it's taken him months to say anything. Yeah, that's the kind of admin a site needs.

There's a reply from Lonely and Desperate saying the same thing, although the diff for that one is lost thanks to Daveh being incompetent. Lastly we have Whining Little Bitch doing his usual trick of replacing actual thought by copying stuff from Wikipedia. He suggests limiting the length of blocks to a year or less.

I thought this sounded a bit familiar and remembered this discussion started by rpeh on 1 May 2011. It seems I've got a better memory than Lonely and Desperate because he took part in the discussion but obviously doesn't remember anything. Rpeh's reason for starting the discussion was exactly what it's taken the other dullards 15 months to realise: that just because someone vandalises a page from a given IP address, it isn't always going to belong to a vandal.

The original proposals didn't go anywhere because LaD is an idiot and some other user I'd forgotten was also an idiot, and has done the square root of fuck all in recent times. While rpeh's suggestion to unblock every single indefinitely blocked IP address was a stupid suggestion that would have led to days of pure spam, the basic idea of not perma-blocking any IPs in the future was a good one. It's a shame it took so long for the others to get there.

It Comes to One Man

As promised, a little more on the recent activity of TheRealLurlock.

Most of his recent edits have been about the Tamriel Rebuilt (TR) project. In case you don't know, it's a huge project to create the whole of Morrowind province using the Morrowind engine. This might sound silly to those of you who haven't played the game, but TES III: Morrowind only featured the island of Vvardenfell. You can see what that means in this image. When complete, the TR project will contain about five times as much land as the original Morrowind game. The other thing to say is that the quality of the added lands is really, really high. The first two releases made by the team were great but the latest one - Sacred East - is mind-blowing because of the increase in quality that the admins have required.

What does this have to do with Lurlock?

When UESP decided to document TR there was a bit of an argument between Lurlock and rpeh about how it should be done. I can't be bothered with diffs, but you can see it here. Lurlock wanted a whole new namespace while rpeh and Queen of Trolls wanted to avoid namespace explosion and to use sub-namespaces instead. The latter solution was used, but despite the claims of the people on that side, things reached the point where QoT's wiki extensions had to take special account of the extra sub-NSs. Anyway...

The project grew, with rpeh taking the lead with lots of help from TR insiders like Gez and Theviking, to become a part of the site that took up a lot of space without generating lots of views.

Whenever TR released a new map, rpeh would set up RoBoT to create stubs for NPCs, quests, places and so on, then begin the process of filling them in. The team working on those pages did a decent job, and although there are (as of right now) 280 stubs, that compares favourably to the 271 Daggerfall stubs and the shocking 1,387 Skyrim stubs.

So instead of a competent group of editors filling in a set of bot-created pages, we have... Lurlock.

No, I don't think this is going to end well either.