One Last Piece of Idiocy?

I'm away for a few weeks and there's a piece of stupidity from Elliot the Obnoxiously Thick! Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?

The trigger seems to have been some incident in IRC between EtOT and rpeh. At first, EtOT reports it as an "Abuse of power", but after a couple of replies from The Great Deceiver, he decides it was worth an indefinite block.

Now normally, I'd say that TGD's reply is unhelpful, but since it's EtOT we're talking about here, there isn't really any better response. EtOT could just as easily stand for Elliot the Obnoxious Troll, but I would rather emphasise his stupidity.

Unfortunately, TGD didn't follow his own advice. After EtOT changes the title, TGD "reverts trolling", which EtOT undoes while accusing TGD of almost violating 3RR (the Wikipedia rule that says you can't make more than 3 reverts to a page within 24 hours). TGD points out that EtOT is talking out of his arse and EtOT admits the mistake, but doesn't apologise of course.

At this point, Southern Belle steps in. She politely tells EtOT to stop being a trolling bastard and wags a finger at TGD, presumably because she had to find some way of balancing her reply. More whining ensues from EtOT before SB tells him straight: he was trolling in IRC. EtOT then reminds us all why he gets the "Obnoxious" part of his name.

We then get Herschel's first major contribution as an admin. He agrees with SB and also tells EtOT that he's a troll. EtOT bids the site goodbye again before Lucius Tarquinius Superbus adds a typically magnificent reply. NOTE: current number of edits made by EtOT after leaving: 7.

Timenn (and I need a new name - he has not been around enough lately to justify the LGA tag) wraps the discussion up by giving EtOT what must surely be his last unofficial warning.

Hopefully this goodbye will be more permanent than his previous dozen or so. It is now clear that everyone is sick and tired of Elliot. The scariest thing about him is that he shows exactly the same behaviour on UESP and WP and still doesn't understand it when people tell him off. You have to wonder if he is like this in Real Life.

What's so Difficult About Images?

For something so unimportant, the images on UESP cause one hell of a lot of controversy. The latest revolves around this image that Timenn uploaded back in 2007.

As part of the current drive to get square images on all NPC pages, Gemellus' page had a tag that said "This article could benefit from an image that is square, showing more of the NPC". New user Walbert decided to help by uploading the tall image shown here and changing the page to use the new image. Unsurprisingly, Southern Belle reverts it with the reason "not square". Not discouraged, Walbert tries again and uploads the tiny square image and changes the page again. SB still doesn't like it as it "shows less of NPC, not more". You can't really fault her logic here.

Unfortunately, Walbert isn't happy and takes it to her talk page. SB replies politely, Walbert replies again, totally missing the point, then Herschel and Lucius pop in with fairly helpful comments too. Walbert finally gets it and uploads a reasonable version before making one last whine: "I'm honestly left wondering how a generally helpful resource like UESP can be so unhelpful to those who wish to contribute".

Now I love to criticise UESP when I can, but in this case I can't. The tag was perfectly clear about what was wanted and three people made helpful comments to expand. If you're not bright enough to read then don't take it out on other people.

It's Finally Happened!

It's a great day as Southern Belle finally removes Elliot the Obnoxiously Thick's patroller rights then announces it to the world and to EtOT himself.

I'm sure several people have been celebrating for some time but let me raise a glass in recognition of the fact that this most idiotic and pointless of editors has had his comeuppance at long last.

It's About Time

Finally, the patience of other users has been exhausted by Elliot the Obnoxiously Thick's behaviour.

It began with Lucius Tarquinius Superbus who in a brief (sarcasm) post outlined most of the case against him. Southern Belle follows up and suggests allowing EtOT to resign first (what's the point? Resign or be demoted anyway isn't much of a choice). Serial annoyance MEG pops up again with a confused series of posts and agrees, then Elliot's Bitch The Editor With an Out of Date Name demonstrates that he needs a new nickname.

So far, EtOT is only facing calls for his patroller rights to be stripped. Nobody has yet responded to Timenn's call for comments on the mutual block-fest from Saturday. Nothing yet from The Great Deceiver either. Presumably his response is going to be several megabytes long and will crash the server when he posts it. I can't believe he's going to remain silent on this one.

He Won't Let it Lie

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Southern Belle Goes a'Snoopin'

It looks to me as if GK (and I've decided to call her Southern Belle because it's time she had a nickname) has been trying to work out who I am. Why do I say this? Because suddenly Timmeh, who hadn't made a post since 1 October 2009 and had only made three since the end of June, pops up on her talk page and posts a message titled "Response to Email" that claims he hasn't even heard of me. I'm hurt! Southern Belle's response also seems to suggest that she asked him if he was me.

No, I'm not Timmeh. But then... if I was, would I admit it?

He is Thick! Hear his ROAR!

That's better. I had been wondering whether or not there would ever be anything worth posting about again since the site had been reasonably sane over the past few days. At last, good old Elliot the Thick saves my blog with a typical display of idiocy.

We need to go back a few days to an edit by Nx on the perennially-unfinished page about The Infernal City. It combines the book image with the infobox table and actually looks pretty good as we now have all the meta-information over to the side.

Spin forward a few days and GuildKnight likes the idea so much she does the same on all the game front pages. A few hours later, Joram takes the sensible step of making a template to make sure things stay the same on all the pages and that they can be easily changed if necessary. He then goes through and adds the template to the game pages.

Now it could be argued that this was all done without consensus. There was certainly no discussion about Nx's or GuildKnight's changes. On the other hand, the fact that Nx's change was around for two days with nobody complaining and that both GuildKnight and Joram obviously liked it enough to adapt the solution, there's pretty clearly some strong support for the new layout. Hypothetically, what would you do if you didn't like the new design? Perhaps start a discussion on the Community Portal? Ask GuildKnight on her talk page? Well not if you're Elliot the Thick.

In a remarkable series of posts, EtT first undoes all Joram's template changes, then goes through again and changes all the pages back to their pre-GuildKnight style. Evidently his little break left him with an itchy undo finger and he was too stupid to realise that the first undo made little difference. He then proposes Joram's template for deletion. Ratwar undoes it, although his edit reason doesn't make much sense; EtT reverts Ratwar; Rpeh reverts EtT; EtT reverts Rpeh, and finally GuildKnight reverts EtT. Incidentally, GuildKnight shows herself to be an expert at edit summary put downs. EtT's edit summary when reverting Rpeh was "it is not being used, it has no reason to remain", to which GuildKnight replied "it is only unused because you removed all uses of it".

I can only imagine what was happening elsewhere. I guess, for instance, that IRC was melting under the flames. Whatever happened, EtT marked himself as an inactive patroller and resigned as a mentor. He also added a quote to his user page: "All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view." The fact that he takes that attitude should prove exactly how unsuitable he is for life on a wiki. He was still checking the site 5 hours later though, when he reverted somebody else who preferred the new layout.

Is this the end of Elliot the Thick? He obviously can't stop edit warring, except this time he did it with two admins. His pig-headed stupidity and obstinacy have been exposed yet again and he still refuses to play nicely with other people.

There should be an onsite debate about Elliot the Thick and his status as patroller. It is time that this idiot had his ability to damage the site removed.

S'drassa for Patroller?

So far, GK's nomination of S'drassa (static link 'cos it'll be archived soon) looks like going through but not without three "no" votes. Let's take a look in, because I feel like it, reverse order.

ModderElGrande stated that S'drassa doesn't have the experience, but that's not the reason. MEG tried to post his own mod on the site, with no discussion and in totally the wrong way. When he started whining about this, it was S'drassa that stepped up and slapped him for it. This led to MEG posting this on S'drassa's talk page and then the official oppose. This oppose, in other words, is motivated by personal dislike.

Next, we see serial annoyance Michaeldsuarez step up. MDS is obviously dedicated to detail. So much that he can't even be bothered to look at S'drassa's user page and so calls him "she or he". MDS is a serial troll, both on UESP and elsewhere, largely caused by his previous rejection from UESP. Another oppose motivated by personal reasons.

Lastly, we have Elliot the Thick. EtT's post is a classic from that user. First, he acknowledges that the rules that let him (EtT) become a patroller are ridiculous, then he says that because of this, S'drassa should be prevented from joining the gang. EtT's entire justification seems to be that because EtT turned out shit with so little experience, everybody else will too.

Well there we have the current state of play. Currently, S'drassa is sailing towards Patrollership with only those three "Oppose" votes. UESPwatch's own opinion is that any user that can even get TGD and RtV on the same side has got to be pretty good.

Happy New Year!

Well I've had a nice break, thank you all, and it looks like the site has had a similar break. Nothing really interesting has taken place during the few days I've been away. Let's see what I can remember...

Elliot the Thick seems to have realised he's not wanted and has disappeared (just ten posts in over two weeks), except for one or two things. First, he did an Elliot Special and got a good kicking from GuildKnight for doing so. Next, and this is an EtT classic, he votes to oppose S'drassa's nomination for patroller largely on the grounds that even EtT realises he got the role too quickly. So, in Elliot the Thick's mind, just because he turned out to be garbage as a patroller, everybody else is garbage at that stage too. And that's about it for EtT. With any luck he's gone to annoy another group of people now.

The Great Deceiver has been impressing us all with his ability to try something in many different ways until it works mastery of templates. To be fair, it does look like UESP can now deal without all the subpages that they previously used to artificially increase their number of pages (cf this from Rawtwat the Vicious).

Another new return is HMSVictory Itachi. So far so good, but I imagine we'll have to watch and wait to see what happens with this user who previously appeared less stable than a malfunctioning gyroscope.

One quicky from today was ^CEshe^V reminding us all just why she got her name.

I'm sure there was more than that. If you think I've missed out anything, please post a comment.

The Sound of Silence

Come on people! Why so quiet?

Three whole days and nobody's done anything. Sure there was a stupid section-protection from Elliot the Thick who evidently can't understand the concept of dynamic IP addresses and we've had the usual Welcome Spam from ^CEshe^V but beyond that, almost nothing.

Timenn, the Last Good Administrator, chipped in earlier with a slew of good edits (although WTF was this one about? The edit summary of "Why do you disagree?" doesn't seem to make sense) but otherwise it's been too quiet. Come on people! Surely it's time for EtT to fuck up another template?

That's two more nicknames decided: LGA for Timenn and ^CEshe^V for Eshe (since 95% of her edits involve copy/paste or existing templates). My lucky off-the-cuff name for Rpeh - The Great Deceiver - strikes me as pure brilliance so I'm sticking with that. For Nephele I'm going for The Pious, since she always had a More Wiki Than Thou attitude that couldn't have been more annoying if she stood next to you and sang off-key Bee Gees songs into your ear while you read her self-absorbed, overlong posts. She's been quiet recently though. Since she's so obviously after a place on the MediaWiki development team, there may be scope for a more appropriate name there.

That leaves just G(?:uild)?K(?:night)? in the admins (Wrye, if he deserves a mention at all, will get "Monkey Man"). I'm not sure what do with GK so suggestions are welcome. Nothing too insulting because if it wasn't for Timenn, she'd probably get the LGA nick.

After that there are the quartet of new(ish) patrollers: Krusty, SerCenKing, WGB and Dlarsh. All four seem pretty decent so far, although you have to worry about Krusty's OCD. Suggestions welcome there too.