The hardest class for me in high school was math. Well, the harder math anyway - halfway through my final year I dropped to regular math to boost my overall score (as at the time I wasn't planning on doing a science-based course at university) and it was by far the easiest subject there.

I think the reason it was hard was a combination of two things. The first is that it was taught terribly - I learned how to plug in formulas/methods but never learned to understand what was happening (ie. learning the Power Rule but not the proof of why it works, or how to differentiate by using the limit process), so I was confused the majority of the time. The other reason is because I'm a bit of a slow learner, so I found it hard to keep up with. Now that I'm in a science degree again I've been teaching myself high school math (and a little uni math too) to get up to speed with the course and I'm finding it a lot easier, probably because it's not being taught wrong and I've got more time to learn it.

Alrighty, I was asked to weigh in on this thread yesterday or the day before. I've had a busy few days and I can't remember who sent me the PM, but here it is.

I'm honestly not well-versed enough in the forums at the moment to give a rock-solid argument on whether certain members should be banned or not, but I'm going to base my opinion on what I've seen in this thread, Drakilian's evidence, and my own experience.

Old Man seems alright. Nobody told him to stop talking about being an old man until this thread, and even so, as long as he's still relevant to the conversation I don't see the big deal. He's not breaking any rules. In regards to the evidence against him, I agree that was derailing the thread but it's not a ban-worthy offence. Older members have done far worse. I'd delete it now but I'm leaving it there in case the other mods want to see your evidence.

Oinkman is annoying and I've deleted a number of his posts already. I'm sure there are many more that have gone undeleted. I don't read every forum thread anymore because I've got other things I prefer to do - that's part of the reason I pushed for another moderator. But yeah, a lot of this guy's posts are rubbish.

I remember having deleted a few of Jihelu's posts in the past. The first thread of evidence isn't spam at all - a bunch of people replied to it and were interested in the topic. Sure, there wasn't much discussion but I don't see how that's worthy of banning someone. The second one isn't bad either! I just looked at it and it's perfectly fine - if he wants to discuss D&D why shouldn't he be allowed to? Unless posts have been deleted by BZ in either of these threads I don't see what's wrong with Jihelu.

MTactical I'm not sure about. Sure his threads aren't exactly interesting but then again how many threads in The Lounge are anymore?

To be completely honest Drak I think in some cases you're getting spam mixed up with posts you just don't like. In fact, some of the older members post more useless posts - see Fireplay's "Burn Tan... Burn from my fire-post!" and some of Aman's one-word/smiley posts in other threads (eg. "^-^", "...") - the problem you seem to be having with new members changing the dynamic of the forums started happening ages ago. Keep in mind new members eventually grow up. I thought when cool74, Bo, and Ugi joined, they were... threatening isn't the word but basically a much cooled down version of what you think of these new members and they've turned into some of my favourite posters in the forums (when they do post).

Don't get me wrong, I'm gonna delete spam posts when I see them (aside from the ones you've posted as evidence, just in case madglee or BZ see this thread and want to check them out) but trying to prevent new members from posting out of fear of the demographic changing just isn't how things are done here. I thought the moustache/penguin thing was ridiculously stupid when it started but I didn't seek to stop it from happening. The demographic of the site changes. It's changed multiple times since I've been here. There was a phase where it was just Anubis and Zero telling dick jokes which didn't suit me, during the Bo/Ugi/cool/Playa/etc. era I felt a little alienated from their sense of humour, and so on. Times change, the active members of the website change and it's something you'll unfortunately have to grow use to, as I have.

In the meantime, if you find spam posts the best thing you can do is PM a mod. I'll try and spend a bit more time weeding through the forums (it seems things have gotten a little crazier since around the time I stopped vigorously checking all the threads, whether those two events are correlated at all who knows), though you guys will have to tell me when something happens in Forum Games because I don't bother reading the posts there unless I've been messaged about it.

And to answer your original question - if you think a user should be banned sending a PM to madglee (along with evidence) is the way to go, he'll make a decision from there.

Almost - originally we had JJJ, Fleshy, Solo and Hav as mods and the creators as admins. After a few years JJJ gets given creator powers due to Alex, Choco, and March being inactive. I became a moderator after this, and then a little while later madglee gets given creator powers also. So only the creators, JJJ, and madglee are admins. The other (inactive) moderators have the same powers as BZ and I.

From memory, if you want to comment on the same line as script, you use two slashes, like this:

%HEALTH := %HEALTH + 5 // increasing health by 5

Like I said, that's from memory so I could be wrong. Try it out. Also I think the following works:

%HEALTH := %HEALTH + 5
/* this is a multi line
comment, in fact everything within
the slash-asterisk and asterisk-slash
is part of a comment and will be
ignored by the storygame engine */
%INTIMIDATE := 17

Good luck with your storygame! Just a heads up - if you're still in the process of writing something, the Writing Workshop's the place to post about it.

It was me.

Really enjoying this so far!

On the page "Use the svelk as scouts", you call Alison Brenda by mistake.

Just a heads up, there's an edit button on your post! (It only works if no one's replied to you.)

Welcome to the site!

If duelling was based on skill then it's more likely that somebody could accrue a large number of points by duelling rather than rating and writing storygames and contributing to the site. I like the idea but I reckon the random nature of duels justifies the point wagers.

Thanks for the suggestion! I've already got someone picked out (not saying who to avoid people going "no, it should be this guy instead!" etc - that's not to rule BZ out, though!).

Who gets appointed will depend on what the other mods/admins think - community opinion will probably not come into play. Just making a note of this now in case people start treating this as a nomination thread.