Stardock, I'm Disappointed

I agree completely, Kinjiru. Not very impressed at all.

JoeUser is a StarDock property as well. The views are NOT the views of StarDock, but of which ever individual posted them. The commentary is often political though.

Yes, if you have different views, by all means go there and post them. That is what Joe User is about.

If it seems slanted to one side, then maybe others with differing views can help balance it out - but they have to start posting there.

Friend Kinjiru, you are quite right. I found the little switcheroo at first to be surprising, then alarming (since I thought my PC had been hijacked), and then I was slightly offended. If I want non-linear hyperventilating rants I’ll visit Ann Coulter’s web site.

Hydro

To respond to two posters: Thank you for the information and I can appreciate the fact that many of the views may not be from Stardock employees. However, some were and they conflicted with my own views. Secondly, I don't know how the blogs on the front page are selected, maybe it's random and they all just shared a common theme, but that would lead me to believe the "JoeUser" community is heavily weighted in one direction if so.

And finally, even if someone not affiliated with Stardock made many of the posts, my real point is that I didn't even want to peek under the hood of the Stardock products I enjoy. I just wanted to enjoy the products. I had no intention of ever getting to know the staff's political, religious and other views. So imagine my shock and disappointment to just go out to the proverbial car (galciv2.com) and find the hood open, and staring me in the face are sentences like, "The Anti-Christ Shall Be Jewish".

This is a part of Stardock, even in some disconnected, indirect manner, that I didn't want to see.

Not sure why the redirect to JoeUser. If the GC2 site was down would seem more appropriate to redirect us to another game related site of theirs. I was surprised to be staring at the very thing I ignore on these forums.  Maybe send us to the Sins site instead.

Yeah, the only time the GalCiv team does much posting on JoeUser is when we post our 'Development Blogs'....or when Animal Planet airs the weirdest show I've ever seen (http://boogiebac.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=64080 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXT-sJcJka4&mode=related&search)

Also...is this still happening to people?  Everything seems OK to me....but perhaps that's jsut cause I'm in the office.

It seems to be back to normal now. The site has been kinda wonky for me since Sunday. I couldn't get the recent posts to update all day Sunday. Then yesterday trying to view a user profile sent me to their Joe User profile.

Found out this morning that it was a server issue, that forced them to move the sites around. Everything seems to be back to normal.

Is she still alive? I thought she died. Maybe she and Imus can get something going together. There's a match made in heaven.

One of the servers had a disk failure last night. I'm not entirely sure why it would have been redirecting to JU (there is some shared code between the two), but it certainly wasn't intentional. For me the front page simply wouldn't load, there was no redirection.

I'm not sure where on JU it was pointing that would give you such a bad impression, though. All of the political articles on the front page of JU right now were written by regular users, not SD people, excepting Brad's global warming article at the bottom (which is not so much an inherently political topic as it is an issue commonly used as political fodder).

It's unfortunate and I accept that it was accidental. But I think we can all imagine how we'd feel if we went to CNN.com, Disney.com, Amazon.com, etc and the content we expect was instead replaced with articles about everything from how wonderful "God" is or why the "Anti-Christ" is a Jew, to why our personal efforts to reduce global warming are in vain because it's a myth.

I accept it was accidental. I accept that this situation is very possibly one that was never foreseen or considered. But now that it's come up, I hope that SD will make adjustments so those of us who find a good portion of what was on JoeUser this morning to be nothing more than negative hate speech can avoid that and instead be redirected to a neutral page of choice while we wait for the normal site to return.

It also wouldn't hurt if whomever was responsible for this happening would jot a quick note to say, "Hey, sorry this happened, we'll fix it."

And, thanks for your concern and thoughts, Kryo.

A little more in the way of explanation on why you saw JoeUser this morning instead of GalCiv2.com

Like Kryo said, a hard drive failed on one of our servers, in fact it was the server housing JoeUser, GalCiv.com, and several other of our websites.  Instead of leaving those sites offline until we could physically bring the server back to life, we restored backups of the sites to one of our still-breathing servers.  Namely the one that GalCiv2.com lives on.

Seeing JoeUser instead of GalCiv2.com was the result of a config error when restoring the backed up sites to the machine.  We didn't catch it last night, but did first thing this morning when people shuffled back into the office. 

We're sorry for the confusion and interruption.

Why is this such an issue to you, still? You seem like one of those people who should just build a room with no windows and paint it white, so that your surroundings remain 'neutral' of course, and then pair up with an ostrich and shove your head in the sand. That way, all of life can be hidden from your delicate eyes and you will not have to suffer the way those of us do on a daily basis. Did you actually read these topics? If not, then what the hell is the problem. You weren't forced to read anything other than a few 'headlines' so let it be.
Again, I find myself to be in a foul mood and I don't know why... maybe a brief time out is in order.

Sorry Kinjiru, nothing personal of course.

I totally agree with Stormbringer. I dont see why you even give a damn what people talk about ON A DIFFERENT website. They already cleared up the fact that it was a server issue, and your still ranting about something childish and idiotic. What, did it ruin your day to see unorthodox topics? If it did, how very sad.

Oh, yes. The village of ~9000 where I live in the west Chicago suburbs decided to have their first newspaper edition with an Ann Coulter editorial. Boy, did that ever get a pointed and decidedly negative response - and that is in the conservative suburbs.
Both Ann and Imus are in the entertainment industry, although I get the impression that Imus does his antics for effect like a true shock jock and Ann might actually believe what she says (as hard as that is to believe). When I’ve read her articles I can almost see her eyes bugging out and face turning red – oh, the screaming. If I want serious non-hysterical discussions I'll read The Economist, American Scientist, the Skeptical Enquirer or the Tribune.

Anyway, I'm glad the redirect is fixed. Case closed.

Hydro

Yeah, I think the case is closed, and I'm going to lock this puppy up before things get criz-azy.

And seriously, speaking of puppies...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8d2xDy5Wuw

It was pulling up (I think) the normal JoeUser homepage. The first article is a Jerry Falwell related article...Which I didn't even know until I looked at it again since I didn't read any of it the first time.

It does also include in the side column "Time for Excess Profits Tax on Big Oil!" and " Jesus - Habitual Liar?" which are definitely not conservative.

There are also a fair number of politically neutral articles. Overall I would say it's tilted conservative...But clearly anyone can post up most anything they like.

Either way, I do understand the point that what you where looking for was GCII not something else. I was probably less surprised since I knew about the JoeUser relationship already and I would have been a bit shocked had I not known about it.

Nice video Boogie.

For me, it did not point to the JoeUser home page, but what appeared to be an archive of January 28, 2007. All of the recent posts, etc. were from very early 2007.

I ignored the theological/political posts, but did enjoy finding/reading Frogboy's "Skinning the Frog" series of posts on management and money value in the white collar world. I don't manage lawyers, but I do have to manage a team of paralegals, secretaries, accountants, collectors and forensic investigators. Some of his points don't necessarily apply to my position - I could never do every task in a case by myself in the deadlines imposed by the courts.

Mostly, I must agree with his evaluation of the value of different workers. I have a team of six paralegals. One does almost everything, and I've made her a "trainer" and rely on her quite a bit. She makes more, but not ten times more, which is about the difference in the work she does. I'm always worried that one day she will actually decide to go to law school, and I'll have to hire 3 people to replace her. Also, like the example with Ted (the star) and Bill (very weak), my best paralegal is roommates and best friends with one of my worst. I can't come down to hard on the worse worker, because I don't want to upset my best worker.

Anyway, thanks Frogboy, for your thread from late January. It was a great read, and very relevant if you are in a position to have the headache of managing people.

I have two pet peeves... Politic's and Reality TV series.

I think us conservatives hate Ann Coulter more than liberals.

She and her fanbase are a really strange, really hardcore bunch.

I am surprised that a company in the software business, would have such poor control of their network system. It is after all, the company's heart beat.

I am equally, surprised that a software company would even have a Joe User blog area, that provides a venue for peoples political nonesense. After all, even if this is a free sociaty, there is a proper place for everything. (Funny enough, I did not see one on the microsoft web site).

Look People! We know computers systems and software can fail or crash. We have heard from Kryo and others that it was unintentional and the problem was rectified ASAP. I too was directed to JU but after a quick glance I decided (by choice) not to read any of the material posted on the site.

My point is. I hardly think we should be disappointed in Stardock or any of the team because of something that happened beyond their control. Frankly I feel we should be grateful for all of their overwhelming efforts in creating wonderful games and the fantastic support they continue to give to gamers and their creations.

No offense intended and this is my personal opinion. Thanks Stardock!

When I hit it this morning, I was confused, but I figured someone hacked in and messed something up. But even still, I don't really care what the people who developed the software think politically. That's not why I bought the game, I bought it because they're good at making games. And as for Ann Coulter, I believe she tends to have the right train of thought, she just expresses herself in too controversial a way.