[amet]

Amet, He took Andys side over the entire complaint I made re: xbmchubs posts, Amet defended their wording, their practices, their "guy" etc while I was told to shut up and move on, both in the thread and in PMs.

It doesn't matter now though, it's one be I'm clear on the position overall and appreciate the info.

I did??

really? http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1197762

[Kib]

Amet, that thread is a prime example of my first point.

Abrasher says <a certain plugin with X at the end> is not piracy, then explains it enables you to see content for free which you had to pay for otherwise - the very definition of piracy! You then tell him "please no usenet links. Be a good boy. - completely ignoring the fact he advertised his site and the illegal content on this forum."

In the meanwhile on the rest of the forum, if anyone else mentions that same plugin, the posts are moved to the garbage bin or moderated.

The XBMC-team must realise that new users look up to people with 1000+ posts and follow their example.

[SNIP] I slept too little and I am very tired. I will react more when I am awake enough to think.

[amet]

note that that post was pre new set of rules... I just dont see how I "defended their wording, their practices, their "guy" etc" ... entire teamXBMC got notified cos Patrick got told off by him... not once, but twice ... thats why I reacted there..

my opinion of hub is well known, if PatrickBateman thinks otherwise who am I to disagree

[da-anda]

@deleted threads - well, this wasn't handled very well nor well thought at that time. It's just too much shit happened lately and team members got sick of it, which lead to some overreaction and loose trigger fingers. I'm not saying the decisions themselves where wrong, just not handled the best way. But we're also only human.

[PatK]

I saw fullmoonguru's first post.. but didn't have enough time to fully drink it in and when I came back to look for it... it was gone, which in itself is a statement. I personally didn't see anything wrong in it... although I'm aware aware of the friction between repo's and understand the issues. A full deletion of the post didn't seem warranted. Although in light of some of the actions the hub has taken, and what Nat has pointed out, I'll take the stand on the official side of things.

But I did want to ask "PatrickBateman"

that secretly downloaded and installed a repo that was full of ways of accessing pirated content.

which add-on did this?

[PatrickBateman]

My point is that I've seen people sanctioned for much less, and while those posts are not the only ones in question, and do not provide the full picture, as the conversation went to PM after this, you know they were still breaching forum rules in place at the time. Xbmc had already stopped ice films etc being hosted here at the time of these posts, so the rules were currently in place, at least placeholders were.

If you read all Andys posts in that thread, about how xbmc.org hosted these plugins without issue previously blah blah blah (prior to the rule change), how it was ok to say things like "stick it to the man for free ppv events" and advertise that openly in here etc... And that it was OK for him to openly advertise a plugin on here (xbmc.org) that required current active xbmc.org registered users to be forced registered on his questionable site, just to activate the plugin!??

My point was (and i dont think i get my points accross well on text) is that xbmc was allowing them to post plugins on xbmc.org that forced users to register on his piracy site to enable the plugin? That's mental that you allowed that to go on, yet sanctioned people for much less, like having differences of opinions on non questionable topics etc...

I reported it to xbmc (as a community member) that andys behaviour was unethical, that i was not comfortable visiting xbmc.org, seeing a plugin I liked on HERE, only to be told that I then had to register on a piracy site to get access to the plugin I saw hosted here?!?...

My point was that while you didnt explicitly post in that particular thread that you agree with them, You didn't exactly agree with me, or advise them not to to do forced registration, or not to advocate/promote piracy links etc...

instead you called us girls, told me to stop reporting these types of posts as they were mot rule breaking, and it then went to PMs... But... Aren't you lot doing now exactly what I did back then...

It seems now that they are being banned, months later, for exactly the behaviour I disagreed with and reported back then! Behaviour they were previously allowed to do as it only affected me! Just another xbmc contradiction that makes me need to seek clarification of what the hell the rules actually anymore?

It was obvious what they were doing back then, any fool could see wht thy were up to, that's why I reported it!

But for some reason those who questioned it were not backed up by xbmc..
You didn't stop it, you continued to let it happen, you knew it was going on and did nothing then?

The things he (andy) said in that thread (IMO) are ridiculous... And... Are exactly why you banned him now! I was just slightly early to the party as I didn't like the forced registration on a site that promotes piracy, being advocated by xbmc.org

They were being allowed to do this on xbmc.org by xbmc team members, you did not tell them not to do this, they were not being advised that it's not what you want them to do etc etc etc...

It was left to happen even though some members were not comfortable with it...

Now however, it seems that it affects xbmc staff, the tables have turned and they are being banned for EXACTLY the things I complained about back then... Hence again, I just asked for clarity on the rules as I have no idea whats going on anymore.. It's ok to post piracy and be I credibly offensive to members, but not ok to discuss video levels or ffmpeg?

I don't expect to get anywhere with this discussion, no matter what I believe or what I can prove very easily with posts and PMs regarding these types of inconsistacys, as xbmc is always correct, even when they are wrong

It doesn't matter now anyway.. They are gone! I'm glad.
Andy was rude and offensive, as we're many of the rest of them. I saw what they were up to long ago, and i that a long reported it to you. You called me a girl.. 6 months later there banned for exactly tht

You guys saw it a little later on...
Perhaps if we moderated things with a little less bias and caught things like this a little earlier on (like when I set the alarm bells ringing), it wouldn't have got so out of hand, had you stepped in back then, perhaps they wouldn't have taken that extra mile.

If it were me, instead of calling the xbmc community member who reported the offending behaviour a girl, id have looked at the issues being reported, sent xbmchub a PM stating that forcing xbmc.org users to register on a questionable site to get access to a plugin hosted on here is not a practice we wish to condone/progress any further with.

I'd have asked him to change the status, remove the forced registration and links to the site etc and have nipped it in the bud early on ... Perhaps then, they would not have pushed you all as far as they did...

But back then I was alone, I'm just glad you guys caught on eventually amd banned them for what I saw and reported back then.

Anyway, it really doesn't matter, I'm out of this thread, I'm not a fan of the hub, never have been after my Inital meeting with Andy... Shame it took xbmc so long to see what I saw back then.

In the words of Andy Capp

I'm outta here

---

I saw fullmoonguru's first post.. but didn't have enough time to fully drink it in and when I came back to look for it... it was gone, which in itself is a statement. I personally didn't see anything wrong in it... although I'm aware aware of the friction between repo's and understand the issues. A full deletion of the post didn't seem warranted. Although in light of some of the actions the hub has taken, and what Nat has pointed out, I'll take the stand on the official side of things.

But I did want to ask "PatrickBateman"

that secretly downloaded and installed a repo that was full of ways of accessing pirated content.

which add-on did this?

Filmon..
Which was posted on 3 seperate occasions by a member who went by the xbmc.org usernames "Film-On Inc" and "fuckyou-amet" ... He was a very hostile and rude little shit bag IMO!

As soon as you downloaded the plugin, it installed the xbmchub style report like that hosts all the plugins.. The one that we can't name in here in fear of a deletion.

Ned also references this plugin here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1350243

One of their users even posted an add-on that auto-installed the XBMCHUB repo. They try to buy out other websites who want to start their own 3rd party add-on repos. They send us e-mails even now demanding that we link to them on the wiki.

[amet]

Which was posted on 3 seperate occasions by a member who went by the xbmc.org usernames "Film-On Inc" and "fuckyou-amet" ... He was a very hostile and rude little shit bag IMO!

its mikey1234

[Kib]

note that that post was pre new set of rules.....

Ok.

[petemcfc]

Sigh,
Can we not all cool off,learn for the past and move on please.

[amet]

Sigh,
Can we not all cool off,learn for the past and move on please.

we are cool, its a healthy debate ... no hard feelings

[amet]

My point was that while you didnt explicitly post in that particular thread that you agree with them, You didn't exactly agree with me, or advise them not to to do forced registration, or not to advocate/promote piracy links etc...

my exact words were "this thread and everyones advertising of Hub is getting a bit too much... " how did I agree with them? sure i didnt say "PatrickBateman is right" but I didnt exactly agree with them.... hats off to you for noticing it early but it was only a suspect then.

point is that even now, after all that we have seen they are capable off, users still go there, users still think xbmc for ATV2s sole purpose is to run icefilms(or whatever its called) and we still get "why did you ban us when we are only trying to help community" and my personal favorite is after posting that Filmon update that installs repo ... "Yes I had the decency to update YOUR USERS!! "...

so if we banned then, we would not hear the end of how quick and rash our decision was, and now we are hearing we are too late... its a no win situation.

[Bstrdsmkr]

I just read through this thread and I'm sure most of the people reading this thread know who I am and why I would be reading it. I'd like to clear the air a little since I'm privy to

some information on both sides that the other parties involved may not be. I'd also like to clear up some of the history that seems to be "mis-remembered" above, and in that vein I'll

layout a sequence of events:

1. Xbmc decided that a certain set of addons were no longer welcome in the repos and forums. The respective authors were given appropriate notification and asked to support their addons

somewhere else. I don't want to get into the reasoning, since it's their decision to make and politics are a holy war. At the time, some of the authors were a bit miffed, feeling the

decision was hypocritical, given xbmc's roots. Mainly due to Team-XBMC's polite handling of the situation, everyone shook hands and parted as friends.

2.The user Abrasher offered to setup a new site to host the wayward addons and several of the authors took him up on it, forming xbmchub.com. At that time, the authors spent a lot of

time on xbmc.org helping the users transition and trying to take some of the load of Team-XBMC (having to explain new rules to a few hundred thousand users). Again, everyone was still

friends, no name calling, no bans, etc.

3. At a certain point, xbmchub grew popular enough that Abrasher couldn't afford to keep up the costs by himself. This is where "Don" or Adam entered the picture. Adam helped to start

jailbreakappletv.com (before all this started) which was successful and brought the necessary funds and experience to keep out little hobby alive. Adam is more of a business man than we

are and we are all just code monkeys. Most of the advertising and blog posts and etc, the majority of the team doesn't know much about. (On a side note, if you have a question or

complaint about xbmchub, why would you post it here? These guys have nothing to do with it)

4. A developer at xda-forums began working on a non-neon port of xbmc for android. Some of the users from our community got in touch with that dev and Abrasher offered to setup a site

for his work as well, which became xbmc4android.com. Once the developer felt he had his project to a point where it was installable and usable by the common man, we posted announcements

on both sites (xbmchub and xbmc4android) (unfortunately, I don't remember whether one was posted here or not). This was picked up on by Gawker media, owners of several highly popular

tech-news blogs (who are also fond of the saying "we're bloggers not journalists") and wrongly attributed to xbmc.org and Team-XBMC. Personally, I believe this was due to a poor choice

of wording on xbmc4android.com, ie the word official was used, but it was intended to mean "our official" not "Team-XBMC official." I hope that makes sense and again, that's just my

personal opinion. Both teams quickly contacted the bloggers (xbmc.org not wanting to be attributed to something they hadn't vetted, and x4a to make sure the dev got credit for his work)

That brings us up to a relatively recent point where things really go off the rails. In the above, I've tried to be as factual as possible, but human nature makes me biased so I hope

you'll take that into account. From this point, things are a little more personal and require more explanation.

Mikey1234 was a user and a member of the xbmchub community who took an interest in writing his own addons. As one of the people that helped show him the ropes, I got to know Mikey

relatively well and I'm willing to vouch for him, I think he's a good guy. Obviously, I don't know everything that went on, and being a good guy doesn't make you infallible. That being

said, I'll relay events as objectively as I can, given the information I have

Mikey had a problem with one of his first addons being poached and re-labled as someone else's work, with no other changes. As a deterrent to this and to try to promote the community he

felt he owed, he added code to his addon to require an xbmchub login to his addon. This was not required or even suggested by the team, it was his idea and he wanted to try it out. After

a week or so of trying it out with the users and discussing it with us (the rest of the devs and team at xbmchub), he decided that wasn't the way to go and abandoned that approach.

Through a long and irrelevant series of events, Mikey got in contact with the owners of FilmOn.com. At this point, I should note that FilmOn has been through the courts in the US and has

been found to be a completely legal site, which rebroadcasts live tv. Mikey then became their officially blessed addon developer and ambassador to the xbmc community.
Mikey had his own repo, hosted at Dropbox.com, but it became popular enough that they disabled public files on his account several times, so he moved his addons to xbmchub's group repo.

Since the site was deemed legal and not afoul of Team-XBMC's piracy policy, it was also in the official xbmc.org repo.

I don't actually know the details of what happened, but there was a disagreement between Mikey and Team-XBMC's amet (hopefully amet will be willing to share his side of what happened)

and Mikey decided to remove the addon from the official repo. That left him with a problem of users suddenly no longer recieving any updates, either from the official repo or from his

personal dropbox repo. To remedy this, he added code which would install the only remaining repo which hosted his addon.

As of late, I've been pretty busy in other parts of life and haven't followed the exact details of everything that has happend, but my personal opinion is that several things were

handled badly on both sides. I don't know what it is about contraversy that brings the conspiracy theories out of the wood work, but I do enjoy the fruits of Team-XBMC's labor and would

like to do what I can to squash the arguments and bad blood that are taking so much away from what's really important: enjoying our shared hobby. As far as I'm aware there's no

conspiracy to try to steal xbmc's work or harm them in any way. In fact, most of us think pretty highly of them.

It is my hope that this conversation can be the beginning of mending fences and getting everyone back to what the enjoy doing.

[rflores2323]

well said Bstrdsmkr.

[jmarshall]

Just to clarify: We do not as a general practice delete threads that aren't obviously spam. I would suggest that over the last few years there's probably been only a handful of non-spam threads deleted. Unfortunately, that number isn't zero. There's two problems really:

1. Deletion of a thread really deletes it. i.e. it's goneburger and can't come back again, yet it's relatively simple for a mod to click the button.

2. We don't have sufficient other tools to prevent the relatively simple button being clicked.

In this particular case, there was also extenuating circumstances in that the person who pressed the button and another team member were having a disagreement which unnecessarily meant the button was pushed. As others have stated, we all make mistakes, and I apologise on behalf of the team if you've been caught up in it.

As to XBMChub, I think Bstrdmkr has summed things up reasonably well, though there's been a number of other interactions that suggest someone is either really bad at writing clearly, or is intentionally trying to create confusion. As a really simple example, signing off an email "Team XBMC Android Staff" is either a poor way of referencing a "team" of "staff" that work at "xbmcandroid.com" or a nice way for "Team" and "XBMC" to end up next to each other and sound somewhat more "official", without being completely obvious about it.

EDIT: Note, to be clear, that the primary beef here is with whoever is writing this stuff, not with anyone else who may use XBMChub or otherwise congregate there.

Lastly, we're working on firming up the rules as there's a lack of clarity as to how they apply within those with moderation rights. This will include appropriate and inappropriate responses to breaches of the rules.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[natethomas]

A relatively obvious specific example of either bad writing or intentional confusion may be found on the only post of the xbmcandroid community news section, where the entire XBMC 12 Beta 3 announcement was lifted in its entirety and attributed to "XBMC Android Staff" without any kind of "via" or "hat tip" or other link back to the actual post. Given that practically all of XBMC's creative content is licensed under cc-attribution (and because I have a huge ego), seeing my writing being passed off as written by somebody else and attributed to a team other than the one I was writing about was unpleasant. Plagiarism isn't illegal, curiously enough, but it's very disappointing to see.

Bstrdmkr, you guys seriously either need better authors or an honest discussion internally about how far, exactly, whoever is in charge of marketing should be allowed to go in pretending to be XBMC. I can't speak for the rest of the team, but every time I see yet another post or email or tweet or sign-off that creates confusion, either intentionally or unintentionally, about the barrier between the groups, I grow more frustrated.