Disney Dreams - The Aftermath.
It seems as if I will not be able to shake off this grudge unless I get this off my chest. Even unloading this might not help lifting this grudge any. I don’t want to be seen as stirring up old shit, or being unable to move on - which I have - but every mention of Disney Dreams just reminds me of the hypocrisy that people brought upon themselves, and also perhaps an even greater reminder of the age range DD catered for. Kali provided an excellent writeup, but there were some things that were lacking - the extent and examples of the admins’ contributions, for one, as well as the details of the conversations between Misty and me.
It is a very long post, starting from us becoming admins to seeing DD what it is today, so be warned, or if you even care.
It all started with the music sharing forums. Around October or November 2006, I had noticed that a significant amount of traffic was directed towards the music sharing forums (which were made public then). I suggested they be locked, both to deter people from signing up just to request for music as well as sidestepping any legal ramifications we might find ourselves in. There was a good amount of discussion, and ultimately Misty decided to bring in two admins to oversee the members who would be allowed to access the forums. Laura (rainbowdarling) volunteered first; as she had already been very active in the forums, and the second was me. Misty said yes to us both.
The original layout was this: the forums would be locked, and there would be a thread in the Announcements forum for people to request access. Laura and I laid out a bit of criteria, a certain number of posts, registered before xxxx, and so on. I don’t believe anyone remembers the Matt saga, in which he requested a whole lot and was snippy when no one would answer his threads. After a whole lot of arguments with me - because I told him to watch his language with the others, and then denying his music request on my thread - I wound up banning him. With the admin position, our abilities also catered to closing and merging threads that were beyond those forums, which we did.
I created an Administration forum, originally conceived to keep a log of those people whom we let in and those we denied access to. We would log the changes we would make to the forum, so that all the admins (just three of us at the time) would know why suddenly two forums merged or the like. We also laid down the rules for members keeping their places in the music sharing forum, a general ‘three strikes and you’re out’, such as requesting too much or not uploading according to the amount of requests they had.
The ‘legal ramifications’ caught up with us. This went on for a while, until some guy ratted DD and its music sharing business out to its hosts, then funkhosting. FunkHosting quickly suspended the site, and all of this is still logged at dream_of_disney. Misty wound up talking to the Disney laywers regarding ’stolen’ content on the actual site (there were soundtracks available for download on the site itself); whether or not the boards were targeted were unknown. After some time, the boards came back up again, and Laura and I moved to close the music sharing forums completely, only opening them to a select few members.
‘Some guy’ struck again around December, this time at the Software/HTML forums. He noted that DD members had been sharing serial numbers to software that required purchasing. Funkhosting then completely shut down DD. Misty then moved to a reseller host which was under bellexbeast’s care (positivelyprimeval.org, now defunct), and created a new domain name for the boards, disneydreams-boards.
Misty, Laura and I discussed about the future of the music sharing forums, and at some point discussed about moving it to LJ. We wound up agreeing that it should stay on the boards, but keep it on the downlow, in which only the admins would induct people into the forums if they saw fit to do so. The music forums were completely closed until the 1st of January 2007, where they were reopened again.
With less people badgering us to let them into the sekrit forums, Laura and I turned our attentions to bettering the rest of the forum. Stickies were made on how to post avatars/signatures, and the art forums were closed to guests, so as to prevent hotlinking. Forums were rearranged: the Disney channel was no longer a subforum, the ‘interact’ section was greatly expanded, etc. All of these were logged in the Admin forum. At this point Misty had interacted less and less with us, and she posted very little on both the Admin boards and the boards in general.
At some point I brought up the need for a moderator for the RPG forum, because the previous thread discussing the need for one had died. I nominated Peggy, and all were in agreement, and there was much rejoicing. Around this time I was periodically deleting inactive members and also reworded the rules (Misty spelt ’signature’ wrongly.)
I also started up a thread in the admin forum that was a log for those people who were on our radar. Members who were spamming, having enormous signatures, not reading the rules were all logged into that thread. We also employed a general ‘three strikes’ rule, although this was not rigidly enforced.
After the installation of the shop hack and the subsequent rise of pin trading (in which Jac became a moderator), I proposed the urgent need to upgrade XMB and the shop hack, as well as install new hacks. There were many loopholes which I had already grasped - IP bans didn’t stick, deleting inactive members were very difficult (one had to literally check a box for every member they wanted deleted, and a box would pop up and say ‘ARE YOU SURE???’) and mass deletion/moving/closing of threads also was impossible, not to mention board security where the boards might be easily hacked. I raised all this and asked Misty if she would upgrade the boards. I did not hear from her until two weeks later, where she refused to upgrade the boards, because it meant losing the hacks, and the boards were a very mangled version of XMB and could not be upgraded. Keep this in mind.
Soon after, I opened the possibility of allowing Jac and Peggy to view the admin forums. By this time Misty did not partake in any of our discussions at all. It was only Laura and me in the forums, and opening it up to more company would stop the loneliness a little. Also, they were moderators and had responsibilities - the admin forum could give them an avenue to log troublemakers instead of using the (rather badly designed) U2U system. This certainly culminated into company; the troublemaker log occasionally wound up as a chatting thread for the admins. Jessica saga and all were logged there, complete with colorful commentary. Those of you who have seen the (now defunct) DDWiki on Jessica showed the extent of drama that was not made public.
I don’t know how it came to, but Peggy participated less and less in the admin forums. I can assure you that we did not purposely isolate her in the least, and only she can tell you either it was our brou-ha-ha attitude we stirred up that resulted in her participating less or she had already felt alienated and didn’t like the way we handled things after that. She said absolutely nothing, and we didn’t think much of it at the time.
Then came the Theme Cleanup. I cannot remember who was the one who asked for the cleanup - it was one of the members on the Announcements forum… was it Wendy? - but there we went with it. I took all responsibility of hammering all 150+ theme previews together into 5 .jpg files, uploaded them and compiled the results. Even that in itself was difficult - people were not following the rules and did not read the post at all. In the end, approximately 60 themes were cut, then Misty took over and reduced it to 30.
Misty had pretty much disappeared at this point, surfacing only once in a while when she realized important things were going on without her. Laura and I asked for someone to be appointed to Superadmin, so we could continue with the work when she wasn’t around - such as reducing signature sizes even after repeated U2U warnings weren’t enough, or uploading themes that were accepted and had been backlogged for nearly two months. She refused, and wound up creating a thread in which she would carry out those tasks when we posted in it. Actions taken by Misty were infrequent and irregular, and we often had to contend ourselves looking at signatures the size of Texas for a week before it was taken down.
Peggy then raised the suggestion of another cut a few months later, because we were already back to the number of themes before the cut. I gave my opinion about the failure of the last theme cut, and the effort put into it far outweighed the amount of themes that would be cut. I suggested a silent cut, where the admins would be the ones to select the themes. Laura and Jac were in agreement, Misty was MIA, and Peggy said nothing in disagreement, and had actually (inadvertently, I suppose) propelled the silent cut. And there was cutting, and much less rejoicing to be found among the members.
DD went down again after the reseller host complained about the site using too much bandwidth. This was pretty much the turning point of most of us - the two month or so hiatus from the site wound up disengaging me from the boards, and I wasn’t attached to it as much as I was. On the site’s return, hosted by Jac’s own platinumdisney, an enormous influx of newbies from IMDB began flooding the forum, and this grew too much to handle. I was already disillusioned with the banning loopholes in the admin system - eddie14432098 had registered as a new member no less than 3 times even after her IP was banned, and the IP search was very unreliable - and the ‘three strikes’ rule began to hold less and less water, because it only meant a waste of time before the person was banned, and more people would take her place. Misty was still MIA, even after the restoration of the site.
And the rest is history, and I think Kali did a remarkable job on reporting it. Laura left the site, and I had one foot out the door. The lack of admin control overwhelmed the boards, which prompted members to take matters into their own hands: by openly complaining about the newbies in threads. This wound up leading to Peggy’s ‘Corrupt Administration’ post, telling the members to stop heaping rage on the newbies, among other things. Jac left to start up SPACE, a community solely for the old guard.
Misty contacted me after she got wind of Peggy’s post, and I believe she had no idea how dire the situation was. She wanted to remove all the admins from their positions and assume sole responsibility, believing that it would stop ‘the drama’ from continuing. I told her it would not fix DD if only the drama was stopped, and stated a complete revamp of the site. She did not listen, and our discussion ended along those lines.
Misty began to kneejerk!ban and delete members that were causing trouble. This went against the ‘three strikes’ rule that we employed, and I was very, very unhappy with the way she dealt with the situation.
The second conversation was prompted after Misty began to read some of the posts in SPACE. Members on SPACE were complaining about the newbies and how DD had all gone to chaos, and I told them they should be doing something to save DD, not to sit and complain about it, and then take sides when all they did was perpetrate the divide between the old guard and the new. This was the beginning of when I realized how two-faced Misty was.
The posts on SPACE was a great wakeup call for her, and she had apologized profusely for her ’slowness’, admitting that she did not realize the severity of the situation. In our conversations she laid blame on the people who had abandoned DD for SPACE, questioned their loyalty - Jac was a name that was thrown about - and kept heaping praise on my ‘bluntness’ and ‘honesty’. In her despair, with SPACE flourishing rather happily, she wanted to delete DD. It took a great amount of persuasion to tell Misty that DD could be fixed. I began to carry out my suggestions, and this time she seemed to listen readily - get a larger admin crew and revamp DD. I asked that Jac, Laura and I all be made superadmins, and we would get a new crew for the admins and moderators. Misty refused to give superadmin status to Jac and Laura, first doubting the loyalty of the former and the disgust of quick abandonment for the latter. So yes, essentially, it was only me and her that would be made Superadmins, and you should know at this point I had nothing to lose. Whether or not the revamp was a success I would still be part of the crew. Apparently I was the only one who was helping her at that point in time, and you will see soon enough how her favour towards other members would fluctuate depending on her mood.
She was convinced that the transfer to phpBB would not work, and she was right. I then elected to ask if people would prefer starting from 0 and making XMB an archive, or just continue with XMB. Everyone voted for the former.
The third conversation did not end well. Misty refused to have DD start from 0, and would rather delete it. She also threw in ‘I own the site, therefore I control what it says’ for good measure. I was so fed up with her that I washed my hands off DD for good. Disneylove had been created for some time soon after Laura left, and this was a choice time to provide an alternative, especially when DD was still closed at Misty’s whim. I had prevented Misty from registering on the site, and she threw up a whole lot of dramatic posts on SPACE, posts which went along the lines of ‘I don’t care about DD, I will delete the site because I don’t care about it, and all I want is to be with my friends’. This should show you how little regard she had for DD, and her indecision on what she actually wanted to do with it.
She contacted Jac soon after, and Jac played mediator between us (and failed, due to my stubbornness). Misty then began to praise Jac to high heavens and denounced me as the next incarnation of Hitler. I need not remind you of how she treated me before when we talked, and while her contempt towards me was justified, I was surprised at how she wound up kissing Jac’s boots without a single mention of disloyalty. I mentioned my conversation with Misty to Jac, and I can only imagine the conversations she struck up with the others later.
After a lengthy conversation with Jac, Misty wound up becoming angry at Disneylove, ‘Hitler’ was now my real name, and then proceeded to start Disney Dreams from 0, and expanded the staff list. I cannot express how furious I was when I found out about this. This was my original intention from the very start, and Misty had outrightly refused to do such a thing. But here she was, redoing it from 0, and if not for her indecisiveness, we would have avoided this completely.
They say history is written by the victorious, and Misty still has a good amount of supporters on her side. I am very sure that I have emerged as the ‘bad guy’ in all of this, and I doubt this would change anytime soon. No amount of reasoning would change anyone’s mind, not until they have experienced what I, Laura and Jac went through. As you’ve noticed, none of us are posting actively on DD anymore, and I have stopped having an appetite for forums in general. Misty’s MIA has completely nullified the work we put in simply because she never noticed it, hence her willingness to leave us all on the wayside.
Now, the issue of my brutal honesty, or bluntness, or meanness, whatever you wish to call it. I wish to just rectify some of the claims that were made. I doubt it will make a difference, but I do hope it would give some perspective on things.
The furthest memory of gaining this (infamous) reputation for being ‘blunt’ was calling out Sheena when she refused to take criticism when she posted a theme on the boards. I should also note that this was way before I had gotten any sort of position in the community (I recall I was rather new, so this should have been in October 2006). I apologized via U2U to Sheena soon afterward. Hence the answer is no, I was not drunk with admin power so as to exact my wrath on little people.
‘Brutal honesty’ came back again during my stint as admin, although I cannot remember when exactly I began to be less polite in my U2Us or postings. I dealt with most of the more dramatic cases of members stirring up drama, and some of these members preferred to take it public, posting about how mean I was on the boards. SallytheRagdoll was one of these people. She had a history of posting emo entries about how mean her sister was to her, and I had helped her out twice. Her emo posts grew more frequent, and it reeked of a ploy for more attention, and I called her out in that particular thread. I suppose that may have cemented my reputation of a no-frills admin.
I raised my concern over this label with the admins. Laura found it alright, since I was the one publicly putting people in their place, and Misty asked me to rein it in, because I had kneejerk!banned a certain person named pirateprincess30 then (which, ironically, was also one of the people Misty kneejerk!banned later during her purge). So I did, and posted less damaging remarks on the boards.
Despite my reassurances that Laura was a much more brutal admin than I ever was, I doubt you will believe me. My blunt attitude did not just factor itself into administrative duties, but also into controversial topics, exposing more of this aspect of my personality than any of the other admins. When POTC3 came out, many people expressed dislike of Elizabeth as a character, and I took issue with that, and stirred up intense discussion about prejudices against females. I also recall gun control as a topic that I was heavily involved in.
However, not once have I ever called people names, or descended into complaining how stupid a person is without evidence. Every single one of my posts where I have been less than polite has always been rationalized, reasoned, or provided evidence to prove what I said was true. If people disagreed, then a ‘discussion’ should be the appropriate word here, not degenerate into some mud slinging name-calling contest. I make my feelings (especially negative ones) very well known, and I believe that may have intimidated some people. I do not believe in sucking it up and moving on just so to avoid ‘drama’. If you’re pissed, make it known you’re pissed (with examples), so it won’t happen again. Every single negative action on my part was posted with reason, and it is up to you to focus on the emotional or the rational part of it. Unfortunately, with the age range that DD catered to, I overestimated the amount of rationality kids (or women) had.
I was particularly annoyed with the lack of discussion when the whole DD saga blew through; people were desperate for the ‘drama’ to blow over, and here I was, thinking that it was not drama, but rather an argument. I posted my thoughts on Misty some time before, and someone ratted me out to her without much of a comment as to why she disagreed with me. I know people took sides, and the lack of communication makes me unable to understand why people are still on Misty’s side, despite all my reasoning to show her as incapable.
It is only when I am completely convinced that the other party cannot comprehend my point of view, or responds in ways that shows her ignorance, I will respond in kind with sarcasm and perhaps a certain degree of immaturity. I have a large load of FAIL macros that I have yet to hurl.
That is me, and I hereby end this last post I will ever make about Disney Dreams.
1. Conversation number 1 with Misty (.rtf file), detailing her reverting back to her ‘one-admin’ rule and my attempt to reason with her other alternatives.
2. Conversation number 3 with Misty (.rtf file). I didn’t save the second conversation, because I thought we were treading towards better ground, but in the end this was the final straw.
6 Responses to “Disney Dreams - The Aftermath.”
Grrf. I keep wanting to reply to you, but I’m getting more and more pissed off with the comment coding. Time for a new layout!
I think that’s always the case for popular forums or any sort of community. Rise and fall, and everyone gets caught in between.
And thank you. You’re one of the few people who hasn’t bitten my head off today. ^^
Well, I suppose as someone who was not involved in the whole thing, I’m a little less emotional about it. I do know what it is like to be caught up in the downfall of something - had it happen at an RPG board, and boy do I know the feeling of “sounds like a good thing I’m gone”.
“Comment coding”? You mean the fact that the text is not really standing out against the text area? I’d only suggest a little lightening of the text, rather than a new layout, but layouts are fun. 
And it gives you an excuse to play with colourlovers.com, I suppose.
Hi jiejie! Aiyoh still angry at Disney Dreams lol.
There are still ants on the study room table.. 
I dunno where they’re coming from or going to! Plus I found a stray, lost little ant on the sink. Haha. Gotta buy that ant poison soon.
Luffluff!
Ooh! I like this new layout. Very bright and fresh. Just in time for Spring down here.
@Catherine: Thank you! Heh, it’s approaching Fall in the US… and I am so not looking forward to Winter.
I love Spring. I was always listening to Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ during the colder Spring days and now every time I hear that song, everything Spring is associated with it. It’s like a nice fuzzy feeling inside.
@Juuu: Still no ant poison?! Quick buy! Alamak! I was spraying insecticide for 3 weeks inside the kitchen and I never completely eradicated them… If you leave them for too long they’ll repopulate! Quick!
*jawdrop*
Oh. My. Gawd.
I admit that I was not a DD devotee, although I popped in now and again - I just hated the forum application software, I think. I hated having to add a slash into email update links because there’d not be one in the right place.
I am still shocked to hear about all of this though. Insane, insane. It happens to a lot of places, but hopefully you can make DisneyLove totally awesome.
I joined, so you have at least one more member.