Cyberjock moderator gone?

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averyfreeman

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Hey,

I was reading through an old thread about something I was trying to troubleshoot, and I noticed all these snide responses from "cyberjock", and a bunch of memories flashed back about why I used to avoid this forum when I was first getting into ZFS in 2015

Is that guy gone? I noticed his last post was in 2016

A lot of the leftover necrothreads that come up in google searches are still loaded with his vitriol :shudder:
 

averyfreeman

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Forums of 2020 are not exactly what you remember from years past. A more elegant forums, for a more civilized age...

It's *so* starkly different due to that one difference.

Seriously, though, is there any more information you'd care to share? Did the board get together and vote him off the island or something?
 

Kris Moore

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Nothing specifically I can disclose, but I can say that its been a lot of concerted effort to cleanup the forums over the past few years. It's hard to change a reputation like that overnight, but I think most would agree that the forums now are much more helpful and generally less toxic than before.
 

ornias

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I can disclose
For the people that are not into corporate double-speak a translation would be:
"Yes we handled the situation, but we don't feel like talking about it more than necessary or go name-and-shame people"

That being said:
Being a sassy/snarky pain in the backside isn't the problem, it becomes problematic when you are wrong about something and sass/snark is the only thing you are adding to a discussion. Previously I myself didn't join this forum, because there where people with totally unfounded (aka factually wrong) "opinions" about ZFS, that where not based on facts which they protected like zealots.

It seems the IX staff in collaboration with the forum staff, cleaned it up nicely!
While I do not agree with all moderation choices all the time, I fully understand why it needed some... cleanup...
 

Kris Moore

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Ha, you called me out on that. I was trying to say it nicely, but no, I don't think its right to go into name-and-shame, or dig into details dead and buried.
 

ornias

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In dutch we have a saying:
"Geen oude koeien uit de sloot halen"

Which basically (not literally) means:
Don't dig up things you don't want to mess with (again).
 

jgreco

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Nothing specifically I can disclose, but I can say that its been a lot of concerted effort to cleanup the forums over the past few years.

Pfft. *cough* Newcomer. :smile:

It was never really a secret that Cyberjock got hired by iX around 2014 which coincided with a shift in tone in his posts, plus a huge decrease in post volume. He made a brief reappearance here in the forums awhile later as js_level2 but for unknown reasons that was short-lived.

He was technically competent and very teachable, but he had a tendency to view things as very black and white. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it led to clashes especially with people who expected their hands to be held and the words to be gentle, and especially those who refused to acknowledge the advice. There's always been a large problem with here with newcomers who believe themselves expert in things that they are not, which has sometimes led to burnout by those of us trying to drag the horses to the water.

One of iX's early mistakes was moderator conscription (that is a carefully selected word) where some of us woke up one morning to find ourselves being moderators. This didn't help the situation. It would have been one thing to ask nicely. I clearly remember the period right before Cyberjock as a time where knowledgeable posters on the forum were very thin, and this wasn't a good situation. Cyberjock tried to make it his job to respond to almost everything, which was perhaps destined to result in stress and confrontationalism (which the OP refers to as snark and vitriol, which may not do it justice). You're welcome to view this through whatever lens you wish, but regardless of which one you pick, the fact of the matter is there was a bit of a void to fill.

From my own perspective, as someone who is on the far side of a career that saw the birthing of the commercial Internet, data centers, servers, the birth of FreeBSD, and many other interesting things, I enjoy bringing a professional's perspective to this and helping SOHO/hobbyist/drowning-professional-IT'ers get up to speed on FreeNAS. It's pleasant when things work out for someone or they have that "aha" moment. I don't always have the time to do that well, so I've also spent a lot of time trying to write technical stickies (now resources) in a manner that's accessible to newcomers.
 

averyfreeman

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Pfft. *cough* Newcomer. :) . . .

. . . There's always been a large problem with here with newcomers who believe themselves expert in things that they are not, which has sometimes led to burnout by those of us trying to drag the horses to the water.

Who, me? Is 2015 still noob-territory? ;)

I'm glad people are trying to help others with FreeNAS, honestly I think the forum did a lot to broaden the range of adoption, but the web gui, while very useful and convenient, also attracts people with less technical inclination/experience. There's always been a stark difference between FreeNAS forums and FreeBSD forums, for example, for the simple fact that a lot more people can use FreeNAS due to its point-and-click nature. It's a double-edged sword. You gonna attract da noobz.

I see the same thing in forums for e.g. Arch vs Ubuntu... but there's no question as to which has the larger userbase in either example.

I'm sure "Cyberjock"'s heart was in the right place, god rest his moderator soul.
 

9C1 Newbee

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Cyberjock was awesome. He and jgreco gave me great guidance. As an ignorant noob's perspective, the guy was great. But then again I don't have thin skin and occasionally used the search button. Just my .02
 

Dice

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I came around the forums in 2015.
I recall this forum standing out with a particularly flat ratio of friendliness:knowledge.
At the time I also became interested in the pfsense. Their forum was ...so different. The ratio was super low on friendliness yet high on knowledge, particularly compared to FreeNAS.

I guess my post count sort of tell the tale where I spent my time. Yet I've been out of the active posting here for some time, I've not seen any of the aforementioned improvements.
 

averyfreeman

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I came around the forums in 2015.
I recall this forum standing out with a particularly flat ratio of friendliness:knowledge.
At the time I also became interested in the pfsense. Their forum was ...so different. The ratio was super low on friendliness yet high on knowledge, particularly compared to FreeNAS.

I guess my post count sort of tell the tale where I spent my time. Yet I've been out of the active posting here for some time, I've not seen any of the aforementioned improvements.

@Dice are you Sir Dice from FreeBSD? ;)

@9C1 Newbee I find not having Cyberjock calling people idiots for asking if you can run FreeNAS without ECC ram makes the board a lot more approachable.

Jgreco would actually explain things, but Cyberjock ... nobody wants to be told they're dumb just for wondering about something - especially if there's a direct economic correlation (and no, I didn't ask about ECC myself, but I did read a lot of contentious ECC zealotry)

I ran a 4x2TB ZFS mirror array on a non-ECC ESXi host for a couple years because I'm poor. It won't murder you in your sleep.
 

jgreco

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Who, me? Is 2015 still noob-territory? ;)

No, Kris. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I'm sure "Cyberjock"'s heart was in the right place, god rest his moderator soul.

It's a personality clash thing.

Years ago, when my activities involved more local stuff, I taught UNIX and FreeBSD and C and other stuff to a number of folks. One quirk of being one of my padawans is that I wasn't really interested in playing the role of the oracle, the source of easy answers. As an example,. this was during the era of the early commercial Internet, when small scale players would find inexpensive ways to serve dialtone that didn't involve a Portmaster 2, so we used FreeBSD hosts with a bunch of high density serial cards. This led to many questions about how to design for SLIP/PPP, and with a number of options available, I wouldn't talk to people about it until they had actually implemented one option. At that point, their familiarity with the concepts was sufficient where I felt I could then discuss things intelligently and on something closer to a peer-to-peer basis. I would generally keep an eye on things and make sure it wasn't going off-track and give gentle correction if really needed. Everybody these days forgets that there was a "before-search-engines" era when it was actually hard to find information. Your two choices were basically either to find a SME (subject matter expert) who knew the answer or to learn it yourself the hard way. I basically created a third way which was to learn the basics until you were familiar enough that you could discuss it with an SME at a higher level and understand the nuances of various solutions.

So that style of learning isn't for everyone and some people just thought me to be a selfish ass who wouldn't help them. But for those who did it, they learned subjects at a deeper level and became very knowledgeable or even expert, and they didn't waste my time with teaching them the basics. Teaching the high level stuff was much more interesting and an angle that allowed for me to learn new stuff as well somtimes.

Anyone who's been here on these forums for any length of time knows that I tend to go on and on about stuff. I've probably gotten more laid back in my old age. But you can still see that I'd rather not waste a lot of time holding individual discussions on the basics, which is why I've hammered out so many stickies about the basics over the years.
 

averyfreeman

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. . . I wouldn't talk to people about it until they had actually implemented one option. At that point, their familiarity with the concepts was sufficient where I felt I could then discuss things intelligently and on something closer to a peer-to-peer basis. . . I basically created a third way which was to learn the basics until you were familiar enough that you could discuss it with an SME at a higher level and understand the nuances of various solutions.

Which is definitely a good approach.

Maybe people could take a multiple choice quiz on how to create a pool on command line, identify different pool types, answer some basic IP+subnet questions, and answer a question about "What does samba do?" before they get access to the forum ;)

Edit: You're right, it is a personality clash thing. I'm definitely a softie and I don't like seeing people being berated. But I agree that a lot of people's questions could have been better researched.

I kind of got the impression a lot of people just asked questions to start a conversation. Kind of like this thread here ;)
 
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i4m

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Yup seen the rantings of the jock and was non too pleased. I remember his rants about running freenas as a vm and how it shouldn't be done etc etc.

as you can see from my posting volume it really put me off posting here.

After 7 years though i am thinking of moving on to something else rather than investing in new hardware. Cloud is almost cheap enough for the storage and appears reliable and cheaper given my time tinkering, i'm running FreeNAS-11.1-U7 and migrating my jails to docker on ubuntu (portainer helps).

Glad to hear its more friendlier here now.
 

diskdiddler

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He wasn't all bad - in his defense, there's a lot of repeating yourself doing that kind of job.

I recall when I started trying to use FreeNAS and I came entirely from a Windows mindset and I wanted everything. My first NAS but darnit I'm going to insist it powers off when I'm not using it and or spins down hard disks all the time, I was quite frustrated that was difficult, if impossible to do at the time.

In hindsight now, I'd never consider that. Nor would I personally bother, with a machine without IPMI, which is hugely limiting in hardware options, but as a desktop guy, that seemed so foolish to me.

He did spout some silly stuff, gotta know when to draw the line with being helpful with people or a bit too impatient.
 

Sleyk

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My non-important opinion? I feel like there was more of a push to come off as "exclusive" and "snobby" more than anything else. Then smartly "shaded" as only seeking to help or guide the newbies.

I am a super nice guy, but I don't sugar coat things. The dude was a jerk. Plain and simple. You can make and mince words all you want. He just was. Stress or no stress. You don't go out of your way to shame, or insult people. He liked what he did and excuse or not, it was wrong.

Forums were made to ask questions. Yes, I agree, people should read. But I also feel like it's just as wrong to approach people with answers that turn them away. I have had questions answered a long time ago by Jgreco and others who gave me info, and insight, and didnt embarrass me. Now, I am at a decent level of knowledge myself. This is how you learn. Not through shame, but through patience.

No amount of knowledge can justify what used to happen here. I don't care if he was Einstein's son. He was wrong. Simple and plain. I'm glad the forums are better. I left years ago because of it, and have recently come back as well.

You can scold, but you don't have a right to insult. There is a difference.
 

garm

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Free speech is absolute... listening is optional, and ya, exorcism
 
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