Bio of a BZP Admin

Intro
Another week done, another update to post. I wanted to try to post this a few hours ago, but a little game called Mass Effect sucked me in. It's a great game I recommend to all Xbox 360 owners. Anyway, time to look at this past week on BZPower.

Updates
So obviously the biggest news this past week is that RPG Contest 8 has begun. Ok, maybe it's not the most important thing, but it's pretty exciting, and if you have any interest in RPGs you should take a look and consider entering. We have over a dozen entries so far and there are about two weeks left to enter, so get working on it! Obviously the real big news is 2008 sets appearing in stores. I've seen reports of them showing up at various Lego stores and outlets, so if you have one near you check it out! With the availability of news sets comes a lot of new images of the winter 2008 and some of the later sets, such as the ones we reported on today. I predict a lot of other news coming out soon too, so keep your eyes peeled on the front page. And speaking of today's news, we're going to be wrapping up our 2007 reviews in the coming weeks as well. Expect to see another review tomorrow. Also, if you hadn't noticed, our usual Holiday Signature Policy is in effect once again. Last but not least, I'm going to stop teasing you guys about new staff announcements. They'll come when they come and I'll talk about the retrospectively from now on. Things come up that delay them, so who knows when the next announcement will be.

Mailbag
Electric Turahk asks:

Possible? Yes. Would it be easy? Not really, so don't expect to see it any time soon.

.::Toa Stheno Nuva::. asks:

1. I had participated in Text-Based RPGs in the past and thought it would be something the members of BZPower would enjoy as well.
2. All time I'd have to say the original Halo, I have a lot of good memories from that. Recently I've been playing a lot of Mass Effect; it's a great game.
3. I enjoyed being a Moderator. It was a lot easier back then (the low number of members might have helped too).
4. There have been so many, it's hard to keep track. Kaiapu's 'Anti-Physicist' was pretty funny though.
5. Another tough one. I was assigned to Promotions for a long time and still check in there regularly. Even though there aren't as many promos as there were in 2001 and 2002, it still holds a sentimental place.

Want to see your questions answered? PM them to me and put 'Mailbag' in the subject line. I'll pick the few I like the best and answer them in the next update.

Conclusion
That about wraps it up for this week. As always, questions, comments, and feed back are welcome. Talk to you again soon!

Intro
Hey, I'm getting this out on time this week! I'm also going to try some formatting and see how that works out. So sit back, relax and enjoy the read.

Updates
So, the biggest story of the past week was the Senior Staff announcement. I'd like to thank the old fogies again (not that I have any room to talk) for their commitment for all these years. As always, I'm going to tease and say the staff updates aren't done yet, but we don't really have a time frame on when we'll be making anything public. Let's see, what else? We should have a staff set review popping up this weekend, so there's something to look forward to. We're also working on some other ways to stop spammers, nothing as drastic as the New Member Policy, but something that will hopefully be just as effective. Don't want to reveal anymore on that until we're ready though. Other than aht, things have been fairly quiet. Bink has obviously been going great guns over at Bionicle.com, I can't wait to see the new design. Some comic news from Greg too, it should be interesting to see how the new artist works out next year. Oh yeah, RPG contest starts at 12AM tomorrow morning (about 2 hours from now)!

Mailbag
I brought this up last week and got some positive feedback on it, so I figured I'd start it up. PM your questions and put 'Mailbag' in the subject line. I'll pick the few I like the best and answer them in the next update. Sound good? Great!

Conclusion
That's all for this week. These things may not be too exciting, but I'm trying to let people in on how the site works some. People claim we're very impersonal, and while it's true I don't have time to post a lot on the forums, I will reply to PMs and IMs and Blog Comments. I'm here for you guys, and am always willing to hear from you!

And so it begins, once you start slipping from your schedule, there's no going back, or so I hear. I was busy yesterday with Black Friday and friends home from school, so I didn't get a chance to post an update. I have one here for you now though, so better late than never.

This isn't going to be a long update, the past week was fairly uneventful. We had our usual helping of spammers, but with Tufi's help we were able to take care of them fairly quickly. With Thanksgiving, there wasn't a lot of time to focus on the site, but we've been brainstorming some things based on feedback we've been getting from members. It may take a while before you guys see anything tangible come out of it though. I'm hoping to make a small announcement tomorrow, nothing that will affect any of you, but just another little thing we like to do.

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving and is enjoying their weekend.

Feedback is always welcome! Speaking of which, would anyone be interested in a mailbag feature where you guys send me questions and I answer them in the next Weekly Update?

See you next time!

As an Administrator at BZPower, I receive a lot of PMs. Unfortunately, there's a lot of stuff people send me that should be sent elsewhere. In an attempt to set things straight, I'm making this entry.

First off, I enjoy hearing from members. If you have a question or comment or suggestion, don't hesitate to contact me. I'll do my best to get back to you, but I make no promises. If you are reporting something, however, it should NOT be sent to me, we have systems in place to process various reports so that the important ones get to me and the lesser things do not. Here's a list of various things and where they should be reported:

• News - Send all news reports to news@bzpower.com. I do not read news reports sent to me via PM.
• Signature & Avatar Violations - These should be sent to any Forum Assistant. They process the reports and the Global Moderators and Administrators take care of them.
• Advertising Violations - Send all advertising violations to AdvertAlert. Myself and other Admins check this account regularly and handle all reports.
• Blog Violations - These should be sent to BlogAlert. Blog Assistants will go through the reports and then the Blog Leader and myself will take care of anything that's left.
• Profile Comment Violations - These should also be sent to Forum Assistants. Again, they process the reports and then higher staff take care of them.
• Individual Forum Problems - These should be sent to the Forum Leader of the forum in question. If they don't reply in a reasonable amount of time, contact a Global Moderator.
• Official Topic Requests - Again, these should be sent to the Forum Leader of the forum in question. The Forum Leaders generally have the final decision on things that happen in their forums.

If it's not on this list, feel free to contact me about it. If it should be sent to someone else, I'll either forward it there or let you know, but if it's on the above list, it will likely be ignored.

Thanks everyone, and happy Thanksgiving!

And by 'axe' I of course mean guitar, as any rock fan knows; and by 'guitar' I mean guitar-shaped controller, as anyone who knows me and my complete inability to play any musical instrument can tell you. Anyway, I finally received Guitar Hero III last Wednesday, and have been enjoying it immensely. Having read some things about it previously I started out on Easy so I could get the appropriate Achievements and money from the store (apparently if you beat a song on a higher difficulty you don't get the money for the lower difficulty like you did in GH2). I breezed through that in a night, five-starring everything, with quite a few perfects, no shock there. Next night I started on Medium and was going through with no problems until the first boss battle against Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. On Easy, you can basically use the attack powers as soon as you get them and be guaranteed a win, but on harder difficulties, it turns out, you need to use some strategy and save them up so you can hit him with a bunch one after another. It took me a couple tries before I figured this out. After that though, it was smooth sailing. Five-starred everything except Barracuda and Raining Blood. Then it was onto Hard. There's something about this difficulty, not the orange button anymore, just the crazy things they do that makes it so much harder. I've been able to pass every song so far until the seventh level, where I've gotten stuck now. One thing I noticed is that compared to GH2, GH3 tends to use long streaks of the same note and lots of three note chords on the harder songs rather than making the movements complex. I find it very frustrating. I've bumped it up to Expert now and am starting on the second level, figuring maybe playing on there will help prepare me for level seven on Hard. Oh yeah, I also went back and five-starred those last two Medium songs.

As far as the music goes, overall I like it, but I think I like GH2's track list better. There are whole sections of GH3's list that just leave me uninspired, although as a change there are no songs I don't like at all (such as Who Was In My Room Last Night? in GH2), just songs that are bland. Although I wish their rendition of The Devil Went Down to Georgia was better, it could use a lot of help. The master tracks are nice though, the real song instead of covers. I wish they could have done this for more bands, especially ones like Cream and The Who.

Overall, I recommend the game if you enjoy rock music and rhythm games, unless you'd rather wait until Rock Band comes out, in which case you may want to save your money.

So another Friday, and another day I've manged to do a weekly update. Last week was pretty busy. The biggest news of course was the appointment of Tufi Piyufi as a Forum Administrator. Let me congratulate her here again. The other Admins and I had talked about the idea for a bit before finally deciding the extra help would be most useful. We're definitely glad we made the choice after the many years Jen's been helping us out as a staff member here on BZP.

In other news, obviously the New Member policy I talked about last week went into implementation, with a few hitches. Unfortunately, to make it so that all new members automatically got put into the new Members group, what we did was actually rename the Members group to New Members and then make a new Members group. This is why everyone who had previously been a member became a New Member after the change. Once you made a post (in a forum where your post count was incremented) the system would see you had more than ten posts and bump you back into the normal Members group. Yes it was a pain for you all, but think of this, there were over 35,000 accounts in the Members group. A whole bunch of them have been posting over the past week, and we've had to approve at least one post of each of those members (more of some who didn't post in one of the right forums). That's a huge load on all the staff. Again, thanks go to Tufi who was a huge part of helping us stay on top of that. We're thinking of ways to speed up the process in the future, so stay tuned to hear about that.

And obviously, PMs are back for most members now, as I'm reminded every time I log on and see more messages in my inbox.

Oh yeah, and you know how last week I hinted at some changes in the staff, and then how Tufi got promoted? Well, we may or may not be done. You'll see more when we're ready to talk.

I think that's about it for the week. All of my non-work and non-BZP time has been filled up by Hellgate: London and Guitar Hero III (plus some Halo 3, of course). All great games I highly recommend if you enjoy those particular genres.

As always, I want to hear your feedback, so leave it. Ask questions too, I'll answer them as best I can.

Until next week!

Since apparently people did like this idea I guess I'll continue with these updates. I would have posted this one earlier but I picked up Hellgate: London this week and it's been sucking up a lot of my time while I haven't been putting out fires on BZP or working.

So, this week there were a couple instances of spammers getting onto BZP and posting some very inappropriate images and messages. Fortunately we were able to respond very quickly and ban the members and remove the images and content. Unfortunately this has required us to turn off the Private Messaging system for the past few days. I know it's a pain, but we're working on a way to bring that back to you guys.

After I post this I am going to start putting into effect a new policy on BZPower. It's pretty huge and something the other Administrators and I have discussed in the past and finally decided to institute. It's going to be a minor inconvenience to some, and more of a pain for the staff, but it's a burden we're willing to take to help keep BZP safe and family-friendly. I'll update this entry with links to the appropriate topics after they're created.

EDIT: The topics have been created. You can read our New Member Policy over in the Reference Desk and discuss it either here or in this topic in General Discussion.

On the plus side, we got to promote six new staff members this week, three on the Fact Team and three new Reference Keepers. Our new reference section is going to need lots of updating, especially as 2008 information starts trickling out. We felt this justified a boost in numbers.

With any luck there will be some more staff-related announcements soon (not necessarily promotions), so there's something else to look forward too.

Ok, I'm going to get to that new policy. Thanks for reading everyone, and as always, I encourage your feedback (although after recent events I have to approve all comments, but that just means you can be sure I'll read them!)!

Well, no one seemed to like my idea so I guess we'll toss it down the drain. Oh well.

In other news, it's amazing sometimes how a few select members think they're being treated unfairly because they don't get Premier Perks. The system is there to reward those who help keep the site running, not to take away from others.

That is all.

Good night.

I thought I might try something new. As a homage to Bungie.net's Weekly Updates, I thought I might try the same thing. No guarantees that it will be every week or the same day every week, but we'll try. Think of it as an extension of this entry that no one really seemed to care about. Let me know if you guys like the idea or not.

Well, right now the forums are offline. We're having some problems with part of the database, so we don't want things to get more messed up in the interim. I know it's a pain, but things can't always work out well.

Obviously the biggest news aside from that is the turning off of the PM System. For the past few days PMs have been on and working. But should we experience abuse of the system again, it will be turned off. There's not much that can be done about it, we have plenty of security measures in place, but it's impossible to stop all attempts to access accounts. If you want to keep your account safe I suggest changing your password to something difficult to guess and to change it frequently.

In other news, we should have an announcement this week about a slight change in the staff structure. Nothing too big, but it should help with some organizational issues that crop up every now and then. Stay tuned for details.

As always there's other interesting stuff in the pipe we can't talk about now. You'll have to wait and see. :X

Finally, I'm still wondering if there would be any interest in resurrecting the BZPowercast. I got about zero feedback last time, but you can look at the details here. I want to hear from you!

So, that's all for this week. See you next week at the same time in the same place (maybe).

It's going to be a fun weekend.

Last week, I had the pleasure of ordering a new laptop. My current one, while only two years old, has been giving me a lot of trouble and has the unfortunate drawback of being unable to easily run Mac OS X. It's battery died this past summer for the second time (first was spring 2006). I considered just buying a replacement battery, but what was the point, chances were it was going to die again. Everyone in my college class was given the same laptop (included in our tuition) and at least half the people I know have had their batteries die. Sounds like a faulty design if you ask me. Anyway, I saw this as an opportunity to get a MacBook Pro.

Obviously once you order something like a new computer, you get excited. The past week I was periodically checking the tracking information to see when it would arrive. FedEx informed me that today would be the day. Just in time for the weekend!

So I was surprised when yesterday upon returning from work there was a notice on my door saying they had tried to deliver the package but that no one was available to sign for it. I was confused by this, and kind of annoyed, especially since I had already printed out the signature form and was going to put it on my door the next day so they could drop it off while I was working. Upon closer inspection of the notice, however, I discovered another option. I could drive to the FedEx distribution center and pick it up that night. This sounded like an adventure, one that I would record for your reading pleasure!

A quick trip to Google Maps later I had an expertly crafted route taking me through various backroads so I could avoid the major highway that was undergoing construction. I hopped in my car and drove off. A short while later (after only one wrong turn) I found myself at the lovely FedEx facility in Mount Olive, New Jersey.



I presented the helpful employee with my notice and identification and a short while later I was in the proud possession of a new MacBook Pro. I brought it out to my car and strapped it in tight for the ride home.



I sped home as fast as local speed limits (and the cars in front of me) would allow. I really wish some people didn't think that 40 MPH means go 33 MPH though...



I managed to make it home nonetheless, and was ready to open the box.



I ripped and tore my way through the durable cardboard enclosure so I could reach the amazing Mac goodness inside. Or maybe I just took a knife and cut it open, take your pick.



Inside the box was – another box! The suspense was building, nearly too much to handle.



Once that box was breached I was finally able to get a look at my new computer. It is a thing of beauty.



I took it out, plugged it in, and powered it on.



And since that moment, there's been no looking back. I've spent the time since then installing various applications, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, NetNewsWire, Gimp, Office, Audacity, and many others that I use regularly. It's gonna take a while to set all that up, and then time to sync up some files with my desktop. I also have to get files off of my old laptop. Right now I'm making a VMWare image to use with Fusion, that should be fun.

So far it's been a blast. I miss my middle trackpad button for opening links in new tabs and such, but command-clicking works almost as well. I love the two finger-sensing trackpad, makes it easier to right-click and scroll, more than making up for the lack of three buttons. It's got lots of other great features too, the backlit keyboard, sudden motion sensor (there are some fun games that make use of it), and of course, all the wonders of Mac OS X. One thing I don't like it the location of the optical drive. If the laptop is on my lap, the drive if pointing right at my stomach, it makes it hard to get CDs in and out compared to most other laptops I've used that have drives the eject on the side. Still, it's just a little thing. Overall it's a great computer, one I expect to use for many years.