And no offense, but are you and Montoya responsible for all the actions members of TEST? Because, when I tell Montoya about a specific member coming over to ADI, spying on ADI, and posting screenshots of private forum posts... Montoya pleads ignorance, and I'm expected to take him at his word. The fact is none of us 'control' our members, they're beings with free will, and do things on their own. When they do things we can't abide, we kick them...
Nobody was tasked, nobody was requested, nobody was encouraged... the OP was talking openly about his situation, and I *assume* the LEO was acting in his official capacity, and for the safety of our members brought his concerns to my attention. And the OP wasn't a 'troublemaker' at the time, he was a valued member of staff, and well liked by a lot of members. Nobody jumped up and down for joy when we kicked him, but we didn't want somebody in his situation in ADI.
At the time, we had minors who were members of ADI, and concerns were voiced from staff members that this person posed a risk to those members. Shortly after this incident, we stopped accepting minors as members, because we were concerned about predators targeting those members within our community.
So, are you saying if a person known to you to be a law enforcement officer WARNED you about person X, and person X confirmed the basic facts given to you by the law enforcement officer, you would ignore the possible risks to your other members and not kick them?
Because, I couldn't in good faith ignore it, and acted in what I believed was the best interest of my members and ADI. I'm happy to stand by my actions publicly, I have nothing to hide, I did nothing wrong.
1. ADI did migrate from using spreadsheets on Google to a custom written database application on Dec. 31st, 2014. The tool never interacted with the RSI forums, never interacted with any API what so ever. All it did was replace a google spreadsheet system we had been using, nothing more. Later in 2015, we did add a feature that would automatically recorded actions taken by the recruiter, so they didn't have to update our records by hand. But, we never interacted with any RSI API, I guess we weren't as smart as you give us credit, our method used manually looking at forum profiles. BTW, our tool would still work today, although we've since retired it.
2. Funny, I helped write the tool, it only existed as a working application for less than 24 hours in 2014. But yes our 'RecruiterTool' was an application you installed on your PC, it did connect to a backend and allowed you to perform recruiting functions. That was the design of the software, and we've never said it didn't exist. What it didn't do, was pull any user data from the RSI website.
3. We saw your posts, and honestly laughed at them, because it gave us way too much credit. We were still in the stone age programming wise at that time.
4. I suspect the person which held the copyright to said program, might have filed DMCA notices, because they didn't want information leaking into the public about said program, because it gave them a huge leg up on recruiting efforts. And screenshots of said program explicitly violated the terms of the software license.
5. We saw that, it didn't impact our recruiting efforts at all, we didn't have to change a single line of code, because we weren't using that API. They contacted us through private channels and confirmed we were doing nothing wrong. I'd share that message with you, but it's my understanding that CIG's new TOS prohibits me from doing so, and I try my best to always color within the lines.
Unlike other organizations who blindly sent mass org invites during that period of time (2014-2015), we wanted to manually vet every invite we sent. I'm not saying we couldn't have completely automated the process, we both know that was possible, and in many ways would have been a lot easier. For sure if we had, leaks would have never happened.
So we threw a LOT of man hours at the problem, every contact our recruiters had with people was done manually, only after reviewing the persons information, their forum posts, etc. The reason we built the 'RecruiterTool' was to enforce our policies better, it had the side benefit of being quicker and easier, and resulted in more recruits joining ADI. There was a clear arms race to increase the size of our organisations, it became clear that server instancing was going to require more members to be a dominating force within SC. Right or wrong, we didn't want to give away such an easy to use method for finding new recruits, but since the SC forums are not used anymore, and everything has moved to Spectrum, I'll be happy to explain exactly how we found your Citizen406 account without using any API.
While every person who joins RSI's website is given a 'citizen ID' number, what most people didn't realize is that everybody who visited the RSI forums while logged in, also received what we named a 'forum ID' number. If you visited your own public forum profile page, where it linked to your posts etc, you would notice in the URL a number, this was what we called your forumID. If you clicked on the url bar in your browser and changed that number from say 179746 to 492434 you'd see the public forum profile for a user called Citizen406, if you increased the number to 492435 you'd see the profile page for butch1111.
I only post this information today, because the old RSI forums were turned off earlier this year.
I'm sure there are screencaps of our new 'AdminTool' floating around by now as well, I just expect anything we do is going to float over to TEST at some point. It's the cost of running an org.
And for the record, a lot of former TEST members turn up at ADI, claiming to have insider information, claiming all sorts of evils going on at TEST... and you know what we do, tell them it's none of our business. They're welcomed to join ADI, but we just don't care about the internal politics of TEST.
To be honest, we have running jokes about TEST, and sending you guys all of our rejects ;) Honestly I'm too busy running ADI to worry about other organizations.
The only reason I'm over here now, is because I want to set the record straight, the OP wasn't kicked because he pushed back on internal policies. I like staff members who push back, it makes our policies better, because we have to continue to defend and refine them. Some of the best folks in ADI, are constantly forcing me to re-think central policies within ADI, and I while annoying at times, I recognize the value that they provide our community.
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