About Me
I am the former, and longest lasting, host of CM-SS13 to date. I joined the community roughly in February of 2017, and began as a Mentor in the following June. Mentors were headed up by the Senior Mentor Jerkface00 at the time, and were considered staff. I spent a little over a month as a Mentor before getting the greenlight from SLC97 to apply to be a Moderator. Mods weren't required to be Mentors first at the time, but for those that were, the process was effectively a formality, and was almost guaranteed to be accepted.
I was largely an overnight mod, being the type to stay up all night, and was typically alone. I spent the majority of my trial period without any real assistance, but passed my trial nonetheless. It was around this time that I built the first initial iteration of gpanel's tools, taking advantage of the server logs being stored in predictable webserver locations and having a hook download and process them automatically on my own server. These were hosted on https://jamie.tools/. It was during this time that I built the first version of Fast Log Search, and Multikey Lookup. I would later build a staff time counting tool and help the Senior Staff, the positions that would become Manager later, and outdate the manual process they were previously doing.
The tools were very well accepted, because tooling was almost non-existent at the time. The entire staff team had to share a password to a PHP file that allowed searches, and it changed infrequently, but some staff also downloaded logs and used Notepad++ from time to time. However, Apophis, the Host at the time, didn't like that technically log data was exposed, though password protected, through a third party site. Thus, I restricted access to only myself and would perform any lookups upon request. I would often assist Feweh with his investigations, and through that and generally doing well as a mod, I was picked for trial admin by surprise in that October, then chosen for Senior Mentor before my trial was up, due to freemysoul leaving Senior Admin, and Seniors being shifted around.
I spent 4 and a half months as Senior Mentor when the community got shaken up again, but harder. Feweh had incited some drama in a voice channel with a female user, and it led to his removal from staff shortly thereafter. Some time later, Apophis started to face pedophilia accusations due to conduct from a user of the same name requesting certain mods for The Sims. Apophis denied that user having any relation to him, but left the community because of people trying to bring it into real life. This left the Vice Host, Rahlzel, to become Host, and he opted not to pick a Vice nor to replace Feweh's old position of Head Manager. Instead, he renamed the Senior positions to Managers, and expanded their abilities. When this happened, Jerkface opted to shift back to leading the Mentors, I took up Mod Manager, and SLC was the initial Admin Manager. This arrangement stuck for nearly 4 months before I stepped down for a lack of time, and opted to be a Coder. Emerald Blood took my place.
Later that same month, BMC, the Head Dev who happened to be SLC's brother, became fed up with the community, leaving an infamous Discord announcement before exiting. This event prompted Rahlzel to also quit the same day or the day after, I'm unsure of which. Rahlzel initially offered Host to SLC, who declined. I was then offered the role as I was the only person on the team with significant technical skill. I initially thought it was a joke, but after he confirmed that it was not, I considered the proposal for a couple of hours before accepting. SLC was made Vice Host, Emerald Blood was Head Manager.
I was Host for less than a week before the source code to the game was leaked. The leaker has never been completely proven, but accounts claim that it was done by Rahlzel as an act of non-confidence, fearing that I would fail the community. That event caused a lot of tension between myself and Hostchat, as CM had been using an old Goon master controller which was licensed under AGPL. There was talk that the master controller was given to us with permission to keep it closed source in a trade, but this was unverifiable. CM was almost kicked out of Hostchat for license violation, only remaining in by 1 vote that broke a tie through the support of the Goons telling people they didn't care.
SLC would remain Vice Host until that January, when he left to pursue other interests. I opted not to replace him at the time. Little else of note happened during that year until I decided that Emerald Blood should be made Vice Host. She tried to use this to start contributing to Development, which was still closed source, but the devs were not interested in her getting involved, I understood and respected that choice, and it caused a massive rift to occur between us. Between that, other drama, and accusations that I was "tyrannical," the next several months were incredibly draining and stressful. After the new year in 2020, I removed Emerald Blood from Vice Host, extending an offer as a permanent Senior Admin, to which she declined and left the community. The events during the preceding months would sap my interest in taking an active role in CM, and that interest never recovered for any lengthy period of time.
Thus, for the remaining time I was host, I largely allowed the community to be governed by the managers and devs, and attempted to step in only when needed to keep things in order. The code would later be open sourced for anyone to contribute toward after much planning.
I may expand this later with certain events that occurred during my tenure as Host, but those are not as well ingrained in my memory as those that came before, or early on. So what I've written is likely to be all there is, but I won't leave out the possibility of updating it in the future.
Staff Rank Listing
| Staff Rank | Start Date | End Date |
|---|---|---|
| Mentor | 06/28/2017 | 08/07/2017 |
| Trial Moderator | 08/07/2017 | 08/25/2017 |
| Moderator | 08/25/2017 | 10/11/2017 |
| Trial Admin | 10/11/2017 | 10/30/2017 |
| Senior Mentor | 10/30/2017 | 03/15/2018 |
| Mod Manager | 03/15/2018 | 07/08/2018 |
| Coder | 07/08/2018 | 07/27/2018 |
| Host | 07/27/2018 | 10/19/2022 |