Talk:Old Man Murray/Archive 1

Caltrops

Caltrops is of no real significance to OMM, the "me too" desires of its users notwithstanding. References to it don't belong here. If anything, OMM should be referenced in a Caltrops article, but I doubt Caltrops is important enough to merit its own.

They really did get a sort of endorsement from the Postal Service, and had it on their page for quite some time. It was mainly a joke, but I think it fits into the "persona" of the page's entry here.

That's nice. Don't portray it as fact. You changed the paragraph, but you still put 'official endorsement' in the extlink. After playing with your (or some forum, who knows) IPs, I'm in no mood to deal with it. We don't even know what the letter said, it could have been a "sorry we lost your mail". --Golbez 01:36, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

No mood to deal with it? Maybe you should follow Wiki advice and move on to something else. http://web.archive.org/web/20000408202811/http://www.oldmanmurray.com/runyon.wcs

Indeed, that's the advice I put on my page. But you people annoyed me. This isn't a political issue, this is a vandal issue. --Golbez 04:05, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. This is info that was posted for a long time on their site. The link points to an article that makes it clear what they mean by "official". And, if as you say, we don't know what the letter said, then we can't conclude that it wasn't an endorsement can we? You are obviously pushing some kind of agenda here. - Wingwalker

The entry was obviously tongue-in-cheek, like the original comical post on OMM -- as the several links provided made abundantly clear. This was an insider gaming joke for a long time while OMM was up and posting original content. May I please suggest 1) adding a single adjective or adverb to the sentence about the "endorsement" to make it clear to even the most obtuse, humorless wiki moderators that it's tongue-in-cheek; 2) said moderators go ahead and wikisearch themselves an entry on "sense of humor". [Posted by different anon user than the one above]

How cute, you think I never read OMM. It's one thing to have a sense of humor, it's another thing to repeatedly put a lie in an encyclopedia. --Golbez 09:13, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

So it's not a site that was made by regulars from OMM, in direct response to OMM sinking? EDIT: I went and signed this so you'll reply. Can you expose the awful truth about the lying liars who put lies in wikipedia? Or what? - Jbernoski 10:08, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

In other news, who the fuck keeps adding caltrops.com to this listing? What the hell does that site have to do with OMM any more than a million others -- the Mushroom, Bitchx, Sierra, Quarter to Three, VoodooExtreme, and the various other forum user created sites (SSW, GA, etc.) and on and on.. get over yourselves. (And I really hope that's the real DIDCOT.) --JustSomeGuy

What's your problem with Caltrops? Even Erik Wolpaw of Old Man Murray thinks it's hilarious. I suggest you spend more time doing something else.

-

This entry is pretty disappointing. OldManMurray was influential enough to be one of the first pages given a permalink from Slashdot. They were responsible for supporting lesser-known games like Serious Sam with its bright colors and outdoor maps, and Pencil Whipped with its bizarre but internally consistent level design. Their front page authors have since worked for game companies, while their forums were read and occasionally contributed to by developers, game theorists, and internet economists, who all had a lot to add to the discussion about game aesthetics. Some of them now teach about games at NYU or Hunter, some have moved on to make interesting games like Chromatron and contribute to games like Supremacy - Four Paths To Power and God of War.

OMM's insecure and unprotected (but always raucus and entertaining) forums were shut down by Chet in response to a massive spam attack. Chet still runs PortalofEvil, of which OMM was a small part, and now runs his own hosting company, works for a game company and helps out as the administrator of Quarter to Three, a games discussion site populated largely by video game critics including founder Tom Chick. As for the post-OMM forums, the majority of OMM posters moved on to Caltrops, using code we got from Chet to make it the same as the original OMM Forums. Many users also moved on to Quartertothree or the now-defunct Gamersangst.

Jack Fool 22:01, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

"OldManMurray was influential enough to be one of the first pages given a permalink from Slashdot" - it's odd to feel nostalgic for a website that's technically still goung, but that's the internet for you. Old Man Murray will go the same way as Firefly or Fucked Company or Robot Frank, and in fact I'm genuinely surprised that Wikipedia's Fucked Company article is just three sentences long. I think the lesson is that internet forums are a complete waste of time; the text on this talk page and the edit war it describes are all just meaningless in August 2008, a lot of passion evaporated into thin air.-Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 18:35, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

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Lies. The OMM forum was shut off as a direct result of Chet getting frothingly angry in a thread at Zseni (nee Vag) for criticising his POE hosting service. He pulled the plug right in the middle of the fight, and later cited us for being "petulant children" on our refugee forum while, at the same time, talking about thumbing through the OMM forum data and deleting random posts. Strangely, no code or post content was ever donated to caltrops. I know this because I was there on the day Chet's meaty paw came down on the forums, Fussbett designed the Caltrops interface, and I wrote the Caltrops forum code.

Entropy Stew 17:14, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

OMM forums were shut off because of that Residential Evil fanboy. -

It is verifiable they have gone to valve, check here

http://www.valvesoftware.com/people.htm

It is not verifiable caltrops has anything to do with the site, so it should not be listed.

Protection

Noticing an edit war, I am semiprotecting the article on the version it was when I came across it. Clear up your issues here, kids. --Golbez 06:27, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

I have unprotected the talk page. Some of the anon edits were clearly trolling, but others were legitimate; there was definitely no wide-spread vandalism. I would also ask that everyone remember to be civil. I'll leave the page itself up to others. Superm401 - Talk 06:35, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

"A newcomer's behaviour probably seems appropriate to him or her and a problem usually indicates unawareness or misunderstanding of Wikipedian culture."

Why is this page even here?

Only ranked 694,502 on Alexa, therefore not notable. Oh I forgot, it's American so the Wiki Fascist editors have to include it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.151.170 (talk • contribs) 10:32, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Alexa ratings, like Google search hits, are not a measure of notability. There's been a lot of blood shed over this article already, so I invite you to read over the proceedings instead of rehashing the same arguments Talyian (talk) 01:05, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Stop already.

Can a mod please stop the caltrops updates? It is unverifiable. It is an attack. It is removing verifiable information. It dominates the entry for this site. It has no place here. Caltrops is not what made OMM great, the forums were not as important as they sad little men make it out to be. And yes, I will keep my identity hidden because they have attacked other users who have corrected this entry.

Sad little men

Can a mod please stop the above user? He is a pussy. He has attacked Caltrops. He has insulted the users of a non-wiki site by referring to them as "they [sic] sad little men", and then peed his anonymous pants.

My updates are verifiable

Mentions of caltrops are not verifiable. Chet and Erik’s current employment is. And considering they now work at the company that is mentioned in the first half of the entry, that information is much more relevant.

Please do not re-add any mention of caltrops.

If the important part of OMM was caltrops, then why is the creation of caltrops mentioned in an OMM entry not a caltrops entry? Chet and Erik were funny, they wrote the site. They wrote what is still remembered. They were hired by magazines and game companies, not the forum members. Statements like, "and when the main website began to stagnate, the forums became the primary point of interest at the site. " are ludicrous. The forums were only ever important to the few people who posted there.

If caltrops is so dead set on being in wikipedia, why not start your own entry instead of riding on the coattails of Chet and Erik?

Sure it's fucking verfiable, the same mass of retards you see in the archived OMM forum are posting on Caltrops, so that's where they went. What's up with the fucking contingent of people who sat around reading articles, and never posted on the forum because they couldn't have Mod Powers? Well, everyone has mod power on wiki. So deal with my revert.txt. (141.158.152.75 15:10, 10 August 2006 (UTC)) -WORM

Or you could create an entry about caltrops and talk about this there. Why not do that? The forums had nothing to do with what made Chet and Erik funny, if anything the forums were a thorn in their side. So why not grow up and stop being that thorn? If caltrops is so important, create a caltrops entry and post your story there.

Let me preface this by saying that I have no connection with the website www.caltrops.com or portalofevil.com.

The section on the OMM forum, past and present, clearly dominated previous revisions of this article and they were correctly whittled down. The article was still in extremely poor shape before my edits, however. OMM did not simply attack popular games. There is no "bad blood" that I can see between the forum posters of Portal of Evil and Caltrops (searching these sites pick up no recent mentions of each other) and it wasn't relevant even if there were. Adding the "Appearances in Other Media" section helps demonstrate (and cite) the legacy of OMM, which should address why the article exists, given its low Alexa score today. Perhaps due to the many revisions, the writing was also uneven and choppy. I have fixed these issues and inaccuracies. I feel the latest version is the strongest version of the article.

Should forums spring up again at OMM, I completely agree that all mentions of www.caltrops.com should be eliminated. And I will be the first one to eliminate such references when they return; I hope that members of caltrops.com would agree. But for now, it is verifiable through webarchive that these are the same people who have simply carried their OMM conversations to a different site. The forum software appears to be the same (while not being off-the-shelf, like phpBB or vBulletin), the layout is identical and many usernames are the same. References to the iterations of the OMM forum now currently makes up a much smaller portion of the article and there is certainly a precedent for a Wikipedia website entry to mention the site's discussion area (Straight Dope, Something Awful, Penny Arcade, etc., all do this). I would be happy to cite any of the points I have brought to the table moving forward and will continue to respect the work of the Wikipedians on this entry. -68.165.135.92

Removing all info on forums due to Wikipedia policy

As per WP:OR and WP:RS, the above proof as to the eventual outcome of the OMM forums cannot be considered because doing so constitutes original research. Wikipedia is not the place to remark about non-notable message forums per WP:WEB. hateless 02:44, 3 August 2007 (UTC)