What happened to Caramel Frappe?

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FrappeBad said:
Its a wonder how he ever got the job given how this is how he started. By default I guess.

(He only got moderately better behind the scenes. You guys don't even know. He put on a great face for public.)

http://i65.tinypic.com/21kkv89.jpg


Honestly thought that was forgotten about.
 

Arnoxthe1

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FrappeBad said:
Its a wonder how he ever got the job given how this is how he started. By default I guess.

(He only got moderately better behind the scenes. You guys don't even know. He put on a great face for public.)


(Wheee I get to use that image again.)
 

Trunkage

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Arnoxthe1 said:
trunkage said:
Everyone says they want this community but no one will lift a finger to save it.
Toxicity aside, WTF are we supposed to do? The mods have no say in how this site's run. Even the community manager has little say in how this site's run.

And it's nobody's fault. (Except Defy. Fuck you, Defy.) It's just how things are.
I think there has been lots of good ideas floated around over the last year. But a large group would shut it down, making it unfeasible.

Unfortunately, like all democracies, some people will have to deal with a situation they don't like because there is no possible way to make everyone happy. We going to have to convince those who feel ostracised by community decisions to stay because we probably need most here for the community to survive.

I'm all for Defy taking their part of the blame and they definitely don't want to take responsibility for this site. Don't let that be a scapegoat for us taking our responsibility too.
 

Arnoxthe1

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trunkage said:
I'm all for Defy taking their part of the blame and they definitely don't want to take responsibility for this site. Don't let that be a scapegoat for us taking our responsibility too.
Honestly, I don't think we ever had an opportunity to take responsibility for pretty much anything so it's completely irrelevant what the community did or didn't want, and WW is really just a mere distraction from the main issue of the site being completely fucking abandoned except for Yahtzee vids.
 

The Lunatic

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Can't say I ever had much issue with Frappe.

Questionable decisions, sure, but, they never seemed willfully harmful, unlike others.

I hope whatever they're doing, they're enjoying it more than what they were doing here.
 

Saelune

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trunkage said:
Saelune said:
trunkage said:
Caramel spent a lot of time asking us to step up and fight for the community. Every single time, the community said no.

Everyone says they want this community but no one will lift a finger to save it.

If your still listening, thanks Caramel for all your efforts
...Except we're sitting blind here. I didnt want to bring up negativity against Frappe here but...

Frappe promised alot and delivered little. And when they failed to deliver, ran and hid from us without saying anything.

Sorry if this is a dick thing to say but...Frappe is kinda hitting par for the course with this. (Thats not to say that much of the rest of those in power of The Escapist didnt all do it first, Frappe is just imitating them I suppose)

Hell, more mods keep popping up suddenly and unannounced. Thankfully I think Gethsemani is a swell person, but suddenly they are a blue-named mod too?

You criticize the community for not wanting to help, but most of us have our hands tied and our eyes covered.
I'd said that Frappe didn't deliver much either. They had way more ideas than anyone else on the team but nothing came to fruition. I don't think it was Frappe's follow through. I think it was their basic underlying assumption. Frappe assumed there would be people like them that wanted to fight this site. That was a false assumption and thus Caramel was always going to fail.

Now, blind? Maybe. I need to hear about this more to understand your point
Well, we arent told much, and since we have to rely almost exclusively on our community, I think things should be far more transparent than they are. There is still too much of an arm's length between those with some semblance of power and the rest of us.

And dont get me wrong, I appreciated Frappe's idealism. My problem isnt that they promised us good things, its that when they couldnt deliver, they quietly bailed. If they said "Hey, so it turns out all that stuff I said, here is all the reasons why I cant do it". Instead, silence for weeks.

Even this, Id have preffered Frappe just own up to the issues, and be like "Hey, I cant deal with this, so I am going to step down, maybe take a break" etc.

I get that those in semi-power cant be as visible as users as they might have been, its why I dont assume Basement Cat is MIA, just busy, but I didnt know Frappe was gone until this topic, and thats not cool.
 

Elvis Starburst

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Arnoxthe1 said:
IceForce said:
I copped a bit of hate for saying it, but I do believe some of the onus needs to fall on CF for making those promises in the first place and stringing everyone along for as long as he did.
Wasn't his fault. Defy didn't do what they told him they were gonna do. So no, that's not fair to say. What, you think CF just wanted to sit on his ass too and watch a site he loved crumble into nothing? He probably loved The Escapist more than any of us. And I can say that too because he put his time and even some of his rep on the line for it.
Well put. Granted, if Frappe waited till he got the ok from Defy for these things first (And actually had the ability/tools in front of him to make it happen) before promising them to us, then it might've gone a bit smoother. So I do think there's some responsibility needing to be held there on his part. But the fact he was fighting an uphill battle against a company that gives no fucks about its site, a lack of ability to fix the site himself alongside his team that couldn't help fix it either, and a section of the ungrateful userbase... No, I don't think it's fair to say it was much of his failure
 
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From what I gathered by my limited interactions with him, his outside life was putting increasing demands on his time. The most likely and realistic scenario was that he had to decide how to spend the limited free time he had. Pursue the stuff in his outside life or pour it into his online life on the forum. I would say he chose the former.

That's my opinion anyway. If it turns out he was abducted by aliens I wouldn't fall over in shock.


Fischgopf said:
The Rules are designed to promote a kind of faux-politeness so everything devolves into passive-agressive snark. Grudges are carried over between Threads because we can't be honest to each other. It also doesn't help that we lack any kind of Chat Thread that would allow us to simply talk about out Day to Day lives and actually get a better picture of the people behind the posts.
Annnnnd then there's that.
 

Tsun Tzu

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Well shit.

I lost my monster girl buddy...sad times, man.
Silentpony said:
The Wild West was a mistake. Always was, always will be. Its a drag on the site and the users. The sooner its closed for good, the better.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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LostGryphon said:
I mean case in point. That's what passes for I guess clever? I mean I can't tell if that's a dank meme, a fresh meme, a forced meme, a me-me meme, is this memes? or cancer memes.

A quick Google search tells me its from yet another high school based anime staring Japanese girls with suspiciously Caucasian features, so I'm going to go with either Harem meme, or assuming I missed something about it being big in 4chan, cancer meme.
 

Saelune

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FrappeBad said:
Flashback to the time Frappe was deemed an "Ambassador of E" for one of the March Madness events, posted something stupid, was removed from the position (and had his badge, the ALL IMPORTANT BADGE OMG, revoked) and then spent weeks (maybe months) whining about it in the forums, in the mod group, and spamming the then-CM Nasrin's inbox about it.

Yup. CM material.
You're an account made exclusively to bad mouth Frappe.
 

Marter

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Oh, boy, Frappe.

Um, let's see. What to say, what to say?

Frappe came into the forum right around the time several users were trying to make it nicer - the most prominent of which, of course, was Aylaine. Frappe saw that this was a means to popularity, and followed suit. Maybe much of it was genuine; I don't know. He wanted power and popularity - that much became clear pretty quickly. Being kind and helpful was one means to that end.

It worked. Frappe got popular, and most people seemed to like him. He wormed his way into leadership or co-leadership roles in several user groups, was a big Forum Games poster, and cozied up to most remotely popular users - the ones who didn't outright reject him, that is. And there were some who did just that. Frappe did do lots of good for people, though, and props to him for that.

We bumped heads a few times. I remember when he tried to report me for snarking about his lack of basic English skills in a user group. And when I called him out for whining about [lots of stuff]. He didn't handle criticism well at all; he never did. The Nasrin incident mentioned above is probably the biggest case of it. There was also the (at-the-time infamous) "Escapist Community Awards," which turned so sour - due in part to his mishandling of dissenters - that it was 404ed.

(There were other things that happened over the years, much of which I don't remember the specifics for. The perception that came from it is what I've mentioned in this post.)

We put most of our issues behind us in the years that followed. He grew up; credit where credit is due. But we went some time without speaking. And I'm still somewhat sour that, after the site had to let go most of its content creators and the mods took over, he took over my Community Spotlight without any consultation. And then did almost nothing with it.

I never thought he should be a staff member but I figured that, at least he seemed to care - and I believe that was genuine - so maybe he had a shot at doing a decent job. I don't know what prevented him from doing anything of consequence with his powers, and I don't like how he's run instead of facing up to the missed promises, but whatever. It doesn't surprise me, either, mind.

Frappe, since you'll probably read this (account-scrub or not, he'll find this thread), I hope you're happy off the site. I really do.
 

The Rogue Wolf

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Silentpony said:
The Wild West was a mistake. Always was, always will be. Its a drag on the site and the users. The sooner its closed for good, the better.
Visiting WW is a self-inflicted wound, and I would rather have the filthy pus congeal there than spread to the few places I still go.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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The Rogue Wolf said:
Silentpony said:
The Wild West was a mistake. Always was, always will be. Its a drag on the site and the users. The sooner its closed for good, the better.
Visiting WW is a self-inflicted wound, and I would rather have the filthy pus congeal there than spread to the few places I still go.
If its a self-inflicted wound, then by definition the Escapist did it to itself. Getting rid of the Wild West isn't going to flood Off-Topic with pages long threads of anime tits and spaghetti memes. Just because the WW is a lawless hellhole doesn't mean bleed over to proper forums can be equally lawless.
Anyone trying to post a WW type thread in any other forum would get banned, or at least a warning and the thread closed.

And the site would be better for it.
 

Arnoxthe1

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The Rogue Wolf said:
Visiting WW is a self-inflicted wound, and I would rather have the filthy pus congeal there than spread to the few places I still go.
What, like the bot-invested waters of everywhere else?
 

bluegate

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Fischgopf said:
The biggest Problem is that we aren't really a community. The Rules are designed to promote a kind of faux-politeness so everything devolves into passive-agressive snark. Grudges are carried over between Threads because we can't be honest to each other. It also doesn't help that we lack any kind of Chat Thread that would allow us to simply talk about out Day to Day lives and actually get a better picture of the people behind the posts.

Really nothing is stopping us from collecting packing up our shit and moving on to a place where we would actually have control. I even considered trying to set something up at one point. But it wouldn't work, so why bother?
That's a bit of a sad realization, isn't it?

At this point, the Escapist's website is best abandoned, but even if the community were to migrate to a different site, what would "it" do there aside from continue on aimlessly bickering with itself.

I also thought of setting something up a little while ago but gave up on the thought after thinking on it for a while.
 

Sean Hollyman

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StatusNil said:
Sean Hollyman said:
What is this Wild West thing?
It's a "no rules" subforum for people with an active subscription. Which is surprisingly many, but that's because apparently a severely disgruntled tech team gave a permanent subscription for free to most active users upon being suddenly laid off.
Oh dang, wish I'd been around for that. What sort of stuff goes on over there?
 

Tsun Tzu

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Silentpony said:
I mean case in point. That's what passes for I guess clever? I mean I can't tell if that's a dank meme, a fresh meme, a forced meme, a me-me meme, is this memes? or cancer memes.

A quick Google search tells me its from yet another high school based anime staring Japanese girls with suspiciously Caucasian features, so I'm going to go with either Harem meme, or assuming I missed something about it being big in 4chan, cancer meme.
What point?

Was that long-winded diatribe supposed to be clever?

Ever thought about maybe taking things less seriously? Being a bit less pedantic? Maybe?

And, frankly, if you're going to whinge, ineffectively flail, and whine about a subforum you don't like in an unrelated thread, on a dying forum then, sincerely, what do you expect?

Certainly doesn't look like discourse is the goal.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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LostGryphon said:
Silentpony said:
I mean case in point. That's what passes for I guess clever? I mean I can't tell if that's a dank meme, a fresh meme, a forced meme, a me-me meme, is this memes? or cancer memes.

A quick Google search tells me its from yet another high school based anime staring Japanese girls with suspiciously Caucasian features, so I'm going to go with either Harem meme, or assuming I missed something about it being big in 4chan, cancer meme.
What point?

Was that long-winded diatribe supposed to be clever?

Ever thought about maybe taking things less seriously? Being a bit less pedantic? Maybe?

And, frankly, if you're going to whinge, ineffectively flail, and whine about a subforum you don't like in an unrelated thread, on a dying forum then, sincerely, what do you expect?

Certainly doesn't look like discourse is the goal.
Says the person posting anime reaction gifs. That's not even the pot calling the kettle black. That's just a whole new level of lack of awareness.

If you post shitty anime memes, you don't get to complain when someone points out you're posting shitty anime memes.