FIBS "Free Italian players" campaign

[neurino]

Hi all!

i submit you hereby a petiton about FIBS.
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~lelli/campaign.html

Maybe some know already, others don't , but, this is how it goes.
Some limitations to your freedom are applied if your connecting IP belongs to Italy.

For the ones who don't know the facts, the timeline and the actual state of things, this is a brief sketch (up to my knowledge):

FACTS: Italian based IP players aren't allowed to play against each other.

REASON: Some italian players (note: citizenship and not IP range related) abused in the past of the FIBS platform, cheating, harassing the FIBS maintainer, using multiple nicknames to raise their rating.

You can explore more and form your own ideas about it, reading the threads below:

"Stupid FIBS rule" http://www.fibsboard.com/index.php/topic,791.0.html

"Why are people so vindictive?" http://www.fibsboard.com/index.php/topic,810.html

The clear enlightening text written by Magowiz ("Preventing Italians to play each other") http://www.fibsboard.com/index.php/topic,920.0/all.html

Now, there are several obvious and less obvious reasons why all this should change at last.

In details, I (and i'm sure many other users do agree) believe in the ineffectualness of the employed technical measure, in the inequity of the prohibition, in the groundlessness of actual situation, from all civil and comportamental points of view, and last but not the least, in the hatefulness of an avalanche and subtle effect that this prohibition is causing. Italians are now seen as cheaters as a whole, as a population (depending on the IQ of your conversation partner. Try it out yourself in the public chat !!!).

I do also trust in the deeply liberal values of the FIBS mantainer, who will rely on them not to keep on  straightfowardly refusing our queries and dwelling his mind on the past.

If you wish to sustain this campaign, please, contact the maintainer (Patti Beadles), spread the petition text or link it in your backgammon wepage. It would be highly appreciated.

The purpose is just to make FIBS a better place to be in. 

Thanks.

[hexagon_sun]

Hi all! I still do not understand the meaning of "you cannot play with users of your own site". A site, as everyone of us knows, is a site, not a Nation or a State. If Miss Patty dont think changing her opinion about ban a whole nation, I gently ask to change the message from *site* to the correct one *state*.
If Mrs. Patti still have problems with user/users with italian ip, she can send the logs to the italian postal police or to the abuse organization, which is worldwide, as everyone of us know.
Fibs is a nice place for me to spend my time, certainly different from yahoo or msn's backgammon. I thought that i was a free place, with normal and obviously rules where people from every part of the world can meet together. I still ask myself a thing: if in a tourney both of the finalists are italian, what should happen?  They, we cannot play against each other. Will win the third one? One of the italian finalists has to go abroad to play the game? 
As everyone cansee my score, i play for fun, not for being the best or the worst, this doesn't matter much to me, i would like only to play freely against everyone. I can use for instance proxy, in order to bypass this rule, but i'm not willing to use this solution, 'cause i don't have nothing to hide.
I'm sorry if I feel rude in my words, but I still cannot understand this solution that has been taken. I read that Patti still has problems with a user, maybe I'm wrong. But I don't think that if a person or two is idiot, a whole nation has to pay for him/them. Changing opinion is the best way to show everyone to be openminded and intelligent. Best Regards to everyone!

[neurino]

Hi all! I still do not understand the meaning of "you cannot play with users of your own site". A site, as everyone of us knows, is a site, not a Nation or a State. If Miss Patty dont think changing her opinion about ban a whole nation, I gently ask to change the message from *site* to the correct one *state*.

Hallo hexagon_sun,

what you write is right, and i append a couple of words to your reasoning.
Technical point: obviously who avoids the ban rule is not the newbie, the passionate, the one who plays for fun and deserves the best service. At the contrary is the wannabe "hacker" who has some computer skills and feels challanged to connect anyway. That's why is specious the idea to remove the ban only after 1 year of no suspicious connection attempts.

A small example: my firewall on my pc logs daily and on a regular basis, around 10-15 malicious connection attempts. And i don't have any sensible informations in it. This happens normally on the net.

Essence of the abuse: i still don't get what "abuse" in the Fibs context does mean. How can an abuser harm, hurt, inhibit others? In facts, they don't. If the abuse means "try to play with other italians in spite of the ban", well, this is clear why it happens. Once the ban is lift, then there will be no abuses. If the abuse means "raise the rating playing a fake user", then such cheaters are evidently cuff off already from the Fibs community. They don't learn how to play, they don't even communicate with others, so why should we care about them?

This issue has become bigger than it is. Everybody should cool down and remember that's only a game platform, with no nationality. I hope that, from now on, people that showed me privatly their solidarity, will do it publicly, with the maintainer.

Italians, and not ontly, need the voice of those silents. They must have an opinion about it, and share it!

Moreover, i tell something directly to the people that say "don't do this, it's a waste of time!": it happens always in life to need somebody's else support. These people are willing to count on this support. You will have it from me. But how could they feel in front of a refusal? A lazyness refusal?

neurino

[hexagon_sun]

Hi neurino!
I've spoken with several fibsters about this so-called ban. About the 99% of them find it "strange and inconceivable".
Some people told me that if i go on in asking through my message to let us italian people be free to play against each other, i surely be banned by Mrs. Patti without any kind of explanation.
I believe that this cannot be possible, because i think that if Mrs. Patti is a or the responsible of a nice place as fibs, she is also so intelligent to understand that is absolutely regular to ask to have the same rights of the other players.
Thanks for the attention,

hexagon_sun

[acegeo]

Could this ban have nothing to to with Backgammon at all??.....But rather FOOTBAll..er soccer???  Perhaps Z. Zindane is the one secretly discrediting the Italians!....OR perhaps a conspiracy of ALL FRENCH to publicly humiliate the Italians at their second most-beloved sport (BG!)....Is Zinedane Z. in a SECRET TRYST with the FIBS maintainer? Is she perhaps an unwitting accomplice at an attempted public humiliation of the entire State of Italy? (imagine a pillow-whispering Zindane into the ear of our beloved FIbs Administrator...whoa)
This, I believe, MUST run deeper than just a few guys trying to jack their fibs scores...Good work Hex for bringing this obvious conspiracy to light.

[hexagon_sun]

Hi acegeo!
Well telling the truth, everything started when i've invited an Italian player and appears the strange warning "you cannot play with users from your own site". Site? So, I've asked through shouts what the problem was, as I  was playing on fibs' platform and I didn't know which other site the warning was referring to  .
Someone, kindly replied me, telling that Italian players cannot play bla bla bla bla. Too many words spoken after than. And the clock is going on.. How many hours till the end of the ban? 8,640? We Italians are lucky, 'cause this isn't a leap year, so we earn 24 hours !
See ya, acegeo!

hexagon_sun

[Peyo]

Hi all,

I don't know what exactly Patti's story is, or the complete sequence of events that lead to this situation.

However, for what it's worth, I happened to have my own problems with SOME Italian players. In short, I played against an unbelievably rude guy, who spent his time provoking me and insulting me in Italian, English and French.

Since I play this game to relax, I don't need this, so in the end I abandoned the match and moved on to play someone with a normal behaviour.

For the next week or so, every time I logged in I got hounded by a bunch of Italian players (6 or 7 in total) giving me more abuse and threatening to destroy my reputation on FIBS and get me banned for dropping that match.

Amazed by that reaction, I did a little research and found out about all these "Italian stories" on FIBS.

The net result ?
1- I found myself a client software allowing me to block people I don't care for
2- when playing someone, I'm ashamed to admit I check the DNS name of their computer and think really hard about accepting an invite from Italy...

But hey, I don't need aggravation when playing, so the simple solutions, albeit brutal and not very discriminating, do work.

So putting myself in Patti's shoes, I can clearly see that she does not need this, and definitely does not need to spend time on a clever solution.

And by the way, I don't believe she gets paid for doing FIBS work, so unless you ever organized anything, had to face the usual proportion of annoying people who do nothing but complain, therefore know what you are talking and are willing to help her with this, please leave her alone.

May the dice roll your way (unless you play me).

[hexagon_sun]

Hi Peyo and hi all!
Imho i think that everyone faced problems with SOME players from SOME countries, but it seems from your post, that you faced a problem with a SINGLE Italian opponent. So, let's lump everything together  ? It should be interesting knowing also the opinion of your opponent, in any case  . And, in any case, rude people come from every country  . I can also say that I faced a problem with an English opponent, and then? What should I tell or believe? That all English people are rude? If I should think so, I'll find myself with a very limited brain.

You don't believe that Patti gets paid for doing FIBS work, but it seems that some people paid through paypal, in order to improve the server. And it seems you don't.
And by the way, I believe that it would be better, before say something, informing oneself, don't you, Peyo ?
Don't think I'm complaining, I simply ask to play against other Italian players. But the clock is running: still 11 months for the ban's death  .
Namaste,
hexagon_sun

[Peyo]

Dear hexagon_sun,

Obviously you have not read my post completely, or not with much attention.

Like I said: I had problems not with ONE Italian player, but with a whole "gang" (whatever that means).

Like I said: I had problems with SOME italians, not ALL. I wrote SOME in CAPITALS, hoping people would not miss it.

So I'm not concluding that all Italians are rude, I just explain why, when facing repeated problems with a group of people, the simplest solution is to just ignore them, if you can.

And like I said: I did research the subject and found out about the many FIBS stories regarding Italians before making my decision.

Since you like giving advice, here is one for you: read carefully to avoid missing someone else's point.

This being said, I completely understand your frustration with the situation, since I can assume you are not responsible for it in any way. However I still defend the point that Patti can do whatever she wants with the server, if it makes her life simpler.

There are other places to play, so if she does indeed mismanage the server in the long run, eventually people will move on and play somewhere else. This is the natural course of things.

Kind regards