were there hidden reasons why the frontier was removed from nexus, despite the latest hotfix discord message?

[M48A5]

Someone older and wiser than I once told me "Don't expect what you don't inspect".

 

Plain and simple, the team leader is responsible for this whole incident for not inspecting before releasing.

Edited February 2, 2021 by M48A5

[ashtonlp101]

This isn't a professional studio. They don't have the resources to do background checks. As Jimbo said, it's very easy to sit in hindsight saying "oh they should've done that." That's not helpful in any way, shape or form. I'm sure TGspy is thinking he should've as well. This is an unprecedented thing to happen on a mod team.

[macintroll]

Same guy again? ok

[Calbeck]

This isn't a professional studio. They don't have the resources to do background checks. As Jimbo said, it's very easy to sit in hindsight saying "oh they should've done that." That's not helpful in any way, shape or form. I'm sure TGspy is thinking he should've as well. This is an unprecedented thing to happen on a mod team.

On top of which, the dev in question didn't put anything sexualized into the mod (despite the OP originally saying exactly the opposite). Resultingly, there was no "red flag". Only when 4chan went digging (and misrepresenting various content and statements by the mod team) to create a deliberate scandal did any of this come to light. Beyond that, the only actual "pedo" content in the mod related directly to Mei's status as a minor, which was put in by a completely different dev. And while we ARE talking about a post-apocalyptic world in which 21st-Century social mores are largely considered a quaint and distant memory, we still have to consider modern-day US laws regarding sexual content involving minors. Pulling that material, borderline as it was, was the right call by the dev team.

 

In the end, it doesn't matter how well a mod team "vets" its membership. There's always going to be a chance something was missed. Unless someone is suggesting 4chan be hired on the regular to find dirt on anyone working with anyone else on a mod?

 

EDIT: I should probably add that Zu still has plenty of mods of their own creation on the Nexus. None of it contains porn, let alone pedophilic content. I myself have commissioned clean art from this artist before, and never knew this side of them existed. So again, no red flags. Let's stop trying to castigate a mod for content that isn't in it, just the same way as we wouldn't delete the whole of New Vegas from our hard drives if it turned out that some Obsidian artist had once done skeezy things in a Bangkok hotel.

Edited February 4, 2021 by Calbeck

[Calbeck]

 

I've worked with others on things and it's never crossed my mind to do a background check, it was a bunch of hobbyists collaborating on a project, they weren't a company hiring a new employee.

Background check makes it sound much more then what was needed, he was posting the questionable content under the same name he used when working on The Frontier, all that would have to be done was a google search of his name.

 

*does exactly that*

 

EDIT: yes, I turned Safe Search off for this experiment.

 

Oh hey look. Even with the recent explosive scandal, doing a search on "Zu the Skunk" and checking the image list results in one clean image by Zu and tons of images of skunks and weed. Of course, I'm using DuckDuckGo here, which includes Google results but also many other search engines and is often more comprehensive as a result. If I ONLY look for "Zu", I get photos of Dutch people with "zu" in their name, the Soviet ZU-23 anti-aircraft gun, the Pug-Zu dog breed, toys from the "Heroes of Goo Jit Zu" line, stereo cabinets, and absolutely nothing by Zu the Skunk. Checking "Zu the Skunk" in the site listing likewise provides zero content about pedo material - EXCEPT for articles generated by the post-launch scandal. Most of the top results are about actual skunks.

 

In short, "Zu the Skunk" wasn't a unique enough search descriptor to guarantee discovery of the problem even had what you're asking for been done.

 

Perhaps you can come up with a background-check regimen that would not only find objectionable content by Zu, but also by anyone else who might be called upon to contribute to a future mod project?

Edited February 4, 2021 by Calbeck

[Ethreon]

Expecting comprehensive background checks for people involved in a hobby projects is as ridiculous as the premise of this whole thread. Everyone is smart when looking at the past and have all the information, eh?

[macintroll]

 

 

I've worked with others on things and it's never crossed my mind to do a background check, it was a bunch of hobbyists collaborating on a project, they weren't a company hiring a new employee.

Background check makes it sound much more then what was needed, he was posting the questionable content under the same name he used when working on The Frontier, all that would have to be done was a google search of his name.

 

*does exactly that*

 

EDIT: yes, I turned Safe Search off for this experiment.

 

Oh hey look. Even with the recent explosive scandal, doing a search on "Zu the Skunk" and checking the image list results in one clean image by Zu and tons of images of skunks and weed. Of course, I'm using DuckDuckGo here, which includes Google results but also many other search engines and is often more comprehensive as a result. If I ONLY look for "Zu", I get photos of Dutch people with "zu" in their name, the Soviet ZU-23 anti-aircraft gun, the Pug-Zu dog breed, toys from the "Heroes of Goo Jit Zu" line, stereo cabinets, and absolutely nothing by Zu the Skunk. Checking "Zu the Skunk" in the site listing likewise provides zero content about pedo material - EXCEPT for articles generated by the post-launch scandal. Most of the top results are about actual skunks.

 

In short, "Zu the Skunk" wasn't a unique enough search descriptor to guarantee discovery of the problem even had what you're asking for been done.

 

Perhaps you can come up with a background-check regimen that would not only find objectionable content by Zu, but also by anyone else who might be called upon to contribute to a future mod project?

 

 

As you say, nothing "problematic" can be found with a search.

Obviously this kind of content is never public, but hidden behind private servers. (those who found it had to register on an obscure private server)

Drawing "my little pony" is not in-fine problematic content.

So no there was no extra background check for him, for no one in fact.

When he asked to join in, we checked all his nexus mods first and everything was top quality.

I also want to say that everything Zu provided for the mod is clean, non questionnable and top quality content. We could never imagine that before.

And personnaly it was a pain for me to remove his 900 icons from the mod. But no choice, this had to be done.

 

For sure now we will double check everyone who want to join the team, especially if they use "my little pony" or "my little licorn" kind of avatar profile ^^ ...

[Calbeck]

Precisely the problem: how is one disinterested in such degeneracy expected to conduct a search for material that's only going to be found on such degenerate boards? In cases like this, you have to know it exists before you even begin looking for it.

 

Channers, though, love digging into degeneracy, because that's how they find "lolcows" to entertain themselves with. For that reason alone, they're all over boards with pedo content, furry or otherwise. It's how they knew about this stuff when no one else did, and they clearly kept it under their collective cap until they could do something "entertaining" with it. Letting the mod team know, so that appropriate action could have been taken on a reasonable timeframe, wouldn't have given them any drama to enjoy, let alone monetize with hyped-up clickbait videos.

 

This is one of the reasons I raised an issue with putting Zu on blast in the first place; it gave them exactly the salacious framing they wanted to keep the drama going. Now, one of the more common views of The Frontier is that it was yanked for containing pedophilia, a line which was deliberately blurred by people whose interests lie with entertainment rather than factual accuracy. It should be evident at this point that they never cared whether the team disavowed or distanced themselves; they wanted the connection to be made and to make it stick. Raw, unadulterated truth is not entertaining, fiction is entertaining, and to some people fictionalized truth is the most entertaining thing of all.

 

And it's nothing unique to their treatment of this mod, or of the modding scene in general, or even of Furries and Bronies as a whole. It's just how these sorts of people operate across the board regardless of who they've picked to be their lolcow of the day.

Edited February 4, 2021 by Calbeck

[JimboUK]

Precisely the problem: how is one disinterested in such degeneracy expected to conduct a search for material that's only going to be found on such degenerate boards? In cases like this, you have to know it exists before you even begin looking for it.

 

 

 

Exactly, this sort of thing isn't going to be sitting there in the open where anyone can find it, short of hiring a private detective there's not much they could have done.

[ashtonlp101]

As Callbeck mentioned which is also a good point, Zu had a lot of mods on the Nexus previously that were perfectly clean mods that contained no pornographic content whatsoever. If any background check were to be done, it would've been the author's modding history within the Nexus since that is the most easily accessible information to get ahold of.