This post is in response to a post made at the Official Olympic Forums by Hawk, from RCT Depot, located here:
http://rctolympics.com/forums/index.php?sh...&st=0&#entry127This is similarly my resignation "speech," though I'm not waiting for the new committee to come in for it to take affect. It's effective immediately.
I've done all I can do for this year's Olympics. I posted several messages in the various competitive threads detailing the voting for all entries that the judges received from Hawk after he downloaded the email attachments. I also have posted the judges comments on the entries, where they were available. Hawk is the only one with the downloads, so I've asked him to upload the files so that people may download all of the entries from this year's events.
I have similarly posted some comments in the Organizing Committee section of the forums detailing my concerns regarding 1) How this Olympics was handled, 2) How it seemed that the user "RCT Olympics" was making decisions for the future of the Olympics and 3) asking said user to refrain from making any announcements, decisions or taking any action regarding future Olympics until a full, formal committee could be organized. I have proposed some suggestions for how the Olympics may be run in the future, but have not attempted to make my suggestions official, nor to take any actions based on my suggestions.
I was approached to help rescue this Olympics, and I've done what I can. I worked in good faith with Hawk, despite our sordid history, and believed he was similarly working toward a common goal.
Over the course of the past few weeks it has seemed that I was being misled.
#1) This "new" Olympic site was started up during the same time the events and judging were going on at the old RCT Resource Olympic forums. I approached Hawk and asked him to A) take these new forums offline and to point to the Resource forums, where we had indicated to all participating sites (and judges) that the remainder of the 2005 Olympics would be taking place. Repeatedly the link was changed, or these forums were taken offline, only to have the links replaced and the forums come back online as the "official" Olympic forums. This caused a lot of confusion among not only the athletes, but the judges, who were trying to finish the judging.
#2) Things started popping up at other sites and here at the "official" Olympic site indicating that decisions had been made by an Olympic Committee and that plans were underway to, among other things, hold the Olympics 2x a year and to hire a wide variety of positions for next year's Olympics (
recruiting topic here) - something that should be handled by next year's host site, not by anyone affiliated with THIS site at THIS time.
#3) The old RCT Resource forums were hacked/sabotaged the day the winning announcements were to be made there. In fact, they went down moments after I'd finished prepping the winning announcements. When I approached Hawk to find out what had happened, and if he knew where to find OJ, his only suggestion was that we announce the winners at the "new" forums. There was no urgency to retrieve the information (not to mention hours of work I'd spent) nor any concern over the lost forums. He kept asking why we needed them since we knew the winners. His primary objective was to move everything to the new forums, hosted on Hawk's servers and under Hawk's control. To his credit, he did give me Admin CP access so I could clean up the forums and prep them for the winning announcements, which were ultimately made here. Though after I confronted him today, he has since removed my Admin CP access.
Now I'm going to call a spade a spade, here, Ray (a.k.a. Hawk) unlike your veiled references in your post which no one is going to understand.
I am not trying to take over. In fact, I don't have time, nor desire, to run the Olympics. Neither am I trying to influence other's who have posted at the official forums questioning your actions and behavior. I trust that people are old enough to speak for themselves and the fact of the matter is, a lot of people are suspicious of you.
I was finally able to contact OJ today and with my help, we were able to get the old forums back online. It appears that someone had written over the conf_global.php file on the RCT Resource servers thus interrupting the site's ablitity to access the mySql database. At the time the forums went down, there were very few people who had that ability via FTP: OJ, Hawk, and perhaps one other person who used to do backups for OJ at Resource.
In addition the inbox and sent mail box of the GMail account for the Olympics had been deleted recently. Hawk had mentioned this previously in passing, but I discovered this the other day for myself when I was able to answer the password security question and log into the email account directly (access that previously was not given to me, despite us 'working together' on this). Back when Hawk first discovered the emails were gone, he told me OJ must have done it. In talking with OJ today, he assures me he didn't delete them. That leaves only one other person.
Today Hawk requested that OJ delete the GMail account, saying we didn't need it anymore. He also told OJ that we didn't need the information that was in the old forums, now that the winners had been announced. He's either over-eager to move everything to the new forums or he's trying to cover something up, and either way it stinks.
Hawk clearly hasn't been paying attention to conversations I've had on multiple sites (including the Official site) regarding the email account still being in use and my attempts to recover the data lost in the old forums.
In my conversation today with OJ, several things came to light which question just about everything I've been told by Hawk since I agreed to try to get the Olympics back on track. I confronted Hawk on the details of my conversation with OJ and he was unable to answer my questions, instead prefering to play the victim in the face of my "'converted back ended' influence" (??) and my apparent habit of blaming him for everything wrong in the RCT community (largely because he deserves it).
I have copies of my conversation with OJ, but have not discussed the possibilility of releasing that information with him. I plan to next time I see him and suspect he will be willing to back up what I've said here today.
So, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
I've invested more than my share of energy into this. My work is done. Hawk still have a responsibility to the athletes of this year to upload the files for download. I hope he'll do that for them, at least. God knows he hasn't done anything else except tinker with the 'new official RCT Olympic site' the past three weeks.
I've neglected my own life, my own job, and my own site for far too long.
I sincerely hope the Olympics has a future, as I belive it's a good idea that could really be a lot of fun if properly planned.
But as long as it is on servers controled by Hawk or RCT Depot, neither I nor RCT*Mart will be participating and I strongly encourage other sites to boycott until a proper formal committee can be organized on an independent site/server.
I suspect this post will be deleted from the Official Olympic Forums as soon as Hawk sees it, so I will be posting it at all of the participating sites from this year's Olympics.
Thanks, and my best to all of you. Goodbye.
That's why I'm trying to contact OJ.
