Moving back to Rizon

The Tulpa.info staff would like to announce that we will be moving the official Tulpa.info channels (#lounge.info, #mods.info, and #topic.info) back to the Rizon IRC network. This may come as a surprise to a lot of you, so we would like to explain all of our reasoning, below.

Why did we move to this network in the first place?

In order to properly understand why we are moving from this IRC network, you first must understand why we moved here in the first place. For those of you who don't know, the official Tulpa.info channels used to be hosted on the Rizon network. We only moved to this network, as of December 5th, 2013. We were proposed by Xena, the current network owner, to move to this new network, with the following claims:

- That the different tulpa communities would become closer, and more intertwined.

- Useful features, such as +q (to mute a person, without having to ban them)

- Account-based bans

- Other neat features, such as registering on Tulpa.info forums automatically registering you an account on the IRC

- The ability to better deal with trolls, as all Tulpa.info moderators would be given network operator status, to deal with ban-evasion, and so forth.

What this network was "supposed" to be

As I somewhat alluded to in my last two points, the original plan (what we were told) for this network was for it to be a Tulpa.info IRC network. This was the intent, but as you can clearly see, this is not the case. This current network, and Tulpa.info are two entirely separate entities. If we had known this would be the case, we would have likely never moved here.

Here are some quotes from Pleeb, who is—for those of you who don't know—the creator of Tulpa.info, from a discussion of the prospects of moving away from this network:

"It's like I said before we ever switched; this was supposed to be a tulpa.info network; it was meant for our community like how dreamviews has one."

"It was shortly after the move that Quora annexed the network, split it as "being seperate from tulpa.info" and Quora was established as being in charge of it all."

"I remember when that whole "coup" happened, when Quora essentially annexed the IRC community, made their own split, and I was told "Too bad." when I said "This isn't what I was told we would be doing.""

Why have we decided to leave this network, now?

When we first considered the idea of moving our channels back to Rizon, we considered the benefits of staying. What does this network offer us? Naturally, those benefits should still today be the very same that they were when we were first enticed to move. However, most of what we were promised has not held up.

- The mode +q, to allow us to mute users, instead of banning them, is not directly supported on Rizon, but in the past, the Tulpa.info staff has used a workaround of sorts to achieve the very same effect. However, this method only served to annoy and frustrate our users. It provided no practical benefit for us. In light of this, the Tulpa.info staff has actually decided to not use +q on its users. Most of them seem to prefer a ban.

- No such dual account registering between IRC and forums has been set up.

- Account based bans do not work. This important feature we were promised simply does not work on this network.

- Only two members of the Tulpa.info staff were made network operators, and one of them has left the network. This leaves us with one, who is very busy, and can therefor not often help with ban-evaders. This means that we have to go to the network help channel, like we would on Rizon.

With that considered, we see that that which we were promised and convinced with does not hold any benefits for us, here.

The next thing to consider is what Rizon has to offer us, over the current network.

- Rizon has proven to be more stable than this network. Users are disconnected considerably more often from this network than we have experienced on Rizon. Rizon is also much faster to connect to, from our experience.

- Our current network has a "single point of failure". This means that if something were to happen to the current owner, or their servers, the network would be rendered inoperable. Rizon is fully capable of surviving staff and server loss.

- Ever since we moved here, we have suffered from rather considerable activity loss. This is partly due to the fact that the community was split, but Rizon also had the benefit of having random Rizon users stumble across our channels. This made for some interesting discussion, from time to time, and introduced some new members to our community. Furthermore, when we move back to Rizon, we will be rejoining some of the users who did not want to join us in the move.

The irc.tulpa.im network operators

First of all, I would like to say that we would have preferred to keep this explanation completely non-personal, but there are simply some very important matters concerning our stay here, that we think you all deserve to know. With that said, we have no hostile intent, and do not intend to defame or insult anyone who played a role in our decision to move back.

I have heard it stated that the Tulpa.info staff has an undue bias against Xena, and perhaps, by extension, the rest of the network operators. I would like to lay this claim to rest, once and for all.

Xena was, until a little over 6 months ago, a member of the Tulpa.info staff, and had been for well over a year, at that point. Between Xena and his tulpas, they had been stripped of their moderation power at least four times, due to power abuse. This includes incidents from punishing users for disagreeing or arguing with them, using their moderation powers to favor some users over others, to banning users without any warning. These are only some of the problems we have had, during their time as a moderator. On September 21st, 2014, after much discussion from the Tulpa.info staff, Xena was voted to be removed, unanimously.

We do not hold any personal grudge against Xena or any member of the Tulpa.im staff. It simply makes us a bit uncomfortable to have a user who was removed from our staff for such offenses, as the owner of the IRC network on which we are hosted. I hope you can understand that.

Between the Tulpa.info, and the Tulpa.im staff, there is also a conflict of interests, and beliefs. From what we have seen, the Tulpa.im staff holds many "metaphysical", or "magical" views, and incorporates them into their practice, and discussion of tulpas. There is nothing wrong with them believing as they do, but we have seen how—due to their status as network operators—their beliefs have begun to spread across our userbase. These types of views are not generally accepted among our staff, or a large majority of our community. Tulpa.info strives for a more scientific stance and view on the tulpa phenomenon. These views simply do not mix with ours, and we believe that separating ourselves from those beliefs would be better for our community as a whole, considering or goal.

What happens now?

As soon as this announcement is posted, #tulpa.info, and all associated channels will be re-opened for discussion on irc.rizon.net. The new channel #tulpa.lounge has been created to replace the former #tulpa_ot, and will function the same as the current #lounge.info. #tulpa.mods will remain the #mods.info equivalent on Rizon. #tulpa.NSFW has been created as an unofficial channel for our community to discuss all things NSFW. We hope for it to have the same function as the current #NSFW channel.

The chat link on Tulpa.info will be updated to automatically redirect users who do not have dedicated IRC clients. For those of you who do, simply connect to irc.rizon.net, and join any of the aforementioned channels.

There will be a bot in place that will proxy all messages between irc.tulpa.im, and its equivalent channels on irc.rizon.net, for a couple of weeks or so, to help make the transition back to Rizon smoother. After that, on May 18th, the Tulpa.info channels on irc.tulpa.im will be closed, and you will no longer be able to talk in them.

We apologize for the inconveniences associated with moving IRC networks again, but we believe that this will ultimately prove to be best for our community, so we hope you understand.