This is why I don't chat with strangers or talk about selling anything, I just put my stuff in the Exchange and in-game chat about in-game stuff only since the system is set to ban quickly anyone who uses an offending word. Free yakmini's account!
Bugger the game. I've had enough of this rubbish. I've been feeling rather unfulfilled by this game as of late. All of the extra "maintenance" periods, the shortage of bugfixes and now this. This has turned me right off this game.
Bugger the game. I've had enough of this rubbish. I've been feeling rather unfulfilled by this game as of late. All of the extra "maintenance" periods, the shortage of bugfixes and now this. This has turned me right off this game.
You're entitled to get what you paid for. If for example you were banned for 4 days, you are legally entitled to have those 4 days added to your sub, otherwise cryptic would be violating the service agreement they made when a person signed up for a paid account. The person pays for 30 days, not 26. They are guaranteed by law to get what they paid for.
Just making that clear
Indeed. Cryptic needs to assign a programmer that actually knows how to properly use a parser and regular expressions, if they insist on using this absurd autobanning TRIBBLE
excuse me though i put in zen close to every month now but im not a gold or a lifetime do u know that is illeagal to not get your money back if you do not get what you paid for AKA i paid and got banned//// way to go you banned a paying coustumer who else are you going to ban lifetime members gold members? well heres a tip fix this problem right away take the shard for emergency matenance and fix if i acnt play i will have to call someone that will make you put all others that were banned online!! this is just wrong ive been playing scince december and i have already put in 200$ worth of zen and now i cant play any startrek and waisted my money................ WHOS WITH ME HERE???!!!
Who is brave enough to go and kill the bugg in the game that bannes anyone who talks in zone can you put a human incharge instead of a computer? we need this problem fixed otherwise you are effecting loyal costumers i was reading one and on just said i will never probably never play this game. That hurts Me personally i like all who play star trek because of these reasons
its a game
have fun
be polite
respect all peoples decision
but who is not willing to have fun will just sit there doing nothing
my friend sayed a couple days ago that there are people in stfs that report you just because you dont listen to him in fact he told the whole team to report them but only one did not the one that knew that was wrong. i fly an oddessey that cost zen i am a valuable player i was about to buy my next ship the Atrox the problem is I AM BANNED
hear me out please i am calm now but if you want to keep cosumers dont beleive one person start an investigation i am telling you all because i am very sad right now all i did was talk in zone aat Earth space dock then i got banned i was also talking to my dad who is in texas and im in california i was happy yesterday but today i can talk to my familiy in texas the game was my way to talk. perfect word if you are reading this please help we are getting banned and no reason at all. PLEASE HELP us
When the eg's friend started the spam up in emails a few weeks before LOR launched there was a thread about it and several people made a suggestion to auto ban anyone saying the eg's friend name. I strongly advised against it because of what is now happening and almost happened to me too. My being against a word filter auto ban for this problem was because fleet mates will warn other to not use the eg's friend because it is a scam and they will not recieve EC but instead lose real money. Having the ability to warn each other is far better than an instant ban.
Now an issue with this ban system does the eg's friend spam in the chat or email? Serious question there. CHAT OR MAIL??? Oh mail!! not in chat? OK why is the filter set to ban for chat? Because someone at Cryptic is an idiot. Dense as a brick. Stupid as a post. Auto ban's are the absolute last resort that should be taken, and banning in the wrong system altogether is the msot idiotic stupid thing one can do because we cannot warn people not to use the "service" to buy credits.
Now from prior experiance and what my suggestion was... DO NOT BAN THE SPAM BOT! just silence it. Have the spam bots message simply not be seen by anyone and not warn or ban the bot. The bot will continue spamming nothing and nobody until a human checks on it to restart it which could take forever as the bot's are completely automated to create a new account to spamming the game. Ban them and they start the create process again. Mute them without any warning and they will spam nobody. Ban them and fresh account and spam happens.
Now the reason i didn get banned and why i typed the eg's friend name was because i recieved MAIL spam from Eg's friend in my inbox, having 2 new to MMO players in our fleet i thought it would be good to warn them to not use it or even be tempted. So typed "F*$&ing eg's friend spam, do not use them. it's a scam" and the message didnt show ofcourse. So sincce I was in our fleet private channel in a tab i created with only that and private messages showing I swapped over to the default chat tab thinking did that go to zone somehow? and saw the warning there because that tab was left at default settings. i imediatly fired off a ticket requesting the warning be removed from my account and the reasons why with the quote warning to the new fleet members. No word on if its lifted but I will not be saying the Eg's friend again in chat even in a private chat that SHOULD NOT BE FILTERED!
Join Date: Nobody cares.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
As of today ii am on day 13 of being banned and no response from PWI/Cryptics support.
Ironically humorous how they have time to delete a duplicate ticket but not respond to the issues. Probably have a person that's that is all they do, Delete duplicate tickets.
(SNIP)
I swapped over to the default chat tab thinking did that go to zone somehow? and saw the warning there because that tab was left at default settings. i imediatly fired off a ticket requesting the warning be removed from my account and the reasons why with the quote warning to the new fleet members. No word on if its lifted but I will not be saying the Eg's friend again in chat even in a private chat that SHOULD NOT BE FILTERED!
With no response to your ticket, I presume you can be pretty sure you're now treading on eggshells. Problem is the word you refer to, is by far not the only word that can trigger the system - so at that point any of the unknown number of undisclosed 'banned' words could get triggered from any kind of in-game communication whatsoever.. so any line you type in-game could be your last.
Of course there is no way I can be sure whether I (or anyone else) am in same position - I'd disabled the system channel long time ago due to all the lockbox spam, and I know there's plenty of times when a line I typed never went through. I'm sure many are aware of the bug with team chat - where team channel becomes invalid, and you have to swap to zone, or some other channel.. and then back to team channel for it to work. There is no way I could know if one of those times had actually resulted from this retarted autoban triggering on whatever unrelated message I tried to say on team chat, like "Do you have any use for these dual cannona [item link]". Or whatever else.
As such, without knowing if I might possibly be on the list too, I just figured it's best to keep your mouth shut. I don't use in-game chat for anything anymore, and just use Steam chat on the side when I need to chat with friends. I can recommend something similar to everyone else - that way you can feel reasonably secure that your account won't be randomly banned someday.
That, and if at all possible, spread the word of this system to anyone you can - like your fleet for example. Point them to this thread if you can.
I've mentioned this issue a few times on zone chat just to make people aware of it. A couple times got thanks for the heads up - so I hope it's helped at least a few people to be more safe with their accounts. I did have a funny incident some days ago though. I mentioned the autoban system, and the potential griefers who may try to trick people to use the bannable words.. and posted a link to this thread. I got a reasponse on zone chat by someone: "Or I could just put you on ignore, seems safer that way *click*".
Makes me wonder a bit, but I guess there's all types.
What doesn't sit right with me is that the first official response we get from them isn't "Oh wow, we didn't mean for that to happen, we'll look into it right away." In fact it was pretty much the opposite - "Yeah, it's doing exactly what we want it to"
I don't personally know anyone who has been affected by this, but it should be obvious that they are going about it the wrong way. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that more innocent people have been banned than actual spammers. And here's the thing: the spammers don't care. They'll just make more accounts or find other ways around it. Not saying nothing should be done to try and stop it, but this isn't the answer.
Yep, pretty much my thoughts.
The sad part is that people who engage in 'illegal' activities are usually much more cautious than the ones who don't.
So chances are that the ones typing this forbidden word are the ones just talking about it, and the ones who should be banned just don't type it, or at least less often.
And yes, spammers don't care. They'll find a way around. Do they care that their disposable spam account gets banned after sending those mails? Not at all.
Dear Cryptic, dear Branflakes, this is bad business practice!
Massive collateral damage actually puts it mildly..
Maybe its past time this was brought to the gaming media's attention?
I definitely think its time they got some bad press on this. They have shown they couldn't care less about the damn near unanimous condemnation of this practice by the player base, maybe they will care when Brandon and Dstahl go and do there interviews and keep getting asked just wtf they are thinking.
Fortunately, nothing bad has happened to me (yet!) as a result of this conversation, but it could have so.
So, for a hypothethical scenario, I'll present what I said today:
Someone came into a chat channel and started talking about solid gold coins being illegal in America.
Since I'd never heard of this, I started typing responses to him asking for more info.
During the course of our discussion, it dawned on me that I was saying the word gold way too much! :eek:
Gold coins, gold bars, weight of gold.
That's when I ended the conversation via text and asked him to step into a teamspeak server so we could talk freely without worrying about being account banned.
And that's what I think most players should be concerned about, how an innocent topic can
accidentally get you banned.
Yes, I am also suspicious that none of the major review sites have covered this yet.
On Steam, when a game company stuffs up like this, there's usually a linked review within two days saying how badly they stuffed up.
But so far, nothing.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
I have a much better, much more elegant solution to halting the spam problem:
Every time you send a message to someone who is not a friend or fleet, you must pay a quantity of money, like, say, 20K EC, to that person.
Spam should immediately cease to be a problem and probably cease altogether.
I have a much better, much more elegant solution to halting the spam problem:
Every time you send a message to someone who is not a friend or fleet, you must pay a quantity of money, like, say, 20K EC, to that person.
Spam should immediately cease to be a problem and probably cease altogether.
FREE YAKMINI!
I have to disagree with this, I get a good few mails from people looking to join the fleet I'm in and I'd rather not have to pay 20k EC just to respond to them if they're not online at the time.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
I have to disagree with this, I get a good few mails from people looking to join the fleet I'm in and I'd rather not have to pay 20k EC just to respond to them if they're not online at the time.
the energy credit fee not a bad idea really, given the idea how easy it is
to make energy credits.
but should be free fee if you go to a mail terminal, but cost 10k a mail if not
at a terminal.
Well I just asked Brandon if there was any update on the auto-ban feature in the REDALERT channel and he ignored me completely. Looks like we have heard the last from him.
Updated: To be fair to Brandon, after continued hounding he did give a response which was along the lines of: The GM team is closely monitoring it. So at least we can rest easy that humans are now involved. Would be nice if they saw fit to post an official response here though.
Well I just asked Brandon if there was any update on the auto-ban feature in the REDALERT channel and he ignored me completely. Looks like we have heard the last from him.
Updated: To be fair to Brandon, after continued hounding he did give a response which was along the lines of: The GM team is closely monitoring it. So at least we can rest easy that humans are now involved. Would be nice if they saw fit to post an official response here though.
Brandon doesn't (and really can't to be fair) reply to EVERY thread posted. That'd be an insane amount of posts per day hehe. And to be honest, it's kinda rude to bother/hound any host of an event about other things while they're trying to manage said event.
If he had any news to pass along he would post it, otherwise there is no point in replying every day with "Nothing new to report"
Yes, I'm that Askray@Batbayer in game. Yes, I still play. No, I don't care. Former Community Moderator, Former SSR DJ, Now Full time father to two kids, Husband, Retail Worker. Tiktok: @Askray Facebook: Askray113
So CO got a fix for unreasonable bans and STO didn't? :eek:
Draw your own conclusions below this post.......
I would think this is about a complitely different issue - wouldn't the 'chat banning' refer to automatic muting when someone gets reported by sufficient number of players for spamming?
Brandon doesn't (and really can't to be fair) reply to EVERY thread posted. That'd be an insane amount of posts per day hehe. And to be honest, it's kinda rude to bother/hound any host of an event about other things while they're trying to manage said event.
If he had any news to pass along he would post it, otherwise there is no point in replying every day with "Nothing new to report"
Nor would I or anyone else expect him too. However the chat was not particularly busy at that time and I distinctly got the impression that he was trying to avoid the subject (perhaps because he had been instructed to do so). You are right that it would be pointless to continually report "Nothing new" however I would argue that information that humans are now involved in the process is MAJOR NEWS considering that it is the main issue people have been crying out for in this thread. Honestly this whole debacle could have been silenced ages ago if someone from PWE had simply said, "Whoops, we really dropped the ball on this one. Sorry about that. We'll make sure no-one else is banned without some form of human input in the future." End of issue, no?
I have no idea how CO banning works, so I couldn't say.
But I know from personal experience they are rather triggerhappy with the Report Player feature.
Someone takes your loot, Report Them.
You don't like someone, Report Them.
And this is the one that I experienced personally:
I was chatting to another player in the Noob Zone (and yes, it is a Noob Zone, the topics of discussion are beyond idiotic) about how computer gamers should eat healthy food.
After we finished our talk, I started mailing items to one of my alternate characters.
Only to have a 24hour silence message pop up!
And by the way, this muted my account in STO as well, I couldn't talk to anyone or mail items there either.
I asked Cryptic why my account was muted and they said something to the effect of someone had been abusing the report player function, therefore, they were cancelling the muting ahead of time.
But even though they're different issues, the fact remains that CO is listening to players and protecting them from the triggerhappy Reporters where STO is straight out ignoring what we are saying. :eek:
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
But even though they're different issues, the fact remains that CO is listening to players and protecting them from the triggerhappy Reporters where STO is straight out ignoring what we are saying. :eek:
Now now... this is a different issue entirely - It's one thing to protect players from other (more triggerhappy) players... But protecting players from a triggerhappy script?! well that's just insanity! What's next? Fixing bugs (sorry, 'features')? :P
...
Ok, that's not entirely fair - I'm sure our devs are doing their best to squash the worst of the bugs in a timely manner. It's just that this whole auto-banning script debacle (easily spotted by a 5 year old (see #12)) is more than a little disconcerting, and the silence on the issue is deafening.
Comments
[sarcasm]Well played.[/sarcasm]
excuse me though i put in zen close to every month now but im not a gold or a lifetime do u know that is illeagal to not get your money back if you do not get what you paid for AKA i paid and got banned//// way to go you banned a paying coustumer who else are you going to ban lifetime members gold members? well heres a tip fix this problem right away take the shard for emergency matenance and fix if i acnt play i will have to call someone that will make you put all others that were banned online!! this is just wrong ive been playing scince december and i have already put in 200$ worth of zen and now i cant play any startrek and waisted my money................ WHOS WITH ME HERE???!!!
its a game
have fun
be polite
respect all peoples decision
but who is not willing to have fun will just sit there doing nothing
my friend sayed a couple days ago that there are people in stfs that report you just because you dont listen to him in fact he told the whole team to report them but only one did not the one that knew that was wrong. i fly an oddessey that cost zen i am a valuable player i was about to buy my next ship the Atrox the problem is I AM BANNED
hear me out please i am calm now but if you want to keep cosumers dont beleive one person start an investigation i am telling you all because i am very sad right now all i did was talk in zone aat Earth space dock then i got banned i was also talking to my dad who is in texas and im in california i was happy yesterday but today i can talk to my familiy in texas the game was my way to talk. perfect word if you are reading this please help we are getting banned and no reason at all. PLEASE HELP us
Now an issue with this ban system does the eg's friend spam in the chat or email? Serious question there. CHAT OR MAIL??? Oh mail!! not in chat? OK why is the filter set to ban for chat? Because someone at Cryptic is an idiot. Dense as a brick. Stupid as a post. Auto ban's are the absolute last resort that should be taken, and banning in the wrong system altogether is the msot idiotic stupid thing one can do because we cannot warn people not to use the "service" to buy credits.
Now from prior experiance and what my suggestion was... DO NOT BAN THE SPAM BOT! just silence it. Have the spam bots message simply not be seen by anyone and not warn or ban the bot. The bot will continue spamming nothing and nobody until a human checks on it to restart it which could take forever as the bot's are completely automated to create a new account to spamming the game. Ban them and they start the create process again. Mute them without any warning and they will spam nobody. Ban them and fresh account and spam happens.
Now the reason i didn get banned and why i typed the eg's friend name was because i recieved MAIL spam from Eg's friend in my inbox, having 2 new to MMO players in our fleet i thought it would be good to warn them to not use it or even be tempted. So typed "F*$&ing eg's friend spam, do not use them. it's a scam" and the message didnt show ofcourse. So sincce I was in our fleet private channel in a tab i created with only that and private messages showing I swapped over to the default chat tab thinking did that go to zone somehow? and saw the warning there because that tab was left at default settings. i imediatly fired off a ticket requesting the warning be removed from my account and the reasons why with the quote warning to the new fleet members. No word on if its lifted but I will not be saying the Eg's friend again in chat even in a private chat that SHOULD NOT BE FILTERED!
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
Ironically humorous how they have time to delete a duplicate ticket but not respond to the issues. Probably have a person that's that is all they do, Delete duplicate tickets.
With no response to your ticket, I presume you can be pretty sure you're now treading on eggshells. Problem is the word you refer to, is by far not the only word that can trigger the system - so at that point any of the unknown number of undisclosed 'banned' words could get triggered from any kind of in-game communication whatsoever.. so any line you type in-game could be your last.
Of course there is no way I can be sure whether I (or anyone else) am in same position - I'd disabled the system channel long time ago due to all the lockbox spam, and I know there's plenty of times when a line I typed never went through. I'm sure many are aware of the bug with team chat - where team channel becomes invalid, and you have to swap to zone, or some other channel.. and then back to team channel for it to work. There is no way I could know if one of those times had actually resulted from this retarted autoban triggering on whatever unrelated message I tried to say on team chat, like "Do you have any use for these dual cannona [item link]". Or whatever else.
As such, without knowing if I might possibly be on the list too, I just figured it's best to keep your mouth shut. I don't use in-game chat for anything anymore, and just use Steam chat on the side when I need to chat with friends. I can recommend something similar to everyone else - that way you can feel reasonably secure that your account won't be randomly banned someday.
That, and if at all possible, spread the word of this system to anyone you can - like your fleet for example. Point them to this thread if you can.
I've mentioned this issue a few times on zone chat just to make people aware of it. A couple times got thanks for the heads up - so I hope it's helped at least a few people to be more safe with their accounts. I did have a funny incident some days ago though. I mentioned the autoban system, and the potential griefers who may try to trick people to use the bannable words.. and posted a link to this thread. I got a reasponse on zone chat by someone: "Or I could just put you on ignore, seems safer that way *click*".
Makes me wonder a bit, but I guess there's all types.
That's pretty much the only thing I consistently say ingame now:
Use Steam Chat, my handle is <not telling>.
Also looking for a text chat client that doesn't go through Cryptic's chat system, like Pidgin does.
And of course, there's voice servers!
So you see, if you stuff up ingame chat enough, people will find alternatives and just ignore the ingame text tool.
And that's when STO becomes a ghost town for chat.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Something simple that can installed without registering an account with some company.
Like Teamspeak, but for text.
Welcome back to the game sirkoric!
13 days? really?
Lame.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Yep, pretty much my thoughts.
The sad part is that people who engage in 'illegal' activities are usually much more cautious than the ones who don't.
So chances are that the ones typing this forbidden word are the ones just talking about it, and the ones who should be banned just don't type it, or at least less often.
And yes, spammers don't care. They'll find a way around. Do they care that their disposable spam account gets banned after sending those mails? Not at all.
Dear Cryptic, dear Branflakes,
this is bad business practice!
Massive collateral damage actually puts it mildly..
i know of one chat but probably need to add it to a site.
chatango.com
its one place i know that you can make a chat room and allow
to join with out making an account.
probably not what your looking for but i thought i mention it anyway.
I definitely think its time they got some bad press on this. They have shown they couldn't care less about the damn near unanimous condemnation of this practice by the player base, maybe they will care when Brandon and Dstahl go and do there interviews and keep getting asked just wtf they are thinking.
So, for a hypothethical scenario, I'll present what I said today:
Someone came into a chat channel and started talking about solid gold coins being illegal in America.
Since I'd never heard of this, I started typing responses to him asking for more info.
During the course of our discussion, it dawned on me that I was saying the word gold way too much! :eek:
Gold coins, gold bars, weight of gold.
That's when I ended the conversation via text and asked him to step into a teamspeak server so we could talk freely without worrying about being account banned.
And that's what I think most players should be concerned about, how an innocent topic can
accidentally get you banned.
Yes, I am also suspicious that none of the major review sites have covered this yet.
On Steam, when a game company stuffs up like this, there's usually a linked review within two days saying how badly they stuffed up.
But so far, nothing.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Every time you send a message to someone who is not a friend or fleet, you must pay a quantity of money, like, say, 20K EC, to that person.
Spam should immediately cease to be a problem and probably cease altogether.
FREE YAKMINI!
I have to disagree with this, I get a good few mails from people looking to join the fleet I'm in and I'd rather not have to pay 20k EC just to respond to them if they're not online at the time.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
the energy credit fee not a bad idea really, given the idea how easy it is
to make energy credits.
but should be free fee if you go to a mail terminal, but cost 10k a mail if not
at a terminal.
Someone else I spoke to said they recieved two of these mails, which used the word that shall not be spoken.
So clearly it's not working.
How much more evidence does Cryptic need to see this obviously isn't working?
And considering it's failing to achieve it's purpose other then to penalize honest players, it's long past time for this "feature" to go!
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Updated: To be fair to Brandon, after continued hounding he did give a response which was along the lines of: The GM team is closely monitoring it. So at least we can rest easy that humans are now involved. Would be nice if they saw fit to post an official response here though.
Brandon doesn't (and really can't to be fair) reply to EVERY thread posted. That'd be an insane amount of posts per day hehe. And to be honest, it's kinda rude to bother/hound any host of an event about other things while they're trying to manage said event.
If he had any news to pass along he would post it, otherwise there is no point in replying every day with "Nothing new to report"
Former Community Moderator, Former SSR DJ, Now Full time father to two kids, Husband, Retail Worker.
Tiktok: @Askray Facebook: Askray113
Champions Online Patch Notes
So CO got a fix for unreasonable bans and STO didn't? :eek:
Draw your own conclusions below this post.......
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
I would think this is about a complitely different issue - wouldn't the 'chat banning' refer to automatic muting when someone gets reported by sufficient number of players for spamming?
Nor would I or anyone else expect him too. However the chat was not particularly busy at that time and I distinctly got the impression that he was trying to avoid the subject (perhaps because he had been instructed to do so). You are right that it would be pointless to continually report "Nothing new" however I would argue that information that humans are now involved in the process is MAJOR NEWS considering that it is the main issue people have been crying out for in this thread. Honestly this whole debacle could have been silenced ages ago if someone from PWE had simply said, "Whoops, we really dropped the ball on this one. Sorry about that. We'll make sure no-one else is banned without some form of human input in the future." End of issue, no?
But I know from personal experience they are rather triggerhappy with the Report Player feature.
Someone takes your loot, Report Them.
You don't like someone, Report Them.
And this is the one that I experienced personally:
I was chatting to another player in the Noob Zone (and yes, it is a Noob Zone, the topics of discussion are beyond idiotic) about how computer gamers should eat healthy food.
After we finished our talk, I started mailing items to one of my alternate characters.
Only to have a 24hour silence message pop up!
And by the way, this muted my account in STO as well, I couldn't talk to anyone or mail items there either.
I asked Cryptic why my account was muted and they said something to the effect of someone had been abusing the report player function, therefore, they were cancelling the muting ahead of time.
But even though they're different issues, the fact remains that CO is listening to players and protecting them from the triggerhappy Reporters where STO is straight out ignoring what we are saying. :eek:
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Now now... this is a different issue entirely - It's one thing to protect players from other (more triggerhappy) players... But protecting players from a triggerhappy script?! well that's just insanity! What's next? Fixing bugs (sorry, 'features')? :P
...
Ok, that's not entirely fair - I'm sure our devs are doing their best to squash the worst of the bugs in a timely manner. It's just that this whole auto-banning script debacle (easily spotted by a 5 year old (see #12)) is more than a little disconcerting, and the silence on the issue is deafening.