Mahz's Dev Journal

[Marlowe]

Honestly with the way he keeps constantly disappearing that's the first thing you guys should have done.

[Carlyle]

@Ambra They have been doing that, though. The issue is that Mahz is the only one who can actually grant that privilege, and historically he has been of the opinion that he doesn't want to give back door privileges.

All anyone can really do, both mod and member-wise, is wait for Mahz to come back or see what Legend might be able to push without needing Mahz. Like the chrome plug-in, for instance.

[Marlowe]

Frankly I feel it's very irresponsible/selfish of Mahz to not let anyone try to help when he doesn't even stick around for more than a month and lets the forum rot without him.

[NuttsnBolts]

Honestly with the way he keeps constantly disappearing that's the first thing you guys should have done.

@Ambra

I think you underestimate how many messages I have been sending over the past few years to try and get him to stay and complete basic things. (And I'm not talking through the site or Discord's DM services)

[Marlowe]

@NuttsnBolts I know it's frustrating for everyone, not just me, but is there any way that he can just revoke privileges.

[The World]

I mean, we at least know more this time than last time he left. There's a good chance he'll be back soonish. Let's be calm and let Legend do his thing in the meantime. That'll also make it easier for Mahz to push stuff forwards when he does come back.

@Ambra
On the flipside, it's selfish of us to expect Mahz to drop irl for the forum. He's been the one paying to keep it up all this time, we should give him some credit. Just like we should give the mods credit for doing their best in the ways they have.

[Click This]

@Ambra
On the flipside, it's selfish of us to expect Mahz to drop irl for the forum. He's been the one paying to keep it up all this time, we should give him some credit. Just like we should give the mods credit for doing their best in the ways they have.

@The World

Ah. Yes. The one paying to keep this site fully hosted. The one that at one point had no money to pay for this to actually stay up. The one that refused donations, causing the site to get wiped. That guy?

You know, the 10th anniversary of guildfall is coming up? Still salty about that.

[The World]

<Snipped quote by The World>

Ah. Yes. The one paying to keep this site fully hosted. The one that at one point had no money to pay for this to actually stay up. The one that refused donations, causing the site to get wiped. That guy?

You know, the 10th anniversary of guildfall is coming up? Still salty about that.

@Click This

... To be honest? I totally forgot about guildfall. My bad.

[NuttsnBolts]

@NuttsnBolts I know it's frustrating for everyone, not just me, but is there any way that he can just revoke privileges.

@Ambra

He owns the site, all the keys, and all the access points. Us mods can't do anything of value except ban bots, close threads, and hide posts.

[BangoSkank]

There's also plenty of problems and I personally don't think just handing the keys off to the current admin/mod team would fix it.

Mahz needs to come back and be present for awhile, but that's probably not going to happen. Thus we remain in a "make the best of a bad situation" situation for another indeterminate span of years.

Ouroboros circles around once more.

[LegendBegins]

<Snipped quote by The World>

Ah. Yes. The one paying to keep this site fully hosted. The one that at one point had no money to pay for this to actually stay up. The one that refused donations, causing the site to get wiped. That guy?

You know, the 10th anniversary of guildfall is coming up? Still salty about that.

@Click This

This one was a payment processing error, less so a lack of capital. I blame the hosting provider more than anyone.

[Hedgehawk]

It doesn't surprise me at all that Mahz disappeared again. He has always been flaky, and I still maintain the site would be 1000% better off without him. That is why I offered a while back to purchase the site from him and take over operations. It is all well and good saying that he built the place and that he doesn't want to hand it over, but when you make a community, you now have a responsibility to that community. It becomes a social contract, one that Mahz for some reason, never seems to understand. As a result, this site will continue to stagnate and bleed members. Since no can innovate, or upgrade it. People will move onto greener pastures where new features do exist. I fear this may be the beginning of the end.

[DELETEDUSER007]

Forums pop up and die on the regular, and even major platforms are not immune to users flocking to other sites. See Tumblr, Imgur more recently, and even Reddit (although they're so addicted their blackout ultimately did nothing). This is hardly the end, it's just another part of the cycle. Also, it'd bleed less if more people got their asses off the Discord and got back into writing actual posts rather than piss poor political takes and shitposts. Half the goddamn Guild is there it seems, and those who aren't eternally offline are busying themselves with bickering over current affairs they've yet to actually change when they could be doing what they originally joined the site to do.

I.E. writing.

I do agree that Mahz should probably cede ownership to someone who's more active, however. A site isn't like an IP for example. You either put in the effort to keep it running and up-to-date, give it to someone who can, or cut your losses and release your lease over the domain before shutting down the server.

[BangoSkank]

I bigly and enthusiastically agree with you Havoccultist.

Below is my ranting. Helpfully hidden so the folks who never pay any attention can more easily ignore this. Helpfully divided into five subsections and then a little bit about how maybe the circle could be broken. I'm just so helpful.

Problem 1 : Mismanagement (not involving Mahz)

Problem 2 : Divided Userbase (by method of interaction)

Problem 3 : Mahz (as a digital manifestation of mismanagement)

Problem 4 : Who to Hand the Reins To

Problem 5 : An Increasingly Niche Hobby

Here We Goooooo

BangoSkank Rants To No Avail, Once Again, For Some Reason

Problem The First : Mismanagement (not involving Mahz)

One of the bigger, if not THE biggest, problems with this site/Discord/community at large is that the Discord has, over years of mismanagement, become much more active than the forum yet often not due to the purpose of the Discord/Forum. There are many reasons for this. Primarily the one Havoccultist pointed out.

The Section Wherein I Discuss The Politics Issue And Am Ignored

The political channels have for many years been the main source of much of this issue. Whether they're called Current Events, Current Affairs, Debate, Discussion, Politics, or whichever iteration they've served as little more than an echo chamber...yet having stood as long as they have when they are eliminated the issues once contained there end up distributing themselves throughout the rest of the Discord. Without a proper balance or staffing this inevitably leads to mass conflict which inevitably leads to a seventh or eighth or thirteenth iteration of such a channel in order to quarantine such discussion. The circle remains unbroken to this day.

Problem The Second : Divided Userbase (by method of interaction)

Another cause of this problem is just inherent in the form. The community is divided into three essential forms, in my thinking.

Forum
Sidebar
Discord

Each serves a different purpose and has different writing requirements and expectations.

If all were calibrated primarily toward RPing there would likely be a more vibrant RPing experience. They are, in descending order, instead, increasingly calibrated to socializing. So you get forums with relatively few posts but mostly RP related and not a lot of socializing. A small portion of the community actually posts RPs with any regularity. On the other end, in the Discord, you have a massive user base with many many posts very few of which are actually RPing or even calibrated even vaguely toward RPing. Many of the most prolific users of the Discord have not actually RPed in a year or more. Some haven't even posted on the forum at all for over a year.

Somewhere in the middle are the folks who primarily just mess about in the status bar. There's probably more actual folks in this group that occasionally write than there are in the Discord, despite there being dramatically more Discord users than Side Bar users.

Few use all three methods. Many who use one or two of these methods are unaware of many of the users who use the other ones. It doesn't help that the community has further divided itself through separating out into increasingly small cliques.

Problem The Third : Mahz

For years now, as long as I've been here and long before that as well, Mahz has been flaky. I use that term euphemistically. Not here far more often than he is. Not engaged even when he is here. Fobbing off most of what most would view as the duties of the owner of a forum onto one admin or another. Taking a completely hands off approach. Steadfastly refusing to deal with the issues plaguing the community even when he does on occasion acknowledge them.

Yet not ever willing to leave it in someone else's hands.

Problem The Fourth : Who To Hand The Reins To

Having been here for some time, though admittedly not near so long as some others, and having been active in the forum, status bar, and at one time the Discord, there is no apparent best choice to replace Mahz were he to decide to hand over the reins, not that he ever will.

I do not believe if he were to just decide tonight to hand it over to one of the current staff, or as Hedgehawk just said one of the former staff, that it would fix anything at all. It would, in my opinion, lead to little more than a temporary shakeup followed by a return to the status quo. Much like the rule change the forum had a year ago or so. Rather than a group of folks with varied approaches who have learned from the mistakes of the last few years we seem to me to just have a collection of mini-Mahzes. Which is a fun thing to say or write but not so terribly useful for managing a community.

Were that to happen, were he to hand over the reins, and it won't and he won't, it would still likewise result in little to no lasting or fundamental change. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Problem The Fifth : An Increasingly Niche Hobby

Much as I, like anyone, would like to think that the state of this place is due entirely to INSERT CURRENT LEADERSHIP AND OR PETTY PERSONAL GRIPES and that if only I had control every fault would immediately evaporate and things would flourish under my iron rule...it is a hobby which has always been relatively niche and which is losing ground to other more immediately gratifying hobbies.

It's a problem bigger than Mahz/Hank/Ruby/Legend/Poo

Not bigger than me, but then I'm special.

RPing is a creative endeavor which requires some creativity, some writing prowess, some effort, and some participation from others with similar or greater creativity, writing prowess, willingness to put in effort, and perhaps most difficult to achieve interest in whatever goofy ass idea you or I have decided we want to write about.

It is a fucking miracle anything ever gets written at all.

So how do we solve all/any of this?

1 - Establish a Diverse and Balanced Mod Staff for the Discord / Close the Discord / Abolish Politics and Enforce Rules Evenly (likely via a Diverse and Balanced Mod Staff)

In all fairness this one may be much less of an issue now than it used to be. I've heard good things in recent months and if that shitshow has now been tamed then big hand of applause for whoever tamed the savage beast.

2 - Attempt to direct Discord/Status Bar activity more towards actual RPing and less toward Current Events activities better suited to Twitter. Push contests and similar events more, participation in general.

3 - Nothing. Mahz needs to decide to fish or cut bait but cannot be forced to make that decision

4 - Expand that Diverse/Balanced Mod team to the forum and focus on the community. Introduce democracy so the user base has more say. Help foster an environment where someone might become the next leader after Mahz. Ideally a position where there are several folks who might aptly take the reins.

5 - Just write more. Help Calle make room for more writing contests by setting them up ourselves. Maybe a fan fiction section. The best way to ensure there is more RPing here is to RP more. Discussing Movies and Games and Music is great. Writing shit is better. RP as a band. RP out the movie you want to see or the alternate ending you'd rather have seen. Be the difference you want to see in the world. Other motivational speech sounding type shit. You can do eeeeet.

[Carlyle]

To be honest, I'm in favor of just closing the discord altogether and redirecting the energy 100% to the site. To give some reasons why:

A) It's another place for the mods to have to moderate, which takes eyes away from the Guild. We had some chat mods that would fill that role, but to my knowledge there hasn't been any new mods since they quit/retired.

B) We already have roleplay/off-topic discussion sections, which are honestly dying themselves. Having two different places to talk about, say, anime or video games in the same community just creates stagnation in one or the other (sometimes both) as people flock to whichever one is more popular or preferable to them.

C) Every time I've popped in the only channel that has really ever been truly active were the current event/politics channel. They got banned for a reason on the site itself, but on the discord they seem to keep coming back from the dead despite drama happening over the years that the discord has been active.

D) There is certainly a population core in the discord that solely hangs out in the discord rather than the site. You may have friends in there, but if you're going to engage the RPG community, then it should be on the site; not the discord.

[LegendBegins]

This convo isn't productive anymore. Mahz will be back eventually, we have backup plans, we're actively working in the background to make the site better (for instance, new antispam systems that are difficult to notice from userspace), etc. Just hang tight and RP.