There is one word above all others that I found more annoying as an admin on my former site on a day to day basis: transparency.
In the day to day running of an RP forum, there's a lot that goes on that the general public isn't privy to. Most of it is day to day administrative tasks, like name changes and the like. It's boring and routine and nobody actually likes to do it, but the writers tend to get agitated if you keep putting it off.
I can't say anything about this crowd, but there's also (usually) a fair bit of low level chatter in the hidden realms. Usually it's just shooting the poodoo, discussing low level issues, or griping about annoying players. No, they don't like everyone. They're only (mostly) human at the end of the day, and chances are, if you spend a fair bit of your time whining about them, they're going to curse your name behind the scenes. On a well chosen administrative team, you have a fairly diverse group of personalities with different groups of friends and enemies. Some of them will be people you know well, others chosen for quiet excellence. (I have no idea how the admin picking process works here, so I can't speak for how well Chaos admins are picked, but I haven't seen anything that suggests deviation from the norm.) There's almost always that one guy with no social skills whatsoever, but is good for playing the devil's advocate and saying the stuff that no one else wants to come out with.
In addition to the mundane chatter, there are usually a few discussions about potential improvements or problems. The vast majority of these go nowhere in the end, because bad ideas are a thing, and even good ideas don't always work with the environment cultivated on the site.
Now, it's important that most of these discussions occur behind closed doors. If everyone could see, for instance, the griping that goes on behind the scenes, there would be a lot of hurt feelings and the site would die fairly quickly. Also, a lot of the ideas proposed are bound to piss people off on general principal. You suggest changing things, and it's inevitable that someone is going to decide that they're getting the short end of the stick.
There will always be a contingent of players who decide that the admins are screwing everything up, that they'd do everything better if only they had the chance, that they're biased, so on and so forth. They question how so and so could possibly be an admin when they could obviously do the job better. They notice that their friends never seem to get ahead in the world, and rather than wondering if they're doing something wrong, they blame the admin because of course they couldn't possibly be the problem.
They demand to see everything going on behind the scenes, so they can nitpick every word and bit of punctuation, looking to find fault.
There are a few ways to handle the situation. On my old site, we chose possibly the worst possible route: we acquiesced. We still had our private forums, but we increased out public presence dramatically. We implemented something not unlike your Factory as a way to give players more of a hand in running things (called them Guilds, had sections devoted to tech, economics, RP) without any idea of what role they were actually going to play in running the site aside from a vague mission statement. It quickly turned into a massive years-long charlie foxtrot that did a lot to run off veteran players.
Meanwhile, those admin with more abrasive personalities just stopped caring. What was the point of trying to defend this monstrous project when every time we logged in, it was just pages and pages of bitching and moaning? Why even bother to respond to complaints when certain opportunists would twist it into accusations of bias, and call for more transparency? It didn't take long for the original staff of admin to decide it wasn't worth the effort. As more and more of us left, we began selecting replacements based on how they were likely to interact with the public. Over time, that led to an admin team with no spine or creativity, and anyone with something approaching zeal quickly found themselves battered senseless by apathy overwhelming.
The site itself has since stagnated and is mostly dead. That was far from the only factor (I'll probably get into others later on) but it was a big one.
So remember kiddies: you may find yourself wondering why the admin did this or that. You may find your faction at a disadvantage, and maybe you're looking for someone to blame. But before you start screwing around and making passive-aggressive posts about bias or lack of transparency, keep one thing in mind: you still have a site, and by all reasonable measures, it's thriving. If you want to whine about transparency or favoritism, please learn from the mistakes of other, less fortunate RP communities.
In the day to day running of an RP forum, there's a lot that goes on that the general public isn't privy to. Most of it is day to day administrative tasks, like name changes and the like. It's boring and routine and nobody actually likes to do it, but the writers tend to get agitated if you keep putting it off.
I can't say anything about this crowd, but there's also (usually) a fair bit of low level chatter in the hidden realms. Usually it's just shooting the poodoo, discussing low level issues, or griping about annoying players. No, they don't like everyone. They're only (mostly) human at the end of the day, and chances are, if you spend a fair bit of your time whining about them, they're going to curse your name behind the scenes. On a well chosen administrative team, you have a fairly diverse group of personalities with different groups of friends and enemies. Some of them will be people you know well, others chosen for quiet excellence. (I have no idea how the admin picking process works here, so I can't speak for how well Chaos admins are picked, but I haven't seen anything that suggests deviation from the norm.) There's almost always that one guy with no social skills whatsoever, but is good for playing the devil's advocate and saying the stuff that no one else wants to come out with.
In addition to the mundane chatter, there are usually a few discussions about potential improvements or problems. The vast majority of these go nowhere in the end, because bad ideas are a thing, and even good ideas don't always work with the environment cultivated on the site.
Now, it's important that most of these discussions occur behind closed doors. If everyone could see, for instance, the griping that goes on behind the scenes, there would be a lot of hurt feelings and the site would die fairly quickly. Also, a lot of the ideas proposed are bound to piss people off on general principal. You suggest changing things, and it's inevitable that someone is going to decide that they're getting the short end of the stick.
There will always be a contingent of players who decide that the admins are screwing everything up, that they'd do everything better if only they had the chance, that they're biased, so on and so forth. They question how so and so could possibly be an admin when they could obviously do the job better. They notice that their friends never seem to get ahead in the world, and rather than wondering if they're doing something wrong, they blame the admin because of course they couldn't possibly be the problem.
They demand to see everything going on behind the scenes, so they can nitpick every word and bit of punctuation, looking to find fault.
There are a few ways to handle the situation. On my old site, we chose possibly the worst possible route: we acquiesced. We still had our private forums, but we increased out public presence dramatically. We implemented something not unlike your Factory as a way to give players more of a hand in running things (called them Guilds, had sections devoted to tech, economics, RP) without any idea of what role they were actually going to play in running the site aside from a vague mission statement. It quickly turned into a massive years-long charlie foxtrot that did a lot to run off veteran players.
Meanwhile, those admin with more abrasive personalities just stopped caring. What was the point of trying to defend this monstrous project when every time we logged in, it was just pages and pages of bitching and moaning? Why even bother to respond to complaints when certain opportunists would twist it into accusations of bias, and call for more transparency? It didn't take long for the original staff of admin to decide it wasn't worth the effort. As more and more of us left, we began selecting replacements based on how they were likely to interact with the public. Over time, that led to an admin team with no spine or creativity, and anyone with something approaching zeal quickly found themselves battered senseless by apathy overwhelming.
The site itself has since stagnated and is mostly dead. That was far from the only factor (I'll probably get into others later on) but it was a big one.
So remember kiddies: you may find yourself wondering why the admin did this or that. You may find your faction at a disadvantage, and maybe you're looking for someone to blame. But before you start screwing around and making passive-aggressive posts about bias or lack of transparency, keep one thing in mind: you still have a site, and by all reasonable measures, it's thriving. If you want to whine about transparency or favoritism, please learn from the mistakes of other, less fortunate RP communities.
