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Staffing Confessions

Feline Overlord
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Idk about y'all, but I'm a dinosaur when it comes to this and I notice I have these thoughts when I go to do new stuff like 'X admin I used to work with would hate this' or 'Y member base would never stand for this and it'd be a shitshow' that limits me sometimes even though it's irrational.


I've worked with a lot of people over the years who had very specific and intense dislikes, and I'm instantly reminded of them every time I do something I know they'd be vehemently opposed to. As time passes more and more of those things tend to be outdated, but some of them aren't yet. I still remember when people used to have heated arguments over whether installing a chatbox would kill a site or not, now everyone has discords. My side wins!

Come to think about it, I wonder if there are some random people I've worked with in the past who are similarly nostalgic/jumpy whenever someone mentions the word scenario. Scenario boards have been the hill that I would die on for years, even if they never really took off. Enabling member-ran events on a large scale was the way I saw forums moving forward, but I lost that one at least so far.

I also vehemently hated Chatango, but that particular pet peeve isn't really relevant anymore. That being said, if any of y'all install a Chatango chatbox on your site I am hard judging even harder than before because now we have Discord.


I am guilty of using Chatango and will prepare for your hard judgement. XD

As a staff member, I have always been someone to write longer lore I find. I never try to shorten it, but rather, create plenty of categories so I could write what I desire without members losing their place or making it all mandatory. I do not think I am somebody who could master short-written lore. Heck, the most popular site I run so far is my current one and it has the longest lore... Soooo, this tells me I am personally better writing longer pieces and assuring there are markers. Or I am lucky as hell.
phantom of the black parade
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what do you want to know? my height, hobbies, quirks, the color of my underwear?
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I also vehemently hated Chatango, but that particular pet peeve isn't really relevant anymore. That being said, if any of y'all install a Chatango chatbox on your site I am hard judging even harder than before because now we have Discord.

the sound of the chatango posting is forever etched into my memory and that sense memory will stay with me to the day i die.

no but also like. i've seen sites that still use chatango and it is so wild to me because just. this so so obnoxious and bulky and inelegant just. why. please. just. i will personally walk you through how to install a discord widget if i never have to see this again. just. please.

Feline Overlord
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I also vehemently hated Chatango, but that particular pet peeve isn't really relevant anymore. That being said, if any of y'all install a Chatango chatbox on your site I am hard judging even harder than before because now we have Discord.
the sound of the chatango posting is forever etched into my memory and that sense memory will stay with me to the day i die.

no but also like. i've seen sites that still use chatango and it is so wild to me because just. this so so obnoxious and bulky and inelegant just. why. please. just. i will personally walk you through how to install a discord widget if i never have to see this again. just. please.
Since I still use it, I will just provide my reason. I won't lie, I use both Chatango and Discord. I also know how to install widgets (I actually have one on site). The reason I use it is actually just because I wanted a free chat with enough staff slots for my team, more ban slots and an account system. I know cbox.ws exists, but the chat's purpose was to be a convenient OOC box since the Proboards provided chat would work as a tag box. The reason itself is because I have met people who hate discord, so I leave them a free chat they can use as much as they like, but still gives me the adequate moderation requirements I like. In short, I do not like paying for subscriptions so I just learned how to make a decent-looking Chatango box.
phantom of the black parade
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Since I still use it, I will just provide my reason. I won't lie, I use both Chatango and Discord. I also know how to install widgets (I actually have one on site). The reason I use it is actually just because I wanted a free chat with enough staff slots for my team, more ban slots and an account system. I know cbox.ws exists, but the chat's purpose was to be a convenient OOC box since the Proboards provided chat would work as a tag box. The reason itself is because I have met people who hate discord, so I leave them a free chat they can use as much as they like, but still gives me the adequate moderation requirements I like. In short, I do not like paying for subscriptions so I just learned how to make a decent-looking Chatango box.

i'd still personally prefer to use titan or widgetbot for guest-posting (and i actually kind of miss widgetbot's guest posting since it felt a lot better than titan's but titan's generally more stable so we live with it).

originally i was going to say that one of the other reasons i didn't like chatango was because you had the same username across all the sites you used it on so it was really hard to keep things on the dl if you didn't want people to know you were on multiple sites but. then i realized that discord really doesn't offer you that much more cover since you're using the same basic username behind the nickname and the blocking feature is a thing and also discord keeps your dms so it's not like it takes rocket science to figure out you have past beef with someone. so. is this it? have we come full circle? what sort of terrible realization have i wrought on myself?

no but also like. real talk, i completely understand that some people prefer chatango, and that's fine, it's just definitely not my preferred chatting platform, to the point where i'd probably not join a site that had one unless it was the absolute be-all end-all holy grail of a site otherwise.
last edit on Jul 10, 2019 1:19:13 GMT by Kuroya

phantom of the black parade
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i honestly find it kind of fascinating how different advertising is for rl sites compared to animanga.

a lot of it boils down to site-to-site advertising being basically useless for rl sites (or at least, there's vastly diminished returns the further outside your genre that you advertise, like for a teen wolf site to advertise on, say, a hunger games site versus a twilight site or a the vampire diaries site) where it's generally your bread and butter for a lot of animanga sites (though i'm still not 100000% sure how useful it is for actually picking up members), but it actually gets super interesting to think about because of why things shifted like that. which i'm not sure whether it's because the rl community has a much larger presence on tumblr (which is the #1 source of traffic for most rl sites), because there's a larger number of resource sites (which is the #2 source of traffic for most rl sites) that are catered more towards the rl community to use as general gathering grounds for a potential member base, because the animanga community is a lot more decentralized than the rl one (both in terms of members not really gathering on general community hubs and in terms of sites getting a lot more traffic value in affiliating with large animanga rp sites), or whether it's some combination of all of these factors.

..... look, i am a sociology nerd, and it fascinates me to explore rp meta, and it's just honestly such a cool observation i've had as a staffer that i find super neat and wanted to share.
last edit on Jul 12, 2019 3:25:07 GMT by Kuroya

phantom of the black parade
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what do you want to know? my height, hobbies, quirks, the color of my underwear?
double post but.

that awkward moment when you realize that in the span of a month, you'll have personally handled 20+ app reviews in that time period and just.

last edit on Jul 15, 2019 20:16:38 GMT by Kuroya

Feline Overlord
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Sometimes I wonder if I should thank members I have banned. All those people who try to justify their rule-breaking decisions and generally treat me horribly for doing my admin duties, cause now I have one hell of a backbone. It has literally become "Oh... you want to break site rules and try to justify it and/or treat me like absolute garbage for noticing? You stop right there cause I ain't crumbling because you decide to be a jag about it!"
the endless hunt
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in turning divine, we tangle endlessly
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That moment of horror when you post in the wrong thread, delete it, and realize you deleted the wrong post.

Thankfully I deleted my own post and I have almost all of them backed up anyway, but the momentary horror was legit.

once, a long time ago (like we're talking 2012 baby ulla), i deleted an entire claims thread

luckily it was back on v4 and chrome was able to save the post since it was back when pb's posting section was less complex so the back button could fetch shit but--

basically what i'm saying is I Feel(tm)
Elemental Enthusiast
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eternally tired
That feeling when a site you've been working on/helping with is almost ready to open up to the public... aaaaaaaaaaa I am so excited to see how it will go once we open it
last edit on Jul 18, 2019 16:55:32 GMT by Mari
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Whenever I get a complaint, especially about how I run things I always go back and check to see if it's valid or not.

For example, if someone says the signup windows for events are too short that's actionable feedback.

It's actionable because I can directly check how long I had signups open and see if I need to make any adjustments there or not. There's always the chance I misjudged something or closed it up a bit too early, and I can definitely understand that. IC signups were up for 35 days total in my site's most recent event, with OOC signups up for the last 15 of those 35. A secondary event was made because we got an influx of members right at the end of the signup period that was open for 10 days, so 45 signup days total for one event cycle.

If anything, when put out there like that I'm kicking myself for letting it lag that much. There is no way in hell there needs to be that long of a window before an event starts, and I stalled for too long. The fact that I came to the opposite conclusion of the person who brought it up is irrelevant, because I wouldn't have noticed unless someone else prompted me to check.