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Staffing Confessions

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I used to get annoyed when a guest would pop up on the chat and then leave when nobody else was on to answer their questions, now I could care less. Though now I find myself annoyed when they ask questions that are clearly in the lore. Like I don't mind going into details about the lore if it isn't clear but when you tell me the information isn't there when it clearly is.... I'm going to get annoyed on the sidelines.
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Yeah, honestly appealing to guests who expect constant showers of attention and handholding is never going to cause you anything but stress.

There's an expectation to be accommodating, sure, but there are also unreasonable requests for accommodation. I'm not going to approve your application line by line as you write it over the course of like 5 hours straight because someone is too impatient to wait or is so self-conscious they refuse to post up a finished application. It is also not my job to resolve someone's boredom every five seconds.

It is also not my job to spend hours going over the Required Docs when the answers are clearly marked. If someone comes in with 'Hey, I have a question about <literally anything in the doc>' I'm going to respond and likely point to where the exact verbiage is. If someone asks about the combat system and I link the combat system... and they ask a bunch of questions that are bolded and on the top of the combat system doc I'm just going to link the combat system again and say it's in there. It's not my job to enable someone disrespecting my time and the time of my members.

At the end of the day RPers are petty as hell, myself included for the reasons they choose not to go on sites. The skin's too bright, the skin's too dark. Too many races, not enough races. This site won't let me play a robot with 5 arms wtf control freak I leave. This site's admin has a bunch of FCs that give me horror flashbacks from previous bad RP experiences so I can't do it. I recognize Bob from this site and Bob was a jerk so I leave to avoid confrontation. Bored of genre. Not interested in genre. Skin too wide. Everyone has ugly posting templates. Everyone has too pretty posting templates. Text size too small. Text size too big. Application too short. Application too long. My power is on the banned power list. My power is taken already. The canon I wanted is taken already. Staff groups are the wrong color. Discord too dead. Discord too active.

If you sit there and beat yourself up because of all the reasons above, some of which border on nonsensical but are reasons why most of us have held off on sites in the past you're going to go insane as a staffer. People don't join and fuck off for no reason at all sometimes. People just join discords, never post, never interact, and forget about it all the time. Some people will shitpost semi-actively for weeks or months but never join your RP because they wanted a social group rather than an RP. RPers are weird as hell, and trying to blame yourself somehow for all the weirdness that happens will only lead to frustration.
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Yeah, honestly appealing to guests who expect constant showers of attention and handholding is never going to cause you anything but stress.

There's an expectation to be accommodating, sure, but there are also unreasonable requests for accommodation. I'm not going to approve your application line by line as you write it over the course of like 5 hours straight because someone is too impatient to wait or is so self-conscious they refuse to post up a finished application. It is also not my job to resolve someone's boredom every five seconds.

It is also not my job to spend hours going over the Required Docs when the answers are clearly marked. If someone comes in with 'Hey, I have a question about <literally anything in the doc>' I'm going to respond and likely point to where the exact verbiage is. If someone asks about the combat system and I link the combat system... and they ask a bunch of questions that are bolded and on the top of the combat system doc I'm just going to link the combat system again and say it's in there. It's not my job to enable someone disrespecting my time and the time of my members.

At the end of the day RPers are petty as hell, myself included for the reasons they choose not to go on sites. The skin's too bright, the skin's too dark. Too many races, not enough races. This site won't let me play a robot with 5 arms wtf control freak I leave. This site's admin has a bunch of FCs that give me horror flashbacks from previous bad RP experiences so I can't do it. I recognize Bob from this site and Bob was a jerk so I leave to avoid confrontation. Bored of genre. Not interested in genre. Skin too wide. Everyone has ugly posting templates. Everyone has too pretty posting templates. Text size too small. Text size too big. Application too short. Application too long. My power is on the banned power list. My power is taken already. The canon I wanted is taken already. Staff groups are the wrong color. Discord too dead. Discord too active.

If you sit there and beat yourself up because of all the reasons above, some of which border on nonsensical but are reasons why most of us have held off on sites in the past you're going to go insane as a staffer. People don't join and fuck off for no reason at all sometimes. People just join discords, never post, never interact, and forget about it all the time. Some people will shitpost semi-actively for weeks or months but never join your RP because they wanted a social group rather than an RP. RPers are weird as hell, and trying to blame yourself somehow for all the weirdness that happens will only lead to frustration.


Preach <3 Well said lol
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sometimes, i feel like adminning is signing up for an endless job of herding cats. just. that's it. that's the job.

trying to get members to post their claims to keep the lists current? herding cats. trying to run an activity check and get everyone in who's actually active? herding cats. trying to encourage people to thread outside their little friend bubbles, to read the lore threads instead of just asking in the cbox, to not sit on claims they barely use, or to be good about posting hiatus notices ahead of time instead of for checks or after they get in trouble. herding cats. all of it. all of it is herding cats.

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Having to remind people that we have a real life too and sometimes it isn't all about the site but us as people in general.... Or reminding them that other people have real life too. The site is meant for fun, not turned into a job where I have to give it my all, when I find it more of a hobby. Don't get me wrong, that could encourage a site to fail but at the same time that is what I view staff members are for, to share the load and all so that I don't have to do the work all by myself.
last edit on Apr 27, 2019 23:41:18 GMT by Deleted
the endless hunt
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in turning divine, we tangle endlessly

i always get mad at myself for putting off update prep until the last second...

but then when i'm a good admin and put it all together ahead of time, all i can think about is how excited i am for it to go live and i get Absolutely Nothing Done

vicious cycle
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I have a bad habit of reading applications at work, and since it is work, I get lost in the applications. I don't know why I don't just allow the other staff members to read through everything, and instead just stumble through the application.
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in turning divine, we tangle endlessly

sometimes i find myself very resistant to change the way that things are done or certain situations are handled as a staffer - both because i have a hard time rationalizing change from an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" perspective, but also because a long time ago when i didn't have much in the way of a spine, waffling around on staff-made decisions and policies could get me into a lot of trouble...

but sometimes there are changes that should be made, and i need to remember that it doesn't equal weakness or spinelessness.

anxiety is a bitch, but i can defeat it.
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what do you want to know? my height, hobbies, quirks, the color of my underwear?
i've honestly become so paranoid about other people. between the bad experiences i've seen from other people and the few times i've had them myself with petty ex-staffers, i just... do not trust other people. i'm ridiculously stringent when it comes to granting access to things in the acp and i almost always end up writing up all of the site lore/systems content myself so that i can minimize the potential opportunities for people to absolutely break the site on their way out just to be spiteful.

sometimes i really hate it since it means i end up taking a lot of the responsibility on myself, but at least i have the comfort of knowing that i'm less likely to see things going horribly wrong because of someone deleting an entire skin or yanking half of the site lore topics before they leave the site.
last edit on Jun 3, 2019 17:35:30 GMT by Kuroya

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Yeah it is very hard to find a reliable staff team that you can trust, I've been there too. Thankfully it is easier for me to join staff teams when I honestly feel like I can benefit the site in someway and because for some reason it doesn't seem like others are interested in stepping up to the plate. I used to care about trying to please everybody but as if the last few years, I got tired of it and decided to go for what I want and see if anybody else finds the site interesting or not. lol
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my tiny peanut brain: make the new site idea you just had
me: i'm already running two sites, i don't know if i could find staff for it, and i don't want to go through the effort of graphics / a skin
my tiny peanut brain: ....... so you'll make the site?
me: whY ARE YOU LIKE THIS, ME?

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When I’m too lazy to fix an error on an update. I also keep getting private messages from my members pointing out the error and I just cry cause it shows they are reading but cry even more cause now it’s just getting embarassing but I STILL can’t bother myself to fix it. Like...I just don’t wanna guys. Too tired, must kick my feet up and turn into a burrito.