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Staffing Confessions

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This isn't a call out or anything specifically related to one person or group of people, but just a general thought I have about it.

Can you trust your staff? Like, as head admin of a site, do you trust your staff to keep things running if you have to disappear for a bit, or do you come back and get really upset that they've done nothing and the site has died or they've answered all the questions wrong or started drama because they don't know how to conduct themselves? How do you deal with that?
i don't make people staff unless i trust them to do exactly that. it's usually why any staff team i have is small and made up of people i've known for years. i hate micromanaging people, so i only put people on my team that i trust to do things without me holding their hand.
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AkiraTsunami Avatar
This isn't a call out or anything specifically related to one person or group of people, but just a general thought I have about it.

Can you trust your staff? Like, as head admin of a site, do you trust your staff to keep things running if you have to disappear for a bit, or do you come back and get really upset that they've done nothing and the site has died or they've answered all the questions wrong or started drama because they don't know how to conduct themselves? How do you deal with that?
i don't make people staff unless i trust them to do exactly that. it's usually why any staff team i have is small and made up of people i've known for years. i hate micromanaging people, so i only put people on my team that i trust to do things without me holding their hand.
seconding this statement. imma be real - i'm a micromanaging control freak at the helm of things. i trust my staff to be able to manage while i'm not around, or to at least get themselves in gear the second i designate some duty/responsibility to them and don't expect me to hold their hand. at the same time, i think that the moment you accept ppl into the staff team - you're opening the possibility of ppl having different ideas on how to run things or how to problem solve. so there's a degree of adaptability to be done on both sides. half the responsibility requires working together cohesively, and knowing when to compromise for the sake of the bigger community. if a staff member is being problematic or difficult, though, then buddy, we're gonna Talk(TM). i've been in more than enough sites that imploded due to drama among the team. this ain't gonna be that.

staffing is a difficult and oftentimes exhaustive task, so best be sure the people you have on your corner are able to step up to the position. if you can't trust your staff, then you're giving yourself, your staff team, and your community more grief in the long run imho.
last edit on Jun 8, 2022 11:41:13 GMT by CEL



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Went through first event cycle on new site, and during the event I was mostly just focused on keeping it running and didn't think it was doing particularly well.

116 posts in 30 days in that one thread, with the rest of the board active as well. It's not the most I've ever had in an event, but it's a hell of a lot better than the first event of my last site's first event in February 2019 -- which had 67 over months and almost nothing actually completed so it didn't mean anything and caused a lot of frustration on my end.

Nice to see the progression of not only completing everything, but maintaining engagement and having things run a lot smoother due to having the time to learn and adjust to a completely different and better model of doing things. Half of the 67 ones in my last site was myself posting for 1x1s with every character in the event. New site I only posted roughly 20 times out of the 116 between DMing and having my one character in the event -- so it was a much smaller % of the event on me which is really liberating.

If this is the awkward first event floor, I'm really excited to see what the ceiling is.
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I just wanted to pop in and say the most controversial rule by far that I've seen dealbreak many guests or people who were creating characters is the one where I basically say no child Face Claims. People don't have an issue with the rule that all characters must be over 18 almost ever, but the Face Claims one has got a lot of discussions/etc. when I bring it up to guests.

It continues to be the biggest dealbreaker by far out of everything else. For me it's 100% worth it, but I just found it interesting that almost no other rules cause such an immediate exit.
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what do you want to know? my height, hobbies, quirks, the color of my underwear?
honestly, i always find it so strange when people will dip over pending pms that are super quick + easy fixes (like 15 minutes tops to fix everything)

don't get me wrong, i defs think it's their right to bounce for whatever reason, but like ??????? this just seems like such a waste of the time + effort to go through the app process only to dip out over a few small tweaks but you do you i guess????????

aliasmany - just ask!
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Let the mighty be humbled.
we're getting so close to finishing our stuff... now it's just time to update the boards. it's a boring job - but someone's gotta do it. and that's me. being productive. because i am bored lol

/keels over and just passes out dramatically.
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I just wanted to pop in and say the most controversial rule by far that I've seen dealbreak many guests or people who were creating characters is the one where I basically say no child Face Claims. People don't have an issue with the rule that all characters must be over 18 almost ever, but the Face Claims one has got a lot of discussions/etc. when I bring it up to guests.

It continues to be the biggest dealbreaker by far out of everything else. For me it's 100% worth it, but I just found it interesting that almost no other rules cause such an immediate exit.
honestly at that point i'd just play on a RL site lmao

i don't know half the characters i use as FCs and expecting me to know the ages of random anime girl, which could range from 12 to 12000 and not change at all in design, is too much. i don't hate the 18+ rule on RL sites because most RL FC directories don't post minors, and also they sort FCs by age ranges.

you can run ur site however u want, but sometimes i think at that point, why not just embrace RL

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I just wanted to pop in and say the most controversial rule by far that I've seen dealbreak many guests or people who were creating characters is the one where I basically say no child Face Claims. People don't have an issue with the rule that all characters must be over 18 almost ever, but the Face Claims one has got a lot of discussions/etc. when I bring it up to guests.

It continues to be the biggest dealbreaker by far out of everything else. For me it's 100% worth it, but I just found it interesting that almost no other rules cause such an immediate exit.
honestly at that point i'd just play on a RL site lmao

i don't know half the characters i use as FCs and expecting me to know the ages of random anime girl, which could range from 12 to 12000 and not change at all in design, is too much. i don't hate the 18+ rule on RL sites because most RL FC directories don't post minors, and also they sort FCs by age ranges.

you can run ur site however u want, but sometimes i think at that point, why not just embrace RL


You're entitled to your opinion. Certainly I've encountered many who passionately share it.

I'm entitled to not have preteen FCs on a 3-3-3 site. It just seems like a weird hill to die on to make the claim that 12 and adult is basically the same. You can hate it and dislike it all you want, but people who have different opinions from you share this hobby with you and the same forum hosts as you and indeed some of the same face claim rules with you believe it or not.
last edit on Jun 20, 2022 21:33:05 GMT by wolfe
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I just wanted to pop in and say the most controversial rule by far that I've seen dealbreak many guests or people who were creating characters is the one where I basically say no child Face Claims. People don't have an issue with the rule that all characters must be over 18 almost ever, but the Face Claims one has got a lot of discussions/etc. when I bring it up to guests.

It continues to be the biggest dealbreaker by far out of everything else. For me it's 100% worth it, but I just found it interesting that almost no other rules cause such an immediate exit.
honestly at that point i'd just play on a RL site lmao

i don't know half the characters i use as FCs and expecting me to know the ages of random anime girl, which could range from 12 to 12000 and not change at all in design, is too much. i don't hate the 18+ rule on RL sites because most RL FC directories don't post minors, and also they sort FCs by age ranges.

you can run ur site however u want, but sometimes i think at that point, why not just embrace RL
Agreed here. I posted this in Peeves but it's super lame when someone looks at an anime character, assigns their own description of its age and then tells you that they're too young/old for the age YOU give them to let you use it as an FC. If someone put up 18+ anime FCs only as a requirement for their animanga site, I guarantee that eliminates like 90% of the available FC pool.
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i've been having some pretty dark thoughts.
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honestly at that point i'd just play on a RL site lmao

i don't know half the characters i use as FCs and expecting me to know the ages of random anime girl, which could range from 12 to 12000 and not change at all in design, is too much. i don't hate the 18+ rule on RL sites because most RL FC directories don't post minors, and also they sort FCs by age ranges.

you can run ur site however u want, but sometimes i think at that point, why not just embrace RL
Agreed here. I posted this in Peeves but it's super lame when someone looks at an anime character, assigns their own description of its age and then tells you that they're too young/old for the age YOU give them to let you use it as an FC. If someone put up 18+ anime FCs only as a requirement for their animanga site, I guarantee that eliminates like 90% of the available FC pool.

Gonna jump in here with a stance, because while it's not a rule I would personally put into place, it is definitely one that I can understand other admins using, because I have definitely been in a situation where such a rule would've been beneficial. u__u

I'll agree that animanga characters play fast and loose with visual age versus actual age - the memes of 'this child is actually 1,000 years old!!!' are around for a reason, and conversely, you literally cannot convince me Rosch from Radiant Historia is eighteen and not, like, in his thirties. Even in the case of characters who in canon are and/or look young, there's also aged-up art out there, or art that just doesn't look all that young. Were I to enforce such a rule, I think characters who can reasonably be argued to look teenaged or up in the art you use is fine. But if you're on a site that does not allow for child characters - particularly in the case that Wolfe mentioned, where they're banned specifically because of the potentially adult nature of the site - it really doesn't sound all that unreasonable to not want someone using art like this for an 18+ character. It's pretty art, sure, and face claims are supposed to be kind of loose-fitting, but those kinds of visuals in certain spaces can (and for very good reason) make people uncomfortable. Under certain circumstances, from first hand experience, I know it's made me and my staff members uncomfortable in the past.

Admittedly, though, I'm a little unsympathetic when it comes to face claims, precisely because I find them so loose-fitting. If we're in the realm of fantasy and your face claim isn't the perfect be-all-end-all appearance of your character, then surely out of the thousands of anime characters out there, there's gotta be one that'll work just as well who doesn't look ten years of age when all characters are supposed to be 18+. If you don't want to go through the search effort, that's absolutely fine. But not wanting to put in that effort (and I get it, it can be an annoying one) doesn't mean that it's unfair or 'lame' for staff to enforce that kind of rule when it's there for a reason. :'D
last edit on Jun 21, 2022 1:25:59 GMT by pharaoh leap
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personally my take on a "fcs must be 18+" rule for animanga is that it just... doesn't make a whole lot of logistical sense to be ported over from the rl community into animanga.

the vast majority of rl celebrities start their careers as adults, and for the ones who don't, they'll age and thus enter the pool of usable faces with enough time; it's also generally tons easier to find feasible alternative fcs (since hollywood is notoriously bad about typecasting + my experiences with the rl rpc is that there's generally more than a few people who are excited to share more diverse fcs for The Kinds Of FCs Hollywood Won't Touch (tm) (c) (r), as it were)

by contrast, ouran host club came out 20-some years ago, and those characters are all just as excluded now as they were 20 years ago because they don't age. it's also really hard to find feasible alternatives for certain niches, such as characters of color, or when cross-referencing several requirements (such as "younger brown-haired female with bunny ears"), a task made infinity harder if you have to start throwing in finding a large number of images and/or larger image sizes (especially for older series that pre-date twitter + pixiv).

there's also the wider situation that animated sources tend to more heavily favor younger cast demographics than live action sources do (since they tend to be marketed towards younger demographics who want to see stories with empowered young people standing on equal footing with adults), as well as the headache-inducing situations caused by "xyz character is minor-coded" discourse or the "2000 year old immortal looks like a 12 year old" trophe. and y'know. most animanga sites tend to discourage using original artwork / commissioned artwork, either explicitly in the site rules or implicitly via the community's openness towards plotting with those characters, so. yeah.

imo, if someone wants to put an "all fcs must be 18+ to be used" rule on their site, that's their right to do, it's their sandbox + they get to decide what rules everyone else has to abide by to play on it. but i also don't think it's one that someone should be super shocked over it being a dealbreaker for a lot of people given how much more annoying it can make fc searching.

(personally, i'd never join an animanga site with an 18+ fc requirement, and i say that as someone who used to run multiple rl sites with the same rule, and it's actually a rule i very much hope doesn't hop over into the mainstream from the rl circuit, but that's just my two cents)
last edit on Jun 21, 2022 1:39:52 GMT by Kuroya

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My personal compromise: Allow young characters (and by extension, younger-looking FCs) to be made. If you wanna do the badonka-donks, then your character needs to not only be but also look convincingly and adequately old enough to be doing the act.

Sure they're fictional characters but also people's discomfort around these issues are very real and not to be taken lightly.
last edit on Jun 21, 2022 1:47:40 GMT by ninelie
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My personal compromise: Allow young characters (and by extension, younger-looking FCs) to be made. If you wanna do the badonka-donks, then your character needs to not only be but also look convincingly and adequately old enough to be doing the act.

Sure they're fictional characters but also people's discomfort around these issues are very real and not to be taken lightly.



100% this. Fetishization/writing smut with chidlike looking characters even if they are canonically of age is an inherently problematic and very real issue.
last edit on Jun 21, 2022 2:27:19 GMT by Mizo