After taking a lot of time to think and consulting a few friends, I've decided to step down as a chat moderator of MFGG. There are a lot of reasons for this decision, and I want to give an explanation as best I can for the people who care. I'm gonna try to walk people through how I felt in the last month and a half and what brought this all to a head. I encourage you to read through the spoilers, but I've included tl;drs below if that's not your style.
tl;dr: Didn't expect to become mod, just wanted to see what applications would be like.
tl;dr: I was a doofus in Minus World and I'm sorry to the people who got annoyed at my doofusness.
tl;dr: False rumor about me cropped up and made it harder to do my job.
tl;dr: Had to ask why I wasn't getting mod role back instead of being told
tl;dr: no tl;dr, read this one
It was a pleasure to meet all of you guys, and I hope I'll continue to get to know you at my own pace this time. Keep doing your thing. Thanks for reading.
I nominate gengarmaster to replace me as moderator
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Spoiler
When I got promoted, a lot of people were wondering who I was. Which is entirely fair--a search through my post history in the Discord shows that I joined in late May and made my first meme post in June after that one time Pedigree used an @everyone ping. I was involved in the discussion(s) that followed, and that was pretty much my first glimpse of MFGG. The next time I came into MFGG, I was pinged by the @here ping announcing mod applications. I'm sure there are a lot of conspiracy theories about why I signed up--which I'll address in a moment--but the truth was I had thought about moderating before and this was the first opportunity I'd ever had. I didn't so much want to actually become mod as much as I wanted to see the questions and think about how I wanted to respond to them, in case another opportunity came in the future. I basically didn't expect to become a moderator. I mentioned multiple times in my application that I was fully aware that not being connected to the community would be really crippling for me, but I still decided to try because "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take".
Needless to say, when I was promoted, I was pretty surprised. My first three posts after being promoted were "Whoa, I didn't think I'd actually make it, Thank you". From there I decided to commit myself to the job, because I got it, after all. But I made a really dumb mistake by not looking into one thing, and I'll segue into that.
Needless to say, when I was promoted, I was pretty surprised. My first three posts after being promoted were "Whoa, I didn't think I'd actually make it, Thank you". From there I decided to commit myself to the job, because I got it, after all. But I made a really dumb mistake by not looking into one thing, and I'll segue into that.
I got into Minus World before MFGG. When I was a little inexperienced with Discord, I joined the Minus World Discord, which had All Messages send you notifications by default, rather than only @mentions. I have an affinity for political discussion, and Minus World has a #controversial chat specifically for such topics, so I was really only interested in that--at least, I wasn't interested in sifting through the chats to get to discussion I actually enjoyed--so I muted the rest of the channels. I was also in Minus World to see the origins of the Killing Game, which is a forum game Fun With Despair created and a now ex-friend of mine introduced me to. But I didn't really get too into Minus World because of my activity in my old personal server, which was for a Killing Game I was going to host, but eventually died. On the day of my promotion (before the announcement went up that I was promoted iirc), I turned MW settings to @mentions and unmuted every chat, discovering two channels that I had not seen before since I'd first joined MW.
I am at no liberty to explain publicly what is in one of those channels, however, one of them made my job significantly harder over the course of the next month or so, and was a large contributing factor in my decision to resign. Letting myself feel like I had to defend MFGG in that channel because I was a chat moderator was a huge mistake, and one that I did not realize psychologically until far, far too late.
With that comes my first apology in this post: To those in Minus World who I rubbed the wrong way with my posts or responses in that channel, I sincerely apologize. I know I really f***ed up and it was my fault for not giving myself time to ease into everything--Minus World, MFGG, all of it. I just went straight into mod mode to "prove myself" or something and I probably escalated a lot of the tension in the Discord early on. MWers have every right to feel annoyed at how I reacted in discussions about MFGG in MW.
If there's one thing I can say to defend myself, it's that I didn't know about The Split until after my promotion. I had no idea that Minus World was split from MFGG long ago, and the fact that I was uninformed on this was most of the reason why I was confused about the discussions in there. Of course it doesn't excuse the ways I reacted, I'm just trying to give an explanation.
I am at no liberty to explain publicly what is in one of those channels, however, one of them made my job significantly harder over the course of the next month or so, and was a large contributing factor in my decision to resign. Letting myself feel like I had to defend MFGG in that channel because I was a chat moderator was a huge mistake, and one that I did not realize psychologically until far, far too late.
With that comes my first apology in this post: To those in Minus World who I rubbed the wrong way with my posts or responses in that channel, I sincerely apologize. I know I really f***ed up and it was my fault for not giving myself time to ease into everything--Minus World, MFGG, all of it. I just went straight into mod mode to "prove myself" or something and I probably escalated a lot of the tension in the Discord early on. MWers have every right to feel annoyed at how I reacted in discussions about MFGG in MW.
If there's one thing I can say to defend myself, it's that I didn't know about The Split until after my promotion. I had no idea that Minus World was split from MFGG long ago, and the fact that I was uninformed on this was most of the reason why I was confused about the discussions in there. Of course it doesn't excuse the ways I reacted, I'm just trying to give an explanation.
A little while into my stretch of time as moderator, I was talking to a member about their behavior on their server and they told me about a rumor that had been going around that I was joining random servers and "gunning for mod" in them. I passed it along to active staff to see what to do, most of whom said it looked like gaslighting. So when I was lifting their ban I told them not to gaslight me in the future. This led to a bit of an argument which I passed along to staff again, and this time a staff member told me that there was merit to the rumor. The staff were understandably skeptical of me and didn't want to let me look into it myself, but they let me know that the rumor apparently came from MarioBoards people. After asking three members of MB, one of whom is an established member, one of whom is a global moderator, and one of whom is an active member of both MB and MW, I got responses from each of them that they had not heard this rumor. When I showed those to one of the staff who told me about the origins of the rumor, they agreed it seemed the rumor was in ill will in light of those responses. However, there was never really any follow-up to it, and one staff member still seemed to believe there was merit to the rumor as far as I can tell, which was a point of contention as I have yet to see what "evidence" there is of this rumor. I considered a few times to make a Suggestions thread asking for a legitimate investigation into the rumor, but that didn't end up happening now that I'm choosing to resign altogether. I know my words may sound hollow and expected, but I have to make it clear that MFGG was the first place I ever applied to be a moderator at. I have now applied for a moderation position at Let Me Level With You, but that's all. I have never applied anywhere else on the internet, and it's entirely possible that there is another person with the nickname Roller who does this sort of thing. You either already believe me or you don't, but either way I had to publicly deny these claims to get it out there.
I don't know if it's okay for me to say much about this, so I'll refrain from saying too much, but essentially I left the MFGG server after an issue with a staff member. I was put on moderation probation--e.g. my actions would be watched more carefully in the future, but I was not "punished" in any other sense. When I returned to MFGG, I asked an active staff member for my chat moderator role back. They seemingly ignored me, so the next day I asked a different staff member, who told me they'd have to ask the other staff. At this point I was very confused because I hadn't been placed on leave or anything, I was just taking a break from the server for my own health. It took me another day and another query to get the response that I would not be given the role back for a week. I still don't know exactly why this decision was made--they said it was "to give me more time to get used to the community", which was strange to me considering I had been doing that for the past month and could still do that with the chat mod role--either way, I feel that's a decision I should've been able to make, not forced to do. Having to jump through hoops to get an answer as to why I wasn't being given the role back was honestly quite frustrating, and made me feel like the staff didn't really trust me anymore. I was allowed to come back this morning "as long as I was active", which was another red flag to me as I had not done anything to imply I wouldn't be active. Needless to say, this kinda rubbed me the wrong way.
At this point I was already seriously considering resigning over all that had happened--including a raid of my personal server--because I had started to feel unsafe in my position, when today, after promoting an old friend to moderator on my server, I discovered that they said some things about me behind my back about my moderation that I found personally disheartening. Up to this point I was rolling with the punches because any connections made through MFGG weren't really "real" in the sense that I would ever actually meet anyone face to face and bond with. But this time, a friend from my personal life was the one complaining about me after getting swept up in a conversation about what would assumedly be the staff altercation mentioned earlier, and at that point I realized moderating MFGG was no longer worth my time. It had done me more harm than good, and even affected my personal life. It had caused me unnecessary stress and anxiety of my standing among staff and among members, and I had constantly felt in a position of playing catch-up as if I was behind on the history of the server. People were telling me I had to resign from MFGG but I didn't want to do it until this moment. All the drama sort of piled all up and I couldn't take it anymore. I caved and that was that. I'm sorry to the few who were trying to convince me to stick around or telling me it wasn't worth leaving, but I couldn't take it anymore. MFGG was too toxic for me emotionally and I'd rather focus my efforts on LMLWY, a community that I care about and that cares about me. That's not to say I'm just gonna disappear from MFGG forever, but I don't have anymore commitments to it. And I need that freedom of choosing when I talk to the community and when I don't.
It was a pleasure to meet all of you guys, and I hope I'll continue to get to know you at my own pace this time. Keep doing your thing. Thanks for reading.
I nominate gengarmaster to replace me as moderator
I'm on the MarioBoards, Minus World, and the Bell Tree Forums as rollerC if you wanna check me out.
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