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I do know that over half the people at SEN don't know me, since I've been so inactive during the past months since May. Most of you know me as the man with the Blue name that was inactive. For those of you that don't know, I used to be the person who basically ran the whole of SEN that you see here. I was a Global Moderator and a DLDB Keeper at the same time. I was actively in doing the DLDB from October-March all by myself and from March-May with help of Chu and DT_Battlekruser. I set the standard for the "New" DLDB that was created after October 24, 2004. I also Moderated every single Forum at SEN, many times singlehandedly. Now I ask the Administration and the people of SEN to hear me one more time.

I will be making a new thread with all my comments in here simply because it is more organized than making one post in all the other threads.

First I'll start with DLDB Keepers. I do know that Chu and I were very inactive in the DLDB as of summer came by. We both have had jobs which took away most of our time. DLDB keeping requires a person, like we would say, "Someone without a life". Dedicating countless hours to approve 40+ files a week and then maintaining the DLDB at optimun condition is very time consuming and I apologize for myself and Chu for not being able to do our jobs.
You speak of voting new people into the postition. I was voted into the position, but I will have to object into doing such a thing. Having someone with absolutely no experience and most possibly little recognition by the Staff. We of the "Old" Staff barely knew(know) the masses on SEN. The most vital thing about the Staff is communication between each other. Having people without either experience nor recognition by the Staff//Admins is an error. I myself had no experience on the DLDB when I first began and it took me literally a month to figure out how the DLDB worked. Now that the DLDB is much bigger it will nearly be an impossibility. You will need to have someone teach this new person how to work with it. Now the DLDB is also the aspect of SEN which most problems has and changes are to be needed. If someone that the Staff//Admins doesn't even know, it will be almost impossible to work it out.

For this position I suggest having people apply that they do have enough time to work on the DLDB and then hand select the person to fill the position by the Staff. Having the people vote for someone which the Staff doesn't fully trust will mean that there will be very little communication.

Now I think that having people manage all aspects of one category at SEN is ridiculous. Say we have this "leader" in the UMS, modding and melee categories. Your plan is to have him moderate the forums and "influence and lead" the activities in these forums. The people of SEN is what makes the essence in Map Making, they do it by themselves and there is no need for someone to lead them except the people themselves. The only thing that is needed is a Forum Moderator that is well respected by the people themselves. Moderating is all about respect, if there is no respect the is no moderating. The activities that these so called "leaders" will supposedly do can be done way better by the people themselves. The Staff doesn't make SEN look good, the people make SEN look good.

I also wasn't informed of such changes to be taking place. I skim the forums once a day and saw nothing yesterday. I learned of these changes to come by word of some good friends of mine that informed me via messenger. It would've been much more efficient and better looking, if it would've been at leaast discussed. Thats why the Administration has a Staff, to discuss all oncoming decisions. I would've been more than happy to give up my DLDB Keeping position to a more active member. As I've said before "It is impossible for one man to make a good decision, it takes an efficient team to make it".
Also, my Global Moderator position was taken away. I have found no such information on that Global Moderator positions were also being taken away. The Staff//Administration knew before hand that I was to be inactive in the DLDB, why did it take so long?

I am not asking the Administration to give back my DLDB Keeping position, I know I didn't and won't have the time to do it.
I am not telling you how to run the site that you coded and payed for.
I am not telling you that I am right and you are wrong.
I am telling you your inefficiencies on how to run a Community. One man can't influence a Community, not Yoshi, not Isolated, not Moose, not Bolt, not Chu, not DTBK, not DK and not myself. The essense of the SEN community is having people in the Staff that are respected by the people, recognized by the Staff, willing to do the job and most of all having earned the position.
We have seen in the past that voting for people in the DLDB was a mistake. I was the only one that ever did the job, it was lucky that I was willing to do the job. The people of SEN don't know who wants to really do any kind of job, be it Moderator or DLDB Keeper. They choose who they like the best, not who is the most fit for the job.

I leave you all with these words of advice from a good friend. Don't attempt to run the community and try to abrutly change it by yourself, it can't be done by one man. You will be alone, the new people won't know what to do.

Ah well, lets see how things go.

Yes I agree. You cannot just let some people run for moderator for a certain place because they were nominated for it. It should be done the old way where the Staff chooses who would be fit for that position. You need someone with respect to be moderator. Besided many of the people are voting for each other for their jobs. Anyways, just take in consideration what BeeR_KeG wrote.

I agree with some parts; espcially the communications part. However, what you don't seem to understand is that simply because you don't know them well enough does not mean they are not qualified.

I don't know voyager that well but from what other people have said (and my very breif look at his history), I can easily see that he has potential to help the group.

I believe Yoshi's idea was to help, not to lead. The "lead" simply meant they got to talk to Yoshi for updates, news and whatnots. I think the overall idea is good because it allows much faster response time throughout the main forums (despite the lack of posts in the melee section *hint hint* ) even if it's just one person.

I agree on some stuff too, some people shouldnt be a moderator just because they get nominated for it. They have to be respected and experienced to be one

On another note of proving that voting isn't the best way to go.

I've seen nominations of people simply because that other person nominated them.
There have been people nominating othe people simply because of their name.
I've seen people do the: "I vote for you, you vote for me", so that they can get an unfair advantage.
People are actually promoting others to vote for them. What is being held is a popularity contest and not a "Put the best person for the position".



I have to partially agree with that. It is true that you don't need to know the Staff//Admins to be able to do a good job, but if you can barely comunicate with the Staff//Admins you won't be able to make much needed changes and fix big problems. Say you have the best DLDB Keeper in the world, but he can't communicate with Staff becasue they don't know each other. He will do an excellent job in doing the normal work in the DLDB, but when someone starts abusing it, starts to bug it up and simply malfunctions it, he won't be able to do anything.

I've said it many times before and I'll keep saying it again, have people earn their positions.

I don't know about you, but I can send a pm to Yoshi. And if that person really is qualified, I'm 100% sure he would be smart enough to pm Yoshi. Or You, or moose, or any other person that could solve the problem.

I don't really care about the popularity, I want a person who can do the job and can do it right.


I agree with this (but). Still, there's something about this thing Yoshi's doing that's making me support it. I really like the idea that if a person is suppose to focus on one particular group of forums, that forum will get much better response and in better time.

Let me clarify a bit more about communication.
It's when no Admin is online and say porn is constantly being uploaded and you need to IP Ban them. You need to find a way in your limited access to stop it.

Exactly CheeZe. Get someone to do the job and do it corretly, not someone who says that they will, and they are inactive for a long time, and they don't do a good job. People with experience should claim the titles of these spots. Not popularity.

That doesn't really have anything to do with what Yoshi's doing. But I understand what you're getting at. I suppose the massive spam can be countered by... allowing a new topic every 15 minutes or something.

I'll agree with you on the nominations part. I removed it. It was too biased and I'm mainly looking after the skills anyway.

As far as your DLDB job goes, I removed it due to inactivity, yes. I did not have to tell you, because I have warned you once before. I told you to tell me whenever you are too busy or dealing with some issue for a period of over a week so I know this and I can assume you're coming back instead of that you don't want the job anymore.

Sorry, I made the mistake of keeping a staff member too long with inactivity before. Remember "Ness" from the orginal SEN v1 who managed our tutorials DB? One day he decided to leave somewhere. I kept him on for about 3 months, where the tutorials just stacked up.

Because of the fact that you did not tell me you were busy, DT_BK had to pay the price. He's been filling in for all of you, when I could of easily got someone to help him. But no, I assumed you guys were still around, or coming back.

ADDITION:
You misinterpeted what they do. Their goal is to keep things organized, like prevent multipule map making contests from happening at once, assisting me in finding the best maps and best mods. Yes, they moderate the forums. They don't dictate how things are done though. They do have a say in it, but it mainly comes from other people. They're there to combine and censor out ideas for realistic goals. They're in the background just keeping things organized and helping me out.

I'll have to agree with the me being inactive means I had to be taken out of Staff.
But, I said many times that I didn't plan on working on the DLDB during the course of the summer. When school started I also made a thread that I wouldn't be able to do much at all.
As I said before, I'm not complaining about removing my position, it's more about the Nominations, voting process and the way everything is suddenly being handled.

If it's for the best of SEN's Community interests I have no problem with it.


Thanks for doing this.

The whole idea is mass unorganized chaos.
Mostly unorganized, partly chaos.

I have the worst feeling about this. Then again, I could be wrong.

I never mentioned this before, but another reason for my returning is my influence over the community. Yes, me. You may think I'm feeding my ego or something (hense why I don't mention it), but I clued in after a few key factors:
Forum Stats - They may be old and outdated, but take a look. October to December is the time period in which I left. Notice anything odd? Theres a 6000 post decline, registration decline, and new topic decline. I don't make these accounts, topics, or posts.
- No news posts. When I came back, I could see my 3 month old news topic still there. You may say there was no news items (which I think there were), but if there is no news, you make your own news, is what I say. Right now, the oldest news post that shows up on the front page is 8 days old.
- Flaming and swearing was seriously up. Everyone was rude and acting really stupid. The site was never like that before.

When I returned, posts, topics and registrations jumped right away. There were many new news posts. Flaming took a bit longer to repair (and its still a problem a bit, but not nearly as bad).

I really didn't want to post those things, but when you say that I'm ineffective at managing communities, I'm forced to back myself up. I make mistakes, I'm human like everyone else. I'm not saying anyone else here is bad or anything, I'm just saying what I know. Assume what you want.

If you haven't additionally noticed, my website managing techniques are drastically different from other communities and webmasters. My ideals, additude and rules differ extremely in certain situations.

ADDITION:

What the hell? You are quick to change your ideals and support. That's not a good trait. You don't think things though enough before you're willing to support it.

Thats exactly what I don't need Thanks anyway

Didn't you once tell me that Yoshism was the official religion of SEN?

After reading Yoshi's Ego thread I'm beginning to think this is a better idea. Is a very bad thing to have a community supported so much by a single person, Yoshi won't be there forever especially after i assinate him.

Cruel bolt. Everyone has a ego just depends whom boost it ^_^ and lots ppl have boosted yoshi's so you expect it be somewhat big. Anywoot hmm shame your gone inactive Keg you were good staff / DLDBER =/ sad see that you cant be active as you were.

\\Moogle

I've known that stuff ever since my return. If I was trying to feed my ego, I would of posted it way before whenever I had the chance, not right now when im trying to defend my abilities to run a community :\

Thanks for the comment Moogle.

I know we all do mistakes, but from what I've seen most of Yoshi's mistakes come from not really thinking things through.

Now about not having a news psot when you were gone. It was pretty hard to actually do so. The small staff, IP, Moose, Bolt, Clokr_ and myself had a hard time trying to get everything back into gear. Sure, posts and registrations would've gone down because a lot of outside sources thought that SEN had died away.

I don't think we need "leaders" at all.

Forum moderators? We have a well-regulated militia of regular viewers who report posts. Reported posts go to me or something else, and we take care of it. The current moderation is sufficient. The only thing that can use more moderation or a "leader" would be modding.

Contests? I think we've got enough of those going on. For spring and summer, I've already run two tournaments, one with a sub-competition to make maps for it. Plus, you've just created the UMST (I'm sure my tournaments would end up on UMS eventually just to keep it fresh). The only thing that doesn't have contests is modding.

Eyes and Ears? Hey. You hired me and a bunch of other people. This is why we have the "almighty" Staff forum. If you want me to dig through the Map Showcase, Reccomend and Review, etc, and get the great maps to you, just let me know.

In my opinion, all we need are the DLDB people and the "eyes and ears", which the DLDB people should be able to handle as they approve maps... moderation and contests are alive and well.

Actually I would like to post here to say I support what Yoshi is saying here. One person can make a huge difference in the community. Each day when I'm running StarCraft.org I know I face real challenges all the time that the normal members wouldn't be able to see. It's not an easy job. And when I look at the way Yoshi handles his community, I feel that Yoshi is a far better webmaster than I am.

Today I was looking at the front page of StarEdit.net, and look, there's Yoshi laying down the rules for the chat channel. In my mind when I was reading that I was saying to myself that he always knows what to say and he doesn't shy away from his responsibility, and I was really impressed. Sometimes I do lay down the law like that, but when I do it, it's draining, and so I feel I turn a blind eye to misconduct on StarCraft.org much more than I should. Whereas on this site, almost always where I see someone breaking a rule, I almost always see Yoshi coming in and putting the person in their place. He's just one guy but he really seems to be able to handle masses of people and steer them in the right direction, whereas I find myself ignoring things that I wish I could change and waiting until someone complains. To be honest I don't understand how Yoshi does it, he's amazing. It's amazing what one person can do.

I also think that Yoshi really shows that one person can change things in the fact that he created this website from nothing. This website receives something like 1000 unique hits a day if I remember right. Honestly, that's the power of one person right there. One time I felt the power of one person myself was when I released the Doom Dragoon mod, which was really just for fun. All of a sudden, the modding community just appeared out of nowhere, we just didn't have modding happening in the public community very much at all until then. I was really surprised. I'm trying not to be egotistic here, but just look, the power of one person.

The thing is, I don't think you can choose people and suddenly they can revolutionise things like Yoshi has. So, yes, you can pick section leaders, and they'll help newbies, run contests, but they won't change the world. Only some people have the right combination of qualities to be able to do that, and if they do, I don't think it will matter whether they are a section leader or not. I mean look, what would happen to the community if you eliminated people like RexyRex? Half the male population of StarEdit.net would just vanish. Of course, I think that Yoshi isn't expecting life-changing events from the new section leaders, so I'm probably just rambling and not saying anything useful here.

However, I think this is a great idea. I think it's such a great idea I actually want to borrow the idea for StarCraft.org. Like I was saying up there, I get drained being a webmaster sometimes, and I think part of the reason is because up until recently I have been running the site almost entirely on my own. It's a little easier now, but I would love to be able to assign some amazingly talented individual to look after say, the fiction section, and they'd put all the rules in and add some guidelines, run contests, and they'd lighten my load. I think you should do it, if not for the community, for yourself.