Staffing Bad Staff Experiences

[Moon 12]

The last forum I was advertising on before my current one, the admin was... a mess. I informed him that I was going through a busier than anticipated bit of life related stuff and he was upset. Not to mention that I was never given character acceptance guidelines, or told anything about how to approve a character, but expected to be able to do so.

 

I think within a 6 month period the staff team there turned over at least 2-3 times.

[Somniac 207]

There were a lot of weird things that went down, but one of the key things was that they stole credit for my ideas and booted me.

 

Honestly, they did me a favor. Hadn't occurred to me that my ideas were worth stealing before that.

[Grimscythe 181]

They argued with me about lore I wrote, because it wasn't tailored to their tastes. And then had the audacity to expect me to write the lore around them. I was like nope.

[4rt3m1s 16]

I had this situation where myself and a friend had started a site, and run it fairly well for a few months before we decided that it was large enough and active enough that we wanted to bring on a couple of extra moderators just to help out with managing applications and claims. We had a couple of friends who were fairly active on our site and who we had good moderating experiences with in the past, so we asked them if they would be willing to help out in that regard, and they said yes and for maybe another year or so, everything was fine. They both did their jobs reasonably well (it was mostly just accepting apps here and there, updating claims or answering questions when us two main staffers couldn't, since we were both based in the UK and they were in the US). One of them was literally insanely productive and started advertising for us and making little trackers to track member groups and information of her own accord, and working with her was probably one of the better staff experiences I've had in a long while.

 

The other girl was fine at first, and she helped out with the site as she needed to and did her jobs just fine, but then a few months down the line she sort of started abusing her staff position. I didn't mind so much if a staff member finished an app and it fit all the character count requirements and they then approved it and sorted it appropriately, but she started making unfinished applications for characters, then just sorting them into the approved app areas, and saying she would "finish them off later", which she never did. She also started adding a ton of reserved faces to the face claim list for herself (and we had a real that staff could have like three reserved faces at a time as opposed to two just as a perk in thanks for all the site-building stuff), but she was just adding them, quickly making an unfinished app, and then moving it to the approved apps section so she could reserve and make another person. It was really hard to spot her doing this at first as well, because it would look like she had just approved an app regularly, but I started getting a bit suspicious of the speediness and started reading through her apps, which is how I caught her out. I eventually called her out on doing this in our private staff chat, and it somehow evolved into a huge argument between myself and the three other staff members about how I was being "too controlling" because I wasn't letting her make characters like she wanted. Apparently, expecting her to follow the same rules as every other member on the site wasn't reasonable, and my fellow admin was oddly against me on this as well (we had butted heads before as to the way apps were going to look, and I had eventually agreed to let her have an app where they just filled in basic profile information and didn't require a biography or shipper section - which I thought made it particularly absurd that she couldn't finish these).

 

Eventually, this girl ended up quitting the staff team and the site altogether, and then the other moderator we had brought on followed suit, although she stayed on the site as a regular member. Because this one girl had made so many characters before quitting, when she left our member count fell by a lot (she literally had over twenty accounts by this point), and then my fellow admin blamed me for causing our site to grow inactive, when I was the only person at that point who was maintaining claims or accepting applications and I had single-handedly coded everything on the site. I was doing my best to come up with site-wide events that everyone could take part in, and I was advertising everywhere I could, but I was the only person left putting any effort into the staffing side of things, since though she was still listed as an admin and site owner (it had been her original concept, so she had written all the lore and come up with main idea while I essentially did all the behind-the-scenes work and building) my friend was just writing and doing nothing else. So the site died. And this was all pinned on me.

 

I haven't written or tried to start a site with any of these people since, although that one good moderator and I still speak outside of things. What I did learn, though, is that having a good staff team that you an actually trust, and who either put an equal amount of effort into things or show an actual interest in helping out rather than just wanting the staff position for the perks, is superbly important. I recently built a site half-and-half with another close writing friend, and the difference between that experience and this one is insane.

[rahzilla 8]

I recently made a site with someone I thought was my friend. I thought I could trust this person. Well, not even a month into being open, I receive a vague message from my co-admin that some members had issues with me. I asked to Voice Chat on the discord server we had, in the staff board. Now, behind my back, my co-admin had been telling members that I had been talking shit about them for the past few weeks, when I hadn't said anything of the kind. So when I started the voice call, I thought it was just me and her... But she found a way to stream me talking, to said members. I said some things as examples of situations where I was confused, but the members who thought I'd been shit talking them, thought that was what I was saying now. The site went into hysterics and I had to delete the discord server. I had to ban her and things only devolved further when I discovered she had taken a COPY of my site's backup and skin, FIVE MINUTES before she even messaged me...

 

It hurt so bad that my depression spiked the highest and worst I'd ever experienced in the long years I've battled with it. I would later find out that this ex-friend had done similar to another member, who would reach out to me and explain the situation. But yea, My bad experience with staffing, is that you can't always trust the people you think you can. And when that happens, you need to let it go. 

Since that incident, I have redone my site, the plot, everything (with help from friends). And now we're re-opened. I will NOT allow this person to be the reason I close my site. I will not give them the satisfaction that they got away with copyright infringement either... But yea lol.

[Cman710 8]

Honestly my worst experience was my co-admin many years ago deleting all his accounts and jumping ship for no real reason going as far as to ban me from his site where I was active too. Then going apeshit on my cbox when I mentioned I was confused and hurt - yelling and raving about how we were all fucking horrible people. It was kind of shocking and I was so depressed for a while as it was so unprovoked and we had just been laughing and having a good time the day before. Put me off Harry Potter along with other stuff too

[ClutchRoadagain 4]

I remember I had a particularly difficult member of a Discord roleplay, he wanted to make a character that could turn other characters in water. Naturally, I tell him to nerf this power otherwise no since this is a roleplay where we have to balance the power of all the players to account for the sake of keeping balanced between players. And for some reason, this guy made it more difficult than pulling teeth. He kept bringing up excuses like "I don't want my characters to be useless" like he wouldn't have busted the balance of the roleplay by outright melting anyone who crossed him. This lasted a few days, and worse of all he kept rushing me to look at his "rebalanced" sheets when he did hardly try and nerf his character.

 

This same guy tried to force me to watch Red & Blue, too, so I know he's the worst kind of evil without a shadow of a doubt.

[MirrorShades 4]

The worst staff experience for me was one of the reasons why I took a massive step back from play-by-post roleplaying. This staff member had a major disagreement with the head-admin about the direction of the site and would not relent, or even negotiate, their position. Now, normally, the common advice in this situation is "make your own site" but this admin refused to do even that. The arguements got so bad that the Head-admin had to leave the site, and has since not roleplayed on a site since... which was a shame because they were a brilliant writer (I'm serious, think Tolkien but updated). So without the head-admin, this admin assumes control of the site and begins to butcher it, changing it to their own view.

The problem with this is that the changes made eradicates any sense of "building a character" from the ground up. The best way I can describe it is that, imagine you begin a level 1 D&D campaign at level 10, and you get uber magical items after the first few sessions. It's that boring. Most of the old members who have been around for 8+ years leave at this point because the site has changed beyond recognition. The ones who stay are routeinley mocked if they don't agree with any changes but new members. When a new idea is put into place, only the positive feedback is listened too and any negative feedback gets shouted down pretty quick by members. The whole place turns into a cesspool.

 

The site starts to routinely experience activity issues are members suddenly discover that having access to OP characters within the first few weeks is not appealing. Pretty soon, the site has gone from about 200+ active members in the community to about 20. This continues for a number of years and then, one day, the admin announces they are leaving. It's sudden, they announce to the other admins and then go on the same day... but not before telling a huge lie, that the original creator of the site told them that the entire site was to be deleted. The original creator, who had not been active for about 10+ years, actually had to come online and refute this. Anyway, the admin didn't leave a successor and the site went down the toilet pretty quickly. A few members started off a new "spin-off" site but it's not the same. The magic is gone and quite a few of us were actually put off RPing by this one admin who couldn't accept when someone said to them "no, I disagree with you".

[Shieb 47]

Once upon a time, on my first staffing job (just a mod), the original admins of the site had left and our host was no longer offering hosting services. As the subscription came close to timing out, we all made a new site and moved over. The admin that was left was brand-new to the gig and openly admitted they had some self-control issues. Over the months, staffers under the new admin became the clean-up crew, coming in after an explosion of anger and ranting - courtesy of the admin - and calmed members, showing sympathy and listening to their frustrations. But we couldn't actually do anything, and all staff were so new we weren't immediately interested in starting ANOTHER brand-new site.

 

By the time the admin stepped down and someone else was given administrator permissions, we were all burned out.

Side note, it is upsetting how one shitty person can ruin someone's desire to run or play a game at all. The number of people who took a long hiatus because of a problem member/staffer makes me genuinely sad.

[Anonymous 234]

We had a member a while back who was incredibly manipulative. They always used their mental health as an excuse for their bad behavior (bullying, passive aggressive comments in the chat, attempting to change subplots to fit their one character, arguing over pointless things to get their way, discussing sensitive topics in the chat and getting upset over rule reminders). When confronted they'd send tens of messages at a time, ignoring the anxiety it gave staff, and claimed their mental state was more important than our own. They demanded others change to satisfy them. Eventually staff gave up and booted them. They made their own site, a complete rip off of our site. Which was hurtful, but there was nothing to be done. 

 

It's just frustrating to see this person continuing to do this and continuing to play victim everywhere they go. I keep stumbling across them and having other sites' staff come to me for support because of what this person has done and is still doing.  And now this person is getting support from others because, once again, they are playing victim and they aren't telling the full story. And there's literally nothing any of us can do because we will look like the bad guys.  We just have to sit back and watch as more sites get hurt and more people get caught in the manipulative shenanigans that come with this person. It's like a bad experience I can't really get away from.

Anonymous poster hash: 23f85...837

[Minx 29]

I think my worst experience with an admin came from a site I was just a member on (at first anyway. Then I became their graphics monkey/moderator). This particular site was in a particular fandom, during a particular time period that heavily interested me at the time. It was the perfect combination of magic and fantasy. Or so I thought. The site was run by a set of best friends, though one was definitely more abrasive than the other, who would often buckle and go along with the former's decisions. This particular admin would mock characters, made all of her characters essentially Mary-Sue's and was stingy with who she was willing to plot with. She had huge problems with one of the writers who eventually became one of my good friends, because she felt like she was taking plots away from her cousin's characters or she just plain didn't like her. Eventually the site fell apart, as some often do and others were made as time went on.

 

I made close friends with this admin's best friend and they would always invite me to new games they would start, though they all managed to fail in a short amount of time because no one wanted to deal with the main admin's bs. Eventually, the admin in question completely broke off her friendship with her best friend saying that she was no longer RPing because she only wanted to be involved with "serious writers and novelists". In the mean time, I invited the former best friend to my game, where they have existed happily (for the most part) ever since. 

It's not the only bad experience that I've had with admins but it's the first one that comes to mind that I'm willing to share.

Edited November 25, 2020 by Minx
Typos

[Somniac 207]

On 11/24/2020 at 8:57 PM, Minx said:

Eventually, the admin in question completely broke off her friendship with her best friend saying that she was no longer RPing because she only wanted to be involved with "serious writers and novelists".

All her suffering, she has brought upon herself.

[Anonymous 234]

Hoo boy. My board ran for several years and we had the usual adventures with toxic members and drama. But let's talk about toxic staff for a minute.

We were a team of four. Three of us had been running things from the beginning. 

 

There had always been a member-staff divide that I thought was weird. It went beyond the usual "some members are shy about contacting admins" thing. 

 

It got worse when one member in particular kept coming up in staff chat. They were passing on requests about things to change about the site supposedly from other concerned members.

 

Long story short, it eventually came out that Staffers A and B had manipulated this player into being their middleman and passing along stuff they wanted off as concerns from other players.

 

Also, Staffer A was gossiping like a leaky sieve about everything that happened in staff chat with players and telling players how mean and unapproachable me and Staffer C are and how scared Staffer A is of talking to us. (The unapproachable thing is not true fwiw)

 

Pretty sure Staffer B was talking mad shit behind our backs too but they were way better about covering their tracks.

 

So. I find out, tell Staffer A that they're lucky I'm not banning them for their shit-tier behavior and the first thing they do is run crying to a player asking if they did anything banworthy.

 

Which leads to a group chat where this player chews us all out.

 

And that's when I said "fuck this I am out".

 

It will be a long time before I ever RP again, and if I ever run a board again it will be something I can run solo because I am no longer able to trust other people. 

Anonymous poster hash: 36c41...f64

[Atypicalzero 12]

I've never had any crazy ones, thankfully. No one's gone haywire and started deleting stuff. No one got with the trash talking. Though I did recently have to let one of my mods go. It was disappointing to say the least, especially considering that this particular mod was someone close to me. We've known each other for years. We've met in person. She was staff not out of favoritism but because she had helped me storyboard, set up and launch this site we had. Was there with me and helped me raise it from the ground up. However, recently she'd begun to drop off the grid a little. Not posting as frequently. Not even posting ads unless I or my co-admin twisted her arm. Finally I had to have the hard conversation. I tried not to be harsh, but I let her know that if she wanted to be a part of the team, she had to put effort in, not just leave it to the two of us. Needless to say, our new site is now looking for new staff.

[Hades101 10]

Uh, not a site I HOSTED, but definitely a site I've long since left behind. To prevent that site every being uttered or advertised under my own tongue, I'll refrain from naming it. 

 

[REDACTED] was a site created some 15 or more years ago by one [admin] who wanted a place to host D&D character profiles. Over time it grew, and it grew big. I happened upon it roughly 3 and a half years ago, maybe 4, and it became a bit of a home. However, that was very quickly over and done with when it became apparent that [admin] was very fine with allowing their friends to torment and bully new and old members without any punishments. 

 

For lack of context, I'll state that I was in a very volatile state of mind during this discussion with a site member we'll call Sunshine. 

Sunshine was very well known in the community, and viewed themselves as something of a pillar and gods were they ever popular. 

Sunshine and I managed coming to a disagreement over the concept of "quit taking it personally" a topic that I created because I felt it was necessary to point out to the community that not everyone does something as an attack on you or your personal character or your writing. Sometimes things just happen, people reject, people fall away, people stop communicating, but in no way are you meant to take it personally. 

They took my idea and threw it back at me and accused me of telling people to ignore their own emotions, which was completely the opposite of my idea. 

I asked them to please refrain from talking to me, and when their flood of groupies jumped on the topic and started parroting their vitriol, I asked a staff member to delete my entire topic immediately as it made me feel horribly unsafe. 
This lead to Sunshine obviously becoming furious that her platform was demolished. She messaged me privately, and when I asked her three separate times to cease messaging me or I'd report her, she told me "People like you don't belong here."

I immediately brought this to staff attention and got the admin's response and was told that I was right that this wasn't okay, but that it was my fault it was said to me. MY FAULT. 
Over the next few years, I ran into similar situations of the admin choosing to uplift bullying from people who were her friends, but immediate punishments to any of my own friends. Anyone who associated with me or my husband was treated as though they were in the wrong and cut off. 

At some point the admin came to my husband and I and literally tried to bribe us with money to leave her site in peace because she had never had a solid reason to actually ban us from the site without it clearly being done out of her own spite and dislike of us. We hadn't broken rules, we hadn't hurt anyone, we'd made great friends with others, and were decently liked in the community. Not by the popular crowds, mind you, but definitely weren't hated. 

We'd had a lot of faith in the site, even against disagreements with administration processes that we'd attempt to discuss with the site admin to better understand any enforcements that were given or changed. Especially my husband. Because we both managed to make arguments to our own cases that forced her staff members to think about situations taking place they were trying to admin, we were on the end of her rope as people who she wanted banned. She even admitted her staff team got so tired of trying to counter our points that they constantly begged her to simply let her ban us from her site. Every single time they were denied because we weren't breaking or even skirting any rules, we were just trying to understand how to fit into the sandbox without destroying our own creations and ideas. 

 

Really. Being bribed with actual money to leave a site because the admin wanted to get rid of us quietly was the icing to a cake we never thought we'd experience. Free thinking adults shouldn't be punished for questioning rules and motivations to get a better understanding and ensure they're complying to the rules.