Lets talk!

Hi everyone! Happy to see you all taking time out of your busy days to take a gander over here. So as you all know there have been a lot of changes around here lately, some good some bad. I won't get into details about that unless they come up later. What I'm here to talk about today is the ever growing divide between staff and non staff members. This can be broken down to a few major points really. I try to be mostly friendly with everyone as often as possible. Of course I realize that I sometimes rub people the wrong way being that I speak my mind and don't apologize for it. I've always been of the belief that everyone should be allowed to voice their opinions no matter what those are. I'm not always the nicest person at times but I always want to see people be happy and enjoying their time here more often than not.

First thing I would like to say is that we all need to be able to come together work with one another. From talking with mods and being friends with plenty of people who aren't on staff, I can say that most members of the site feel like their pleas for help, suggestions and voiced concerns just simply fall of deaf ears. They don't know how to tread here due to rules being hidden, guide lines not truly being guide lines and reserved staff. This might be the easiest thing to fix over all. If staff be it mods, admins or even dev team who is privy to the info would just be open about the way things work and stop calling rules guide lines then things would over all get better. Sure, things would seem more cookie cutter on site but its we the writers jobs to make each of our characters feel unique within these rules. If everyone could open up a dialogue with one another in a friendly manner I think things would flow immensely better.

Second is the staff's threats of bans for speaking out against them. I think we all understand that staff is an "authority", when someone gives an opinion and feels strongly about it maybe listen to them instead of telling them to drop something or get banned. This is a two way street. We as members need to be a little more responsible about this. Instead of going crazy about things, maybe try to be more respectful and open to a calm and friendly talk. Staff will be more likely to listen to things if we can all be relatively adult about things. In addition to this, admins, yes you guys do run the site but putting out the idea that what you say is law and nothing else matters only makes everyone on the site dislike you. I had no idea how bad it was until a few days ago and its alarming how many people over all on all areas of the site don't even view you as humans. There has to be something that can be done about that. What it is I can't say or even suggest but, maybe with the very limited amount of admins there are it is causing stress among you all. Perhaps add a new admin or two to help out. Maybe an admin to manage every major section would be the best idea. Also not having to run everything through Aiyana. I get that he is the "head admin" but really all that means is that he is the only admins and everyone else are glorified mods. If the other mods aren't allowed to know what the admins know, how can they possibly help the other staff members. That being said I will say that on a one on one basis this is the best set of staff members over all I have ever seen on the site.

Members who aren't staff. Lets be a little more forgiving. I'm not always great at that but I'm trying, over all it has been better. I do think we all need to take a step back and understand that staff has a lot on their plates not only on site but IRL. If everyone waited a week or so for things to get reviewed that will really help out. In addition if you see a member struggling with something that you can help with, be a friend and do it. We can all pull together in this aspect in order to make new members feel like this is a place they want to write at.

Also I'm leaving so good luck.