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Have you ever been a community leader?

  • Yes, I volunteered to contribute to society

    Votes: 266 73.7%
  • No, fuck the police

    Votes: 69 19.1%
  • No, because people are dumb and wouldn't make me one

    Votes: 26 7.2%

  • Total voters
    361

Revali

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
1,394
Rito Village
I was briefly a moderator for a big Minecraft YouTuber. It was all right, but there was a lot of drama over a new server being made when I joined.
 

AgPhoenix

Member
Oct 27, 2017
332
Super Moderator on Cosplay.com from 2002 - 2005. Drama never ends in the Cosplay Community. It just evolves and becomes more transparent.
 

WhySoDevious

Member
Oct 31, 2017
8,451
Holy shit, that's like, 18 years ago, right?
Yeah, long time ago.

Then they brought in some guy named Sean, iirc, and was pretty clueless. He wanted the boards to be liked Reddit - whatever that meant.

Then since he didn't want much to do with the boards, he elevated some mods to a type of council and he called the whole thing a "beerocracy". And that didn't sit right with me. It used to be that all mods were equal. And then they weren't.

The boards were never that important to IGN. They kept making it harder and harder to access the boards from the front page. And they rarely had engineers assigned to fixing or improving the boards.
 

NekoFever

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,009
I was a mod on IGN for a few years in the early 2000s. It was good fun until the Vestibule happened šŸ˜¬
 

Rad Bandolar

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,036
SoCal
I was an admin for TheForce.Net forums during a time long ago, when the ancient mods were petty and cruel, and plagued their users with suffering.

This was a time before best practices and when everyone was trying to figure out how to moderate large forums. Everyone was jumping from newsgroups and CompuServe/Prodigy/AOL to the web, and the forum layout that everyone takes for granted now was still new.

We were on one of the earliest versions of UBB, which ran on Perl, making the technical side as difficult as the social side of administrating a community.

It was difficult. Cliques formed, sides were chosen, favorites were protected and moderation was often up to the whims of the individual mods. There was no appeal, no reconsideration, and no real mercy. The mods hung together like cops and protected their own.

Overall, it was a pretty educational experience. We were probably one of the first communities to experience forum drama in all of its nascent and myriad forms, especially as the user base grew and changed, which presented a real challenge to those who'd been there since the beginning and who used their mod privileges to try and forcibly keep the forum from evolving and changing.

And then Episode I was released...
 

Yari

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,318
I did on a THQ/EA forum for many years. I liked it when I was still passionate about the game, after that I quit. They both had outdated boards so when some troll ran some porn spam bot, I had to deleted everything manually for hours. And he could get around their bans in minutes. It was pretty terrible.

EA didn't upgrade shit until I threatened to quit, then they finally put up some new boards.
 

RedMercury

Blue Venus
Member
Dec 24, 2017
17,646
I've been a moderator of a bunch of subreddits for years, some big, some small. I think I'm really good at what I do, I def feel like if it were the right fit with my experience in challenging spaces I could mod anywhere reasonably well with a bit of an adjustment period, it's a fun hobby most of the time. It's kind of like how people say everyone should have to work retail for a while to understand what it's like on that end, I feel like it would be cool if people who used forums understood all that goes into keeping a community active and monitored. From a user perspective sometimes things can seem really simple when that isn't always the case!
 
Oct 25, 2017
6,033
Milwaukee, WI
Yeah, long time ago.

Then they brought in some guy named Sean, iirc, and was pretty clueless. He wanted the boards to be liked Reddit - whatever that meant.

Then since he didn't want much to do with the boards, he elevated some mods to a type of council and he called the whole thing a "beerocracy". And that didn't sit right with me. It used to be that all mods were equal. And then they weren't.

The boards were never that important to IGN. They kept making it harder and harder to access the boards from the front page. And they rarely had engineers assigned to fixing or improving the boards.

I spent a depressing amount of time in IGN Chat back in the day.
The day Metal Gear Solid 2 was announced for the Xbox was a shitstorm of fanboys screaming at each other.
Heck, I had an IGN email.
 

Deleted member 5028

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
9,724
I did on a THQ/EA forum for many years. I liked it when I was still passionate about the game, after that I quit. They both had outdated boards so when some troll ran some porn spam bot, I had to deleted everything manually for hours. And he could get around their bans in minutes. It was pretty terrible.

EA didn't upgrade shit until I threatened to quit, then they finally put up some new boards.
I had the same thing at one point. We ended up disabling the ability to add images across the network with a hot fix. The shit I saw in the live feed before it hit the site. Fuck, that shit stays with you.
 

Luap

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,830
You could report them to the Discord Health and Safety Team and make a rule that that sort of talk isn't allowed. As someone who personally had to deal with that kind of talk daily. . .it's really difficult to keep your own mental health in check. You're not a professional so don't feel bad for deferring and straight up just not allowing it.

Interesting, thanks for the tip.
 

Mirage

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,555
The main downsides are the mental fatigue (from keeping track of all the chatter and having to act like a babysitter for immature people) and dealing with the people who have serious mental health issues. It's an online community and naturally these tend to attract lonely people that feel like they have no other place to go for venting their mental health struggles, but man it does get tiresome/worrisome seeing it day after day. None of us mods are trained therapists. I still haven't figured out exactly what to do when people come in and start talking about suicidal thoughts and self-harm, or have meltdowns that freeze the conversation in a channel because it scares everyone else away.
I really get this because I have no idea how to handle stuff like this either.
 

mindatlarge

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,926
PA, USA
I was a moderator on the old Gamespot forums for...four or five years, maybe?

I didn't mind it much, although I probably didn't take it as seriously as I should have. I remember plowing through the moderation queue and ignoring most of the things people had reported because they were pathetic, wimpy complaints.

Did have a number of eye-gouging account suicides to clean up, but it wasn't too bad overall.

Greg (Kasavin) and Alex (Navarro) were probably the staff members who were most active with us, which was nice.
Hey, man! Was a mod around the same time you were on Gamespot...mostly OT, 311Music was my username. Nice to see an old face!
 
Oct 25, 2017
2,391
I was a mod for a pretty popular twitch channel for a couple of years.

And it honestly wasn't that bad since the streamer was cool with straight up permabanning assholes.

This ended up creating a great culture where modding was hardly needed, usually just spam links and backseating.

It did make me paranoid that people only thought my jokes were funny because I was a mod though lol
 

Luap

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,830
No I have not. šŸ˜

3e3.jpg
 

Syder

The Moyes are Back in Town
Moderator
Oct 25, 2017
12,543
in the mid-2000s, I was very active on a Star Wars forum while in my early teens. At some point, I decided I was going to pretend to be 30 years old when speaking to other users on MSN and struck up a friendship with the forum owner who eventually made me a mod. I wasn't rumbled until about 2010 when someone discovered my FB but by that point I was completely inactive on the forum.
 

Mirage

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,555
I was a mod for a pretty popular twitch channel for a couple of years.

And it honestly wasn't that bad since the streamer was cool with straight up permabanning assholes.

This ended up creating a great culture where modding was hardly needed, usually just spam links and backseating.

It did make me paranoid that people only thought my jokes were funny because I was a mod though lol
That's definitely the thing about twitch chats is they can be really good as long as they're handled well like that.
 
Nov 14, 2017
4,928
When I was a 90s kid I was on an email list, and ended up being one of the main posters and took over the admin of it. I think I might have been kind of a dick, but I don't think I banned anyone too unfairly.
 

Deleted member 176

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
37,160
Having been on the inside of several mod group chats without ever actually being one myself, I've seen first hand the mental toll it causes and how it basically forces you to become a horrible person. It's not for me.
 

Commodore64

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,264
I was a moderator on the electric playground forums way back but it wasn't super active and thus very chill.
 

Jaaake

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
2,215
Australia
I was a mod in a couple of private groups on bungie.net back in the day. Nothing terribly special there though. Whole place was a meme!

Right now I'm again a forum mod on finalfantasyforums.net and while activity isn't what it used to be, the rest of staff and the regulars are great people and I very rarely have to do anything beyond the occasional spam clean / tidy up.
 

F34R

Member
Oct 27, 2017
11,988
I did software distribution, admin, community manager, moderator, all at the same time on what is now named talkvideogames and doesn't really exist any more. It used to be PSPForums though. Did moderator duties with playstation universe forums as well.
 

Deleted member 3542

User-requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
4,889
I was a moderator for many years at IGN until I realized I was a moderator for many years at IGN then I wasn't anymore.
 
Nov 1, 2017
8,061
Several times. It left me a jaded cynical bitter person for the longest time. Dealing with cliques, groups or people who didn't like you based on who you interacted with, shit gets thrown around. It's crazy. These days I don't give a fuck much. I just post and that's about it.
 

Border

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
14,859
I got approved to review flagged photographs on OkCupid. You would be surprised how little nudity there actually is. Mostly it's just people uploading blurry pictures, photos of their pets, non-face photos, or pictures of artwork they have made.
 

Spidey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
588
UK
Ran a Wrestling eFed forum in the early noughties, bought the domain, installed the forum, had a few hundred members and it was pretty healthy for what it was.
 

Hilbert

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,977
Pacific Northwest!
I am an admin for a horror group on Facebook. It used to be pretty crazy, but the group has mellowed out over the years and it's really just a core group of people now.
 

Euphoria

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,507
Earth
Yes. I used to be a moderator back in the days of the PSP home brew scene for a no longer active site called Quickjump. One of my favorite time periods for gaming. I used to enjoy being knee deep in conversations involving home brew and enjoyed even more when I maintained threads with tons of homebrew applications for PSP where I would customize majority of it myself.

Beyond that I was also a moderator on a few message boards and at once point I was also an administrator on a Kingdom Hearts fan board during the KH2 days.

Now I feel old.
 

Cess007

Member
Oct 27, 2017
14,083
B.C., Mexico
Yes.

I moderated in one of the most vile and infamous Spanish-speaking dens of gaming of all time: Atomix Forums.
If you guys think gamefaqs and all that are bad, you'd no idea then.

And I'd so much fun with the community back then lol
 
Last edited:
Nov 8, 2017
13,092
Yeah, the old place from somewhere around 2012-2013 until the collapse.

There was a lot of bullshit we had to deal with but I made a lot of friends in the staff I still keep in touch with.
 

RyougaSaotome

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,663
I was a moderator a couple of times, all of which were in the Godzilla/tokusatsu/kaiju community.

I was a mod for Gojistomp for many years before also becoming a mod over at Tokyo Monsters for a handful of years as well.

I eventually moved on post Godzilla Final Wars when the series "ended."