Rambling thoughts of a single-cell amoeba.......

[Penfold]

The following has just been posted by TL in game admin section. I'm posting it here so that everyone who has a position of trust and authority in dMw (Game Admin or Forum Moderator) can read and comment upon it.

 Bascially it's a heartfelt plea for the nut kicking to stop


Rambling thoughts of a single-cell amoeba.......

I'll post this here as this is where I feel my roots are. Not sure where the rest of my tree is at the moment, but my roots are here and I feel amongst enough friends to post some ramblings..........

Personal thoughts:

Recent happenings in the community have been troubling me.

I am sure that OB & I manage to get some things wrong or miscommunicate or communicate insufficiently at times, but at the end of the day you break either of us in two like a stick of rock you'll see nothing but 'dMw'.

We do what we do with dMw's best interests at heart and between the two of us we spend untold hours outside of our gaming discussing, managing, planning and trying to develop and improve dMw for everybody. We've always been open & honest about what we do, we've never hidden the community accounts from anybody and we have more admins sharing the workload and 'power' than at any previous time. So, the recent threads have been bewildering to say the least.

When people attack others directly without holding all of the necessary information or even thinking through the effects of their personal attacks it saddens me greatly and some of those comments really seriously hurt. For my part, OB and I work as a team, we regularly speak on the phone about dMw matters, we have a torrent of PMs between us and other admins about various issues and how to proceed, so when someone throws daggers at OB or me then it hits the other one of us too.

Speaking for myself, I have found the level of vitriol that some people feel free to hurl at me or OB extremely difficult to cope with and have got to the stage of whether it was even worth continuing at all if who we are is so hated and what we do so terrible.

I find it even more difficult to see ex-admins who have thrown their toys out of their many prams and self-banished themselves from dMw, returning to our forums only to make cheap shots at us knowing full well that our own dMw standards will stop OB or me from responding and posting the other half of the story in the public forum. We have no wish to '**** on a dead men's grave', but there are so many people out there who think that half the story makes them properly informed - and before you ask, No; the information contained in this section or even the Section Head forum does not even come close to constituting the whole story.

OB and I are just human We just try our best to be decent people, to not act like pricks and to do the right thing for the members and for dMw. We donate a huge chunk of our personal time to the community each week and we don't get paid for our trouble. I have found it difficult to maintain a positive mind when so many of the attacks describe us as some kind of power-mad, money-grubbing genetic low-life.

The threads have contained some positive ideas and contributions and that at the moment is what I am trying to focus on, but it sure is hard to think good things when someone is kicking you in the nuts all the time.

So where now?

I am hoping that we can sort the wheat from the chaff and debate those worthy ideas here and come up with enough positives to help us plan dMw's future from here. If nothing else then please send me some salve for my aching balls.

OB and I want your input. We want to hear your voices, we need to hear your voices. Silence is de facto support of whatever idea is being discussed, so please contribute your time, ideas & effort to help develop the community. We we value those contributions and we do try to listen and take those thoughts and ideas onboard when setting final policy with the Coucil.

Yes we can & will get some things wrong.  
No, we cannot wave a magic wand and fix all things at once.  We take one step at a time.

At the end of the day though someone has to run the community, so OB & me is where the buck stops. When someone does not like what we do then it is our heads that are above the parapet first being shot at. It's just a damn shame that some people feel the need to shoot first instead of asking questions through normal channels.

I remain hopeful that YOU, the game admins and section heads, will contribute sufficiently your ideas and effort to initally developing support for your own game, then the other games we support and finally the overall plans for the community, that we are then able to draw out the positive from recent threads.

Please post up your ideas, get active discussing them and push ideas up via your SH for further discussion & deliberation. dMw is full of opportunities to succeed, so please help us make dMw a continuing success.

TL.

[sulky_uk]

i still feel and have always done so that tea and oldie are the guys to lead us.
 
i did try to calm things down by posting a please lets be nice reply, but it seems that anyone who have any negative thoughts just decided to stick their oars in, which i found a bit childish.
 
There are many good points in the thread and some not so good ones, i think the way forward on this would be to surf through all the remarks and make a report/decision on it as soon as possible, with reasons why something may have been adopted and why something have not. If people have taken the time to post what they think should happen even if it is a complete load of crap then there should be a reply to each point, that way no one can accuse anyone of not taking anything on.
 
Thats all i can say except
 
oldie and tea you have the upmost respect from the majority of the people here and you are doing a great. :dmw:
 
"sulky wipes lips and tongue with hanky ...... well and truely browned"

[delanvital]

Cheers to Pen for arranging it so this information could be parsed on. Second, I would like to add, as Sulky says, that I would want no other to run this community and you have my support. Third, I know, I blabber a lot, but try to comment in a fruitful objective fashion and hope it has been taken as such.

As long as there is dialogue, we are getting somewhere. After all this venting, I, for one, will look past the ill will and aim at  the good, objective ideas instead.

I look forward to seeing what will be done to increase our base, I will try and spread the dMw word as always, and hope the administration will keep us posted on it - and seek the member's comments and responses :thumb:

[Sparko]

oldie and tea you have the upmost respect from the majority of the people here and you are doing a great.

i 2nd that.

having not been a member of the community for long, i have been made to feel welcome and had all the support where ever needed, a very hard thing to find elsewere in the gaming world.  like i said before in the deabate thread, i cant see anything wrong with the way the community is run, the SH's, admins and everyone involved at the top do an exceptional job.



Edit: im not sucking up either, i leave that for when im at work

[Jamin]

I'm puzzled by it all, I can't see what the problem was that caused such a negative response by some. I'm amazed and appreciative at the time and effort that TL and OB volunteer to provide a community base for us.

They get my support to make any decisions they like :thumb: