“There is never going to be an Internet utopia where every person sitting behind their monitor wants to get along with everyone else in that specific community. But members of the community can contribute by limiting these public disputes between players to simply agreeing to disagree in private, taking that burden off the shoulders of the admins, and freeing up time for them to deal with more valid infractions.”

But…isn’t that their job? Isn’t that exactly what they’re supposed to do? Aren’t moderators, hosts and admins in place to help mediate? If not–then there in lies some of the problem. Vast majorities of people cannot be relied upon to play nice and deal with it maturely. Thus, it is the staff’s position to set the mature and impartial example to the best of their ability.

Or maybe I’ve just too high of an opinion on what it entails to run a group of people online?

You too, have an excellent point. Role players–we’re a damn fine lot aren’t we?

The only way to tell if someone is trustworthy or not is to actually …well…trust them. Should our above examples actually be happening at the RDI, something’s going to give if newblood isn’t brought in and soon. I can’t imagine it’s going to be good.

Blips on the trustdar are part of finding the right people. When I ran a board with a measly few 100 some odd role players on it, as much as I HATED having to guess who would be impartial and who would not, having to hand power to someone and trusting them now to screw up? I did it anyway. I had to suck it up and do it otherwise I would have lost my sanity and the role play environment would not have enjoyed the several year run it had.

There is no easy way to go about it, but new blood needs to be injected into that site and desperately. I suspect there are poor souls that have been working at doing the same thing, day in and day out on the board and in role play that they’ve completely burned out on.

What’s healthier? A forum run by mods and admins who frankly don’t care anymore giving out lackluster replies and doing fart-all for the site? Or a web site with a dedicated crew that cycle off and on every few months that might make the occasional slip in human judgment, which can be easily fixed (back ups, removal, ip ban)?

For me, the former leads to a nice dead road, the latter sounds like promise.

P.S THANKS EVE FOR LETTING ME CLUTTER UP UR BLOG.
UR BLOG. IM IN IT.

But the site has been in existence for a few years now and a lot of the players have history between each other going up to a full decade. And from what I’ve seen from my OOC board observation some of that history is personal disputes and vendettas between players. There is going to be the difficulty of appointing chat moderators that others would think are entirely neutral. And then that opens up a whole different can of worms that the admins have to deal with in the end. It creates another situation for the admins to have to deal with, as now they will have to audit any punitive actions handed out by the designated moderators when members file complaints. It creates a more complicated system then any of the volunteer admins have time to deal with.

There is never going to be an Internet utopia where every person sitting behind their monitor wants to get along with everyone else in that specific community. But members of the community can contribute by limiting these public disputes between players to simply agreeing to disagree in private, taking that burden off the shoulders of the admins, and freeing up time for them to deal with more valid infractions.

Unfortunately in ten years I have yet to magically find the single web site where this never occurs. Those who claim to have a drama free role play environment are full of sparkly crap. You cannot gather more than 30 people with different opinions, ways of life, role playing views and what not and expect them to ever get along. What you CAN do is “hire” those willing to spend an hour or two every week (or more) in helping you maintain some semblance of semi-order and make sure there’s a definite, strong presence of moderators or administrators.

You have to deal with people if you’re going to run a very public website not to mention deal with role players when you role play. You have to deal with all the issues that arise if you are going to set down rules and guidelines, otherwise there’s not point in having them what so ever.

When you get tired of dealing with it then it’s time to suck it up and try and get some help.

I agree with the idea that if the admins are sick to death in dealing with it all then it’s time to go out on a damn limb and trust some people to help them. If they aren’t willing to deal with the issues (if such is the case) but still want people to follow rules and guidelines? It doesn’t work that way. If effort is no longer being put forth for whatever reason people are going to start sensing this and one cannot expect effort to be given back.

I frankly don’t blame them for their apathy. At times the site just seems like factions of children all squabbling for favor from their mommies and daddies. If I was admin over the DM and RDI all I would want to deal with is creating new folders and transferring old ones to the Catacombs. Sure, they have policies that need to be enforced, but when people try to manipulate those policies because of personal issues with other players I would get pretty fed-up of dealing with infractions. Sure, some of them are very obviously blatant and need to be dealt with. But when there is a larger majority of infractions being reported that are due to personal disputes between members, it has to get pretty tiring to try to attempt to filter out the valid reports of policy violation versus the ones borne out of player disputes.

I’ve suspected for a while that the Admins are getting pretty exasperated with the site and all the infighting. And I think this is a result of people being constantly unable to: keep their disputes to themselves, agreeing to disagree, take the internet way too seriously, or try to play nice with others.