User blog:Bond em7/Event/Expansion Cancellation

Well, after teasing and taunting everyone for a couple weeks now, having meetings and planning things, it looks like this event will be a no go. There are numerous reasons, which I'll go into a bit, but also know that there are reasons I won't expand on too. Still, if all you wanted to know was the status of the expansion, it's been cancelled (well technically postponed until notice since I think the ideas and such were solid). So, first reason is lack of leadership. Obviously User:Alyssa5582 isn't here this summer and I thought I would run a small event while she was gone to help spice things up and such. However, due to unexpected life stuff (car accident where I missed a meeting, family vacation, wife's grandma having a stroke so I'll be gone another week) I haven't been able to provide the leadership and cohesion needed to pull this together. ...and while I've tried to delegate I've noticed that on our wiki we have a 'while the cat's away' mentality and that things just don't seem to get done and pulled together. So...out of all those working on this, that contributed thoughts and time I'm sorry, but you can lay your blame squarely on me for the lack of leadership and work put into this. If/when we try this again we'll have more consistent leadership (not having 2-3 Bcrats unavailable) so as to ensure it's success. So...while I'm the main reason this was a failure, and have no problem admitting that I do want to say that while making this decision I heard from many different people about different mistakes that were made from it's conception until now. One in particular has me pretty upset, so I thought I would include it here. I've heard that certain people who were involved in the planning and such from admins on down have been gloating about that, and thinking that having inside knowledge about what's going to happen on the wiki makes them special. While I specifically asked certain people to come to meetings (from admins down to regular users) and know what was going on so they could help and push things how they needed to go, I never expected them to take that and make themselves feel important with it. I'm honestly ashamed and upset that anyone in our Admin team from a Bcrat down would do that. This is a warning that if I EVER see anyone acting like that, they will be instantly demoted. Think about it this way...when you're acting like you're better than others, regardless of how 'kindly' you phrase it, what you're really doing is making them feel worse, and in effect bullying them. Honestly I'm seeing a lot of bullying coming from the admin team recently, and I don't like it. People use excuses like 'that's just how I am' or 'I had a hard day' etc, but honestly I really don't care. If you cannot be civil to other users, don't come on chat. ...and if you make the choice to come on chat and are constantly rude, abusive, or a bully then I reserve the right to demote you. I know that may sound harsh, but I hate coming back from vacation and finding out all this has been going on and caused issues. I'm tired of hearing about users (especially those on the admin team) causing issues in chat. Those on the admin team are supposed to be the ones helping other users. They're on the team because they're shown they know what they're doing and will help others. They have more responsibility (like being expected to help archive, clean things up, get new users started, etc) and are grated extra permissions to help them do that job. Anyone on the admin team not doing their job should step down or be asked to leave. So...a warning of sorts to those on the admin team. Step up, do what you're supposed to do, and be polite and nice about it...or step down. Well...now I've gotten a bit off topic...sorry to go into a rant like that about something completely off topic...though a lot of it stems from the expansions and events too. I think the expansions and events in general are really cool and help us be able to RP our characters in ways and places that we don't normally get to. So...for this next schoolyear we'll be going back to a normal year (getting quidditch going again!) and once it's over we'll see how interested the wiki is in trying another expansion. We'll take the lessons we learned here and apply them, giving it another go and see if we can do a better job next time.