User blog comment:Ildsjel/An Open Letter/@comment-5108994-20190818063621

Honestly, I was never going to respond to this blog. Jaye had, before posting this live for the rest of the community to see, linked a document of it to myself, Time, and Oli just to let us know that she was posting it. Before she did so in the conversation initially had I had voiced my concerns about how the blog may come across, issues I myself had with it, things of the sort. Jaye responded to me then and there I said my piece and thus I didn’t feel a need to post a comment, as I was just going to sit back and see how everyone else felt about the blog. Am I surprised of how things played out? No not at all, and I can explain why.

I think it be most important for me to address the elephant in the room and say, I can recognize that you didn’t mean any ill will when creating the blog above. And from what I’m seeing, while maybe not the exact responses you were looking for, the blog itself was successful. It is creating the conversation that needs to be had, and the conversation where all opinions need to be heard. Unfortunately where my issue with this stands is, I think it only fair that everyone be allowed to voice their opinions (albeit perhaps in a calmer manner moving forward please everyone <3) without someone creating a new thread just to talk negatively about the opinions shared. I don’t want to harp on this topic for too long because what’s been said already has been rectified to the best of my knowledge, but can we please respect any and all opinions coming in before and after my comment, yes even the ones we may not agree with ourselves.

Like some have mentioned before my comment, we are an aging wiki and while that may not be the sole or even the biggest reason behind diminishing activity, it is certainly a prominent one. I feel like another reason behind diminishing activity could also be simply that the Harry Potter universe itself is aging, and while there has been recent instalments coming out they aren’t as directly connected to the events that we role-play here on the wiki. Between new users appearing few and far in between, a community that is to stay the least hard to crack and feel accepted in (as many of us - myself included - still feel at times), and older users leaving to tackle big accomplishments each and every day in their desired career path, it can be hard to keep the community as big and grand as once was.

What Time said about a lack of motivation and energy for things on the wiki is a very true statement, and it is one the admin team has been trying to combat since I was first brought on as a rollback if I remember correctly, if not the first time then it certainly was the second time. I’d like to think steps that have been made recently towards hopefully getting people more motivated like switching quidditch out completely and replacing it with something new and exciting in the coming IC years will help with this and perhaps light a spark in everyone, but only time and patients will tell if it is to work.

On the other hand however, there is such thing as perhaps having too much motivation to the point where one is literally burning themselves out. I hate to make my response personal, but towards the end of June I had started my first full-time job and was still consistently trying to maintain edits, roleplays, things of the sort. During the first week things were honestly great and I was balancing it well, at least I think I was. It wasn’t until the second week when I was constantly having dizzy spells and I could notice a decline that I realized I needed to take a step back from the wiki and focus on my job. As much of a job as being on the administration team is, unfortunately it does not pay my rent bills and I shouldn’t have to make myself sick just to balance both. This is a really long and complicated way of me saying I’d rather those with the motivation for the wiki to take the necessary time away they need, before they too burn themselves out because truthfully there was a point in time I was worried for my own health.

Now to discuss how some feel that the admin team is directly being called out or “attacked”, I can honestly understand why it comes off as the admin team being the ones at fault, but I also understand that wasn’t your intentions. I mean the mention of having to undergo re-election makes it seem as though the admin team isn’t doing enough, which isn’t necessarily fair on us when events and new additions can only run smoothly with the help of the entire community guiding and accepting it into the wiki. Quidditch was tried time and time again, but the motivation simply was not there for users to actively post. This isn’t to call out just regular users, because 1) admins and regular users alike sign up and don’t participate despite the commitment they know quidditch is 2) a busy schedule often led to games carrying on for two weeks, or perhaps not finishing at all.

Moving on because now that I’ve had time to sit and think since you first showed me Jaye, I do actually want to have a discussion about the blog and some suggestions you made because I do think some of what was suggested may actually be worth giving a shot moving forward into the future of DARP. I do quite enjoy the thought of perhaps changing up the theme of the wiki, proving a new background and some colours could make it feel more fresh to older users who have perhaps been looking at the same shade of yellow for x amount of years. I personally really like Jay’s suggestion of matching it to who wins house cup (though I imagine it would be in terms of house points now that quidditch is out of the picture for a little while). But by doing that it can also bring some life into classes, competing to get house colours on the wiki seems like a fun and interesting twist on what would normally just be seeing who posts the most.

The idea of the Big Sibling/Little Sibling program is actually a fun and helpful way in which we can keep new users invested in the community while also giving them one person in the community they can feel safe going to to ask questions, regardless of how minor/major the new user feels the question may be.

There are more things for sure that can be addressed but I fear this is already getting rather long so for the sake of everyone not needing to scroll a mile, I’ll finish this off by saying if anyone is at all offended by anything I said I in no way meant any negatives towards anything or anyone and I apologize if it came across as such. Please let me know if something I said rubbed someone the wrong way and I’ll do my best to remedy the situation because that truly was not my intentions what so ever.