A Letter to the Admins

Ardent

your blood on my teeth
Original poster
FOLKLORE MEMBER
Invitation Status
  1. Not accepting invites at this time
Posting Speed
  1. Multiple posts per week
  2. 1-3 posts per week
  3. One post per week
  4. Slow As Molasses
Online Availability
12NN-4PM, 7PM~
Writing Levels
  1. Intermediate
  2. Adept
  3. Advanced
  4. Adaptable
Preferred Character Gender
  1. No Preferences
Genres
Horror, Dark Fantasy, Modern
I think it was maybe a year or two ago when I started to notice Iwaku's steady decline. I hoped it was just a passing phase, but I've seen role-play sites die before. I know all the tell-tale signs.

General Chatting is bare. There are no new staff-made resources, no new "official" events(1). There are bugs(2)--a lot of them, and no ETA on when they're getting fixed. It feels like some of the staff members and administrators have abandoned ship. Or at least they haven't had much of a presence. Lack of visibility gives the impression that they haven't been active. Nobody knows what's going on. Not even the staff members, from what I hear.

We're all left in the dark. Iwaku is dying. And it sucks.

This likely isn't news to most people, but I'm hoping that in getting this thread out there, we can start to see some change. I get that the admins probably have some stuff going on in real life that I know nothing about. But, if that's the case, why not inform people about it? Why not hire new admins? I hear Iwaku is understaffed too. Some of my friends have applied, by the way, and they're pretty eager to get some work done. (Vouching for @Kuno @Bubbly Potions @MiharuAya ) So why not hire them?

I know that we, as members, can do our part in keeping Iwaku alive. Whether it be through posting new topics in GC, hosting events, or just starting role-plays. But it gets pretty discouraging considering the state of Iwaku right now.

(1) Regarding events: I mean, sure, we can make our own events, but it's just not the same. When Iwaku had staff-hosted events, there were cool prizes. Like the special username colors, banners, subforums. The staff hosting those events also just had more experience, or they received guidance from someone who did. Events coming from a staff member also feel more "official", you know?

(2) Regarding the bugs: There’s a specific one that’s been bugging me (pardon the pun). Since the update, we lost google fonts. Which is fine. I mean, it’s just two dollars and I was happy to support in any way I could. What bothers me is that there isn’t some kind of warning on the upgrade page. What if someone buys an upgrade hoping they’ll get those google fonts, only to realize it isn’t working?

And that’s pretty much all I have to say. I hope the admins/moderators don’t take this the wrong way. And to the staff members who are still actively working on the site, I appreciate all your hard work (as I’m sure many other members do). In the end, I’m just a concerned member.

Truth be told, I was a staffie once, a few years back. And from my experience, Iwaku’s admins are the most capable group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s no site quite like this one. The rules here are reasonable, the admins have many years of experience, and they’re all very nice people. I love the community you worked so hard to create. It’s really hard to find a site like this one. I've tried. And I just don’t want to see Iwaku die.
 
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Your worries are 100% valid. To be honest, at this point this is where I would chose to shut a site down -- except weirdly enough all the crappy things that've happened to prevent me from being a good admin in the past year are exactly why I am trying really hard to hang in there, and I really hope Iwaku can too. @_@

I can't tell you what Kitti and Astaroth are going through right now, but I can at least break down what's happening with me. I've been posting updates on my patreon and my facebook but I know most peeps don't look at those.

SO, 2020 was going to be our big come back year. We had plans to do our big 15 year birthday celebration, events and everything -- then the pandemic happened and all the protests and really heavy shit. Iwaku is really good at taking care of itself for a couple months, so I didn't worry about it. Sometimes we just have a bad year, it's really not the first time it's happened.

In June last year my mom started getting really sick and was going blind, so we moved her and my dad out here. And then just as we were getting settled with that she got gangrene in her foot and had to spent some time in the hospital. This shook things up a lot in my house but we settled into a decent routine, and things were getting better. Nov, Dec, January I did have charps going regularly and then I was trying to do this cool streaming thing with Sims and Iwaku, with plans to do some neat community events. I was trying to get back into the swing of things, chatting with Astaroth and Kitti so we could make some cool 2021 plans and get back on track. We had an update scheduled to pop us off.

At the end of Feb?March my mom had two heart attacks and two strokes in the span of three days and for a week there we thought that she wasn't going to make it. Against all odds she actually survived, though now she has her entire left side paralyzed. She was in physical therapy for about two and a half weeks or so before we got her home. There was a lot of meetings with nurses and therapists and learning how to do her home care.

I had mom home for a week and then my sister-in- law died. Overnight kidney failure, just gone. She had two kids 9 and 7 that now belong to me and my hubbo. The care of his parents who have disabilities also fall to us. All of April was me struggling to handle all of this awful garbage at the same time and keep two families alive and fed and from falling apart.

And it LITERALLY broke me. @_@ My foot started swelling up really bad and weird, so I went to the doctor about it. AT one visit my blood pressure was so high they thought -I- was about to have a stroke and shipped me to the ER. I spent the night in the hospital, and basically all of May has been doc appointments and tests and getting me set up on meds to make sure I'm okay. Luckily so far it just seems to be stress induced hypertension, and I don't appear to have any other hidden ailments. They're sending me to a counselor to help with my mental things and stress management. Yesterday was my checkup appointment and my doc says things look good so far.

It's been a lot. And in the past couple months I have discovered that if you stop doing the things you love and are passionate about, and let your stress levels get super high and your mental state turn into a going-thru-the-motions robot that you can literally break your own heart. >_> Roleplaying and running communities has always been my therapy, and gives me inspiration and joy and a reason to keep going. Hanging out with you guys and watch people being creative and having fun is my life's blood. I did not realize how important it actually was to my health until these past couple of weeks.


Sooooo, with all that said, I don't know what's going to happen next or how fast Iwaku will turn back around. I can promise it's NOT going to die and it WILL see another era of badassery and activity. The bills are still getting paid, and now that my scarier doc appointments are over I am going to try and inject some daily Iwaku back into my life. I'm finally back at a point where I can do another update and some charps. So far this year every time I've tried to get something done for Iwaku something BAD would happen shortly after, so I'm just a little scared. T_T

Please keep hoping and having faith in Iwaku. ;_; Iwaku IS quite special thanks to all of you guys that've hung in there and stuck around even during our crappy years. This period is just lasting a lil longer than usual.
 
When Diana says can't, of course, she means she's not GOING to speak for us. I just wanted that clear in case anyone was concerned she wasn't in contact with either of us. Don't worry, Diana and I talk daily.

We did have an update about Diana's life stuff a few times, but we unfortunately only posted it on the Discord due to it being just links to the post she made off-site on her Patreon. We absolutely should have thought to also post it on the forum and that's our bad.

So here's what's been going on with me. As some people know, I have MS (multiple sclerosis) which I was diagnosed with in 2017 after I first became an admin. That involved several hospital trips, the worst of which was directly after Jorick resigned and related to stress from his resignation and the aftermath. I won't go into more detail on that other than what happened really depressed me and made me have very complicated feelings about being publicly active on the site for a long time. I was spiraling.

I finally got over all of that around the beginning of last year and started to heal and be around again, but my health issues limit what I can do. And then I was dealing with quarantine, with a spouse whose alcoholism got out of control during quarantine and caused him to have a car crash and brain injury--and also lose his job, our insurance, and for a short period of time our marriage. Despite all that, I was hanging in and doing what I could.

However, Kitti has not been around for her own personal reasons. I have been in touch with her sparingly through FB, but she hasn't been active here for months. And in the course of everything going on with me and Diana, our number of staff is low and we're constantly putting out fires in our personal lives. We DO handle serious issues when they arise, but some of the minor day to day things we definitely have been letting get away from us. I actually have been thinking of talking to Diana about the possibility of closing the site since her hospital trip, but held off because I didn't want to add more stress on her plate.

If Diana is still not ready to give up, neither am I, but we will definitely have discussions going forward about how best to prevent some of the issues you've acknowledged.
 
@Diana @Astaroth

Thanks for your response, and I'm sorry to hear about what happened/what's been happening. I can only hope that things will get better for you guys from now on.

In the meantime, I'll do what I can to hopefully keep things active. I love this website so if you guys aren't giving up on it, then I'm sticking around. :-)
 
bRiNg bAcK gOoGLe FoNtS nOw

I kid, I kid.

On a more serious note: I think we can all agree that communication is key. Like Adrian said - being left in the dark is the worst, and when you see the lack of action and presence - both of admins and mods - on the site, it does draw concern about the site's well-being to members. Trust me. I've been on a couple of sites that have been inevitably closed or abandoned due to inactivity. All the familiar signs were here, and I was w o r r i e d.

Thank you guys so much for finding the time to respond and let us know what's going on. I'm very sorry to hear your personal lives have been...less than ideal, to sugarcoat it greatly. I've had my own health battles recently, and while they've been nowhere close on the scale of troubles y'all have had, I can 100% empathize with how much it can take your mind away from things. Keep up the hard work! We really appreciate you guys.

...also hmu for a mod position when you can, pls and thx. xoxo
 
Oops I've also been a mess IRL.
Some of it is exciting stuff (higher education baby) and some of it is more personal stuff and it's a secret but I'm terrible about talking about my personal life.

I do want to apologize for not being around more, I know it can be really hard to watch when you want to keep something afloat but you can't grab one of us and help it along. I appreciate people loving Iwaku and wanting to push to keep it going because I do too! There's a lot of things to be done so some of the bigger changes will need to be looked at and it might take a little longer to see these things in motion BUT I think things should start happening. You've all been so good and especially the staff bless them honestly. The staff have been absolutely invaluable while the admins have been having a rough go and I want everyone to know that they are amazing.
 
It is a real concern to see the lack of presence from the staff, but I need to say something I think is equally important: yeah communication is of the highest importance more often than anything else, online presence on the other hand isn't just up to the staff. That is a matter for everyone to attend to. Not pointing fingers, after all this is my first time back in probably well over two years, so it isn't much my place to even speak out on it.

But anyway, it is up to us all, staff and members, as a whole to keep things running. Staff have that job in a technical sense, keeping stuff from breaking, paying the bills, etc., but we as members have a duty to keep the general activity flowing. Again, I really have no right to say it, as you could say when things went to hell in life, I abandoned Iwaku, abandoned discord, and almost all of of social life online. Still, we gotta keep things moving in all areas. Without us members, the staff are wasting their money on a dead site, and we can't have them wasting their time, effort and money like that. For those of us here like me who don't have the money to donate, our role in it is limited, but even the little we can do, being active, posting, it can help keep the site going. Sharing the site can help too, though again, people like me who have no friends, are really at the mercy or hit or miss with sharing because we don't have anyone for sure who roleplays. That being said, I think us members can do more right now to keep things going, than anyone else, because without us, our mods and admins are putting in their sweat and tears to keep something dead afloat.

As much as it pains me to say, I'm the least qualified for this with my superb lack of any creativity over the last year and a half. But I believe the staff are doing a great job considering. I mean, yeah, things could be better, but things could also be much worse. It could be a single admin and maybe two or three mods putting money into Iwaku, only for everyone else to disappear. I believe that this won't last forever, we just need to get the site back out there, reaching the audiences that so crave such a place. I have hope for this site, it's the only site I actually have a desire to be on, and I believe it'll keep on going, no matter what happens ^-^

Sorry if this sounds a little negative, I don't mean it that way, I just can't seem to say it properly how I want to
 
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Reactions: Astaroth and Diana
I disagree that the members have a "duty" to keep the activity flowing; most people would see a dead site and just choose to go somewhere else. It's not our website, we don't own Iwaku. The members you still see here on this website are the ones keeping the activity flowing despite the lack of admin presence, despite the fact that we have no duty to do so. We do this because we love Iwaku, and we don't want to see it die.

Furthermore, many members of this website are also donators; that's not to say that the admins aren't the ones who are putting in most of the money to keep the website afloat, because they definitely are. I just want to point out that the donators are also contributing in their own way. Because again, they love Iwaku, and they don't want to see it die.

I'm not trying to deflect responsibility. But there really isn't much that ordinary members can do without the administrators. We could try everything within our capacities; but in the end, if the admins aren't invested, then there is no point. The admins could pull the plug at any time (and that was actually briefly considered, as Astaroth mentioned), and all that work would be lost. That is why we are concerned.

Things could indeed be worse, but you could really say that about anything. It could be worse, but it's also been pretty bad. And this isn't just my own observation. In truth, I'm also speaking on behalf of certain members in Iwaku, some of whom are also staff. The point of the letter is to address the lack of presence from the admins and some of the staff members over the past year or so, as well as to find out what has been going on behind the scenes. And again, hopefully, to see some change.
 
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The important thing is that we are not shutting down! Yesterday we posted a staff review with goals and hired three new Intern staffers. Earlier this week, Diana scheduled several upcoming chat roleplays. Kitti is able to be around again and we've been getting a lot done.

I know there's been some frustration (quite understandably) but let's try to keep discussion productive, and any criticism constructive and focused on administration.

Staff applications are still open for those who want to help out. A lot of the applications we looked at recently were fairly old, so if anyone has applied in the past and not heard back, consider reapplying to let us know you're still interested.
 
I've been running roleplay communities for over 20 years and Iwaku has been alive for 15 of those. 8D The only thing that's going to kill Iwaku is me hitting the delete button.

But to be for serious, boosting life and activity into a community is an easy fix when the people there are passionate and have a few minutes to post around! The bad years were when we had a hive of toxic behaviors and cliques of mean people that were giving Iwaku bad feels. Changing the entire mood and vibe of a site and fixing relationships and trust is haaaaaaaard.

I will take content building and making new friends and posting sprees anyday!~ Ò◇Ó
 
I stand ready and willing to run for the role of Admin, on a platform of doing absolutely nothing until my inevitable removal from office.

This is what the forum needs.

GRUMPY FOR PRESIDENT 8D