Oh boy. I don't like trashing people but there's no way around this: Mahz is simply irresponsible no matter how you look at it and it drove several long time members away.
Actually yes, it is. I was on that site since 2007 up until a month or two ago where I just snapped and left, I was also a manager of the "Writer of the Month" contest for over two years. Mahz straight up forgot to pay the bill two years running. I'm fairly sure the reason the site got deleted was because the site hosts got pissed off at Mahz for consistently forgetting to pay the bill and always paying late. Instead of doing the rational thing of taking responsibility and using the loyal community to help rebuild the new site he went power hungry and shoved away any notion of logical thinking in favour of mending his
bruised ego. Don't believe me?
Repeatedly members of the site offered to help foot the bill, Mahz declined and decided to use his own server. A server which is an unstable, buggy piece of crap that goes down every week and spits HTML errors like watermelon seeds (ex: white screen of doom). People offered to help Mahz with developing the site/paying for actual forum software, Mahz declined so he could give false promises that he's failed to deliver on for over 9-10
months. The moderation staff even is left in the dark about what's going on (
@Sherlock Holmes can tell you that. She receives requests for info all the time, gets nothing.)
@Jorick was a fellow WOTM manager, he and I asked for the very basic of tools to run a contest--our own section of the forums (a subforum really--takes five minutes to make on any standard forum software as I've experimented with sites before), a moderation account locked to that section of the forums (to ensure we couldn't trollpost other members of the forums via the WOTM mod account), and some way to give very minor incentives, like coloured user titles.
We got absolutely nothing but empty promises. We were then backstabbed so that another member of the forum (who shall not be named) could run the contest. He too was left in the dark to the sheer level that he was incapable of even
starting a second version of the contest.
This leaves one of two answers, considering this has been going on for months.
#1: Mahz doesn't give a shit and only upkeeps it out of a sense of responsibility, not because he desires to do so, but refuses to hand power over to people who both know what they're doing and have the passion to build the community. This is insane troll logic. This either means he trusts
literally nobody in the community he's been growing for almost a decade, or he's power hungry and doesn't give a shit about people pleading for help as he gives empty promises.
#2: Mahz does give a shit but he's simply too busy with work. This would be acceptable for a month or two--not
nearly a year. To disregard a community this long is just straight poisonous. Either he should be responsible enough to hand power to someone who has the time or he should stop getting people's hopes up for something that's not going to happen. Setting up a forum does
not take ten fucking months! Not unless you are either an incompetent neanderthal or literally working fourteen hour days and have literally zero time to spend on anything else, which isn't the case, as he has outright stated he's unemployed now.
Ultimately, after eight months of putting up with it, I couldn't take it anymore. The moderators were swamped, there was no administrative presence, the site runs on a potato, the site's software is comprised of the dying screams of orphaned children that
@Kadaeux hasn't killed in his laboratories yet, and Mahz is either too incompetent or too callous to care that he's made dozens of false promises about deadlines.
I came here to Iwaku and migrated my RPs with me. You know what I found?
Not
one active admin--at least two, possible
three. Several moderators, community volunteers, a warm and welcoming community rather than the hostile venomous bile pit that is Spam on RPG.
The RPG I knew and cared for, that I went through high school using, that I joined back in 2007, died late 2013-early 2014. All that's left is the carcass nobody is willing to let go of to just move on.
If you don't believe me on that, believe
the fifty or so people who came with me, including
@Jorick ,
@Kadaeux ,
@Tempest , et cetera. When some of the most long standing members of the community are leaving, that's a sign that site is just a crippled thing that needs to be taken out back behind the barn and put down for everyone's sake.
