Done. It isn’t much work at all, it’s just a lot of responsibility and occasional stress. Whoever is admin has a lot of power, can read pm’s and basically do whatever they want to to the site. Choose carefully.
Things that need to be done to transition are as follows:
Change over the email smtp service (can probably keep the current one, just change the credit card so it isn’t mine)
Pretty sure that’s it. Everything is pretty set up already. I’m happy to help a new admin transition.
I don’t want this hanging over my head anymore, because although it is practically zero work, it comes with a lot of people bugging you for things, checking server graphs and praying that we don’t have some random ddos attack or something else that crashes the server (like some huge news event that causes server memory to go berserk out of nowhere), etc. Not very likely events but definitely something that could drag me out of bed at 12am and I am no longer willing to do that.
If you are wondering why, I will try to shortly express my feelings. Over the last several months I’ve watched my involvement here dwindle to practically nothing. Almost every time I do dive into a thread there’s people taking pointless shots at each other, whining about moderation (who do an incredible job btw), and otherwise shitting all over the place in a way that seems almost on purpose to me. I have a list of at least a dozen posters who I have no idea why they even want to post here at all. It just doesn’t seem worth it to me, and I’ve said it before but there’s a tiny handful of people keeping this place going and then a bunch of whiners.
Chalk it up to me being burnt out, ragequitting, or whatever else your minds can conjure up, don’t really care. So at this point it’s probably best for someone else to do this. Thank you for giving me a chance.
I cannot stress enough that you should choose very very carefully who should do this and it should be a near unanimous sitewide vote. If no one suitable is found, I will stick around until someone does and make the transition easy.
Sorry if I disappointed or let anyone down. That was not my intention, and I genuinely saw a real opportunity for this place to be something more. I don’t see that happening anymore.
I am not in charge of anything except maintaining the servers and doing various administration things on the frontend. this misconception at times put a lot more on my shoulders than I was really wanting to deal with as well.
I think the new admin should be a server monkey, not anyone that actually runs the site or has any control over policy, and I’ll fiercely fight over this. It’s simply way too much power to also make those kinds of decisions.
I’m glad people didnt even know I was admin because I wanted it to be a behind the scenes thing. That’s what good server admins do. My biggest fear is someone new coming in and abusing power, which is why I recommend choosing carefully.
I am aware this process could take potentially months, so I am just starting now. Off the top of my head I can’t even think of one suitable person so I might be boned anyway. I will stick around indefinitely, but definitely want out.
From my perspective anyway, some of what jmakin hates about the job are not requirements for the new person. There is no need to be on call in the middle of the night for instance or to be involved in fights between users or start RFT (or whatever the fuck) threads. The role could be as bare bones as possible: keep the lights on. If the lights go off for a few hours, so be it. Leave fights to the mods. Leave new rule creation to whoever is spearheading a change, etc.
Exactly. If people start complaining that they still haven’t been perma’d or their name hasn’t been changed yet or w/e just tell them to go and get a life and you’ll get around to it sooner or later.
I nuke every new mod thread from orbit so I have no idea what drama goes on in them. But from the threads I watch everything seems more or less copacetic and the mods are doing a good job.
I think the mod threads could be a big chunk of the problem. They’re like Stack Overflow meta. No one should ever go there.
You’re probably also bringing some of the professional work standards into here, which is natural and hard to switch off from, but you’re not getting paid here, owe no one anything and nothing terrible can happen if this place goes down for a few hours or even a day.
Yes, this was my mistake. I don’t really know how not to do that. There’s been things I’ve been lazy about that I constantly kick myself over and feel bad about, and it doesn’t need to be like that, but for whatever reason for me it just is.
jmakin is stepping down for literally the exact same reason I stepped down. It is close to impossible to take on all the responsibility of being a site admin without also finding yourself obligated to pay attention to all the stupid shit as well.
This is why I have from the very beginning strongly advocated for minimizing and deescalating all the stupid shit, in no small part by shipping most of it off to some back corner where it doesn’t snowball and metastasize across the rest of the site. That suggestion has been repeatedly ignored and at times actively resisted. I guess it’s better to constantly lose admins so a handful of drama queens can scream at each other on the front page.
The other thread got locked while I was typing, so I’ll put it here instead:
I can’t say you’re wrong about everything that’s frustrating you, but even though I basically agree with you about all of it, I do hope you nonetheless reconsider resigning.
ETA: just saw the relevant “need a new admin” thread where this post would belong, I guess, but anyway.
