Thread:S3r0-Ph1i/@comment-106.68.146.7-20190819053334/@comment-2601:544:C180:1E4C:E56F:71AB:B2AB:A87B-20190822020311

Ok, I'll fill in more details. I'll admit that, honestly, I was trying to be a bit polite, and not really lay into things or name names. The certain site and people in question would be the r/owarinoseraph subreddit. They built their own server, and have successfully used their draw power from the sub to build it up to a couple hundred members. However, they have almost no activity there, (usually about a month between posts, and usually only by people who are just joining at that) and we figured that we could team up to try to use our actually active base to form a more centralized and more active community. However, it became very apparent very quickly that the main reasons why they were so inactive is that their attitudes were towards trying to hop on any anime subreddit domain that they could, not just ones that they actually cared about, didn't actually want to put time into building real conversations about those series, and they had ultra restrictive rules that boiled down to basically "You're only allowed to talk about the series, or if you had a really nice day, but you can't do this, you can't do that, and we don't like memes for the most part either."

While the one member of their group was fairly polite, at least to begin with, the leader of their group was also very rude to all of us, insulted myself, my mods, my members, and the way that we had built up the server from scratch over the past two years. He also barged into our server, and initially insisted with snowballing the other admin into talking one on one in private DM's, without involving myself or the two moderators of the server. Luckily, said other admin has been doing this sort of thing since the olden days of useNET, and knew to negotiate involving us in the discussion, and not just cow towning to shiny promises. (Fun fact, their group kept trying to flex on us that they have been running online communities since 2014, thinking that would impress us. Of course they changed their tune of how important experience was whenever we told them that we actually had more years of experience than them.) We still were rellegated to a channel only accessable to our mods and admins, and were not supposed to involve input from our general members, which I feel to be absolutely inescusable and not right in the slightest, especially when the interests of  those members are the reason why we were attempting this in the first place.

Honestly, after a few insulting remarks alone, none of us particularly wanted to work with them, as we could tell that we just would not be able to get along with them in the long run. But that wasn't even the start.

A point by point list about your concerns, and maybe a few other things:

As I said, we felt that a lot of their discussion rules were way too restrictive, and limited the conversation too far, especially with how they didn't like many things such as memes and basically any joking around. Many of our members tend to be kinda snarky and make a lot of jokes and banter back and forth, just in the name of fun and being kinda smug. (Cue "shinoa smug" being our most used emote) This was going to end up explicitly banned. Another thing is that we have several LGBT members, (incl the other admin, who is gender fluid) and we pride ourselves on being able to be a free and open space where our members can discuss issues relating to that. We also have an "educate, don't berrate" approach to those issues, where we don't actually really mind people who aren't really... inclined... toward that demographic, and feel that it works better for everyone if instead of further alienating either demographic, if we let our lgbt members try to politely and civilly talk stuff out and try to help people understand their ideas. However, their rule set again explicitly banned this, as well as banned certain other things along those lines, and we felt that this would be detrimental to those members of our community.

As for the channel layout, I worded it fairly poorly. Their channels that they wanted to impliment were set up in a very cookie cutter maner that broke conversations down too far, and into too many sub sections. On a larger server (about 5k members) for a currently airing series, such as Domestic Girlfriend, it works alright to have the discussions about the series broken down into anime, light novels, and manga, but for us we have found it to work best if you can discuss them all in one singular channel. This encourages the conversation to not have to ping around back and forth as you reffer to different parts of the ONS lore, and makes one channel with lots of activity, rather than three or four with maybe a few messages each day. (By the way, Domestic Girlfriend is another series that they run the sub and server for. Also, fun fact, bc they're partnered with Discord, they're not allowed to have NSFW content... in a My Domestic Girlfriend server... A series that is almost entirely based on how it's NSFW... How that works, I do not understand. And how anyone who actually is a fan of the series wants to run a server for it without access to like, 3/4 of the content of the series and its fandom is beyond me, unless it's, once again, just them wanting to run the biggest server that they could)

Our channels are broken down into a series of three main sections. Each channel has been added or removed based on how popular it is with our users, and if they actually use it. The first is for administrative stuff (which everyone usually collapses) including our mod chat and related channels, announcements,  a channel for neww members to write a quick bio about themselves to introduce themselves, starboard (a user-input "best of" series of quotes and posts using the Starboard bot) and a channel where our members and moderators can submit reccomendations to be pinned for other series that we enjoy. Their layout would get rid of everything except the mod chat and annoucements. Obviously, this "cleans up" the channels, but deletes some very popular features that our members enjoy.

Then there's the general side of the server, with general, off topic, (basically a second general to keep people from trampling over the discussions going on in general, and visa-versa) a normal art and image channel, a meme channel, a videos and music channel, a bot channel, and one that we've been slowly working on off and on where we want to eventually team up with another server or two to play some free to play games and have a little bit of friendly competition. I forget the exact layout of their general section, but iirc they again wanted to basically get rid of everything except for art/images and general. Again, this gets rid of channels that are popular and very much used, crams everything into general, making it very clunky. Also, mind you, they did not like memes being posted very often, and didn't allow even related images in general, with not only kills much of the fun of a discord server, but not allowing any images in general tends to make actual conversations really hard, as you often need to show what something, someone, or a character looks like.

Then there's the seraph specific side of the server, which is very simply broken down into general discussions about ONS, (so that they're not trampled by General) discussions on ONS that involve the source material, and thus things that were not animated and are considered spoilers, a channel for media (images and videos) relating to ONS that aren't spoiler related, and one specifically for discussing the new chapters. Again, this was not what they were willing to let us keep, and would rather break it down into specifically a channel for the anime, one for the manga, and one for the light novels. As I said, since the lore for this series tends to loop around between all three, any actual hardcore discussion would get incredibly clunky between trying to move between them. Additionally, the seraph media channel is really home to a few very tallented fanartists in our community, who almost exclusively post there, and have made that their home, where they can post ONS fanart that they made and not get trampled over by other content in images. Again, losing this was unpopular with our entire member base.

We also have a nsfw channel that would have had to been removed, and while that's neither used a whole ton, nor a huge deal, that also made several members slightly unhappy.

I assume that you can see the pattern of where this is going that our members, and *especially* the ones who came to our server and had previously been in their server, were agregiously unhappy with the proposed changes by this point.

Alright, point two

There is a huge difference between administrative perms and just a regular moderator. Moderators can, well, moderate a server. However, actual admins bypass every single permission short of deleting a server. They can change literally everything in the server. As Discord states themselves, this is a very dangerous permission to grant, and only for those most trusted to do the job. It is sadly not uncommon for servers to be either completely destroyed and "Madoka'd" (so-named for a infamous case of this occuring in the Madoka server) or otherwise severely griefed by supposedly trusted people with admin perms. As for "mantinence" and coverage, servers really don't need a whole lot of actual "admin" attention for mantinence and upkeep. Once you have all of the perms and channels set, you can usually just leave it go and you're alright with just basic moderator perms. (helping people get the roles that they want, steering convos where they need to go, both in terms of content and the correct channel, and disciplinary actions) We are fortunate that because of myself working night shift, the other admin being on the west coast, and having two Australians on our mod team, we actually have about 20-22 hours of the day covered, and the only times when there's no coverage tend to be times when we don't usually have members online anyway.

As for the "they tend to fail" thing, I full-heartedly agree. I am of the opinion that if your server is not growing, you're dying. That is why I've put on my best Sir Kaniye impression (hopefully you get that reference) and have tried to pull out all the stops that I can think of, with tons of great help from our other members and moderators, to try to grow our community. (Honestly, we couldn't have built ourselves up like we have it it wasn't for the great team work they have all put into it) That's why we decided to take some initiative, even after being so badly scared from joining up with other communities, to try to talk to you guys and perhaps expand. We have also taken the things that we did like from the other server, and have been slowly working toward implimenting them. (It's just a bit of work) There wasn't a whole lot, but we did agree that we liked most of their asthetic choices for the server, and the physical formatting of their rules, even if we didn't like the content of them, as well as some bot stuff that we have slowly been working on. Again, it's a team effort, and we're in the middle of some major revisions atm, as someone else is working slowly on making a server-specific bot for us, and another is helping out with our other bots.

Anyway, that's really freaking long, and even then I know that I probably missed a whole lot. Hopefully someone else from the mod team is willing to slog through reading it to find everything that I missed covering.