Oh boy do I have some grade A posting for you guys today. This is gonna
get long, but bare with me. I promise it’s worth the read.
So I joined Argent Arts, a facebook group that ran in tandem with Argent-Dawn-EU
over a year and a bit ago. At first it was pretty great. People there
were friendly and offered me quality feedback and I learned and grew a
lot as well as making some good friends. A few months ago though
everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Or rather, the head
admin stepped down and turned the group over to a new moderator team.
This
has led to some of the absolute worst community management I have
absolutely ever seen on a group. Ever. Since then the participation of
the group has fallen massively with a record number of low quality art
and comments being posted despite having nearly 2k members. The admins
have posted before about how to tackle the problem of the declining
community part of the facebook community.
But luckily we’ve sorted out the problem now: it was me all along. I’m the reason that people feel demotivated to post. Just in case I might be mean to them. Apparently.
But why you ask.
Well. Let’s start at the beginning.
Hixxi’s First Warning
A
few months ago a friend of mine posted an image she had made of a dark
skinned Blood Elf to the group. I cannot remember the exact comment she
posted to accompany it, but it was something along the lines of thinking
that WoW should add darker tones to the character creator so she made
her own darker elf in the interim. Initially I did not comment. However,
because online communities are actually the worst things ever,
inevitably a racist showed up and was rude to her about it. I stepped
in, defending her and explaining some of the context behind diversity
pushes in gaming these days, to the point where he actually thanked me
for being reasonable about it. I tagged moderators in after he resorted
to personally attacking my friend but no one showed up to deal with it.
In
the end I received a warning for ‘getting involved’. My friend received
a warning for posting her art in the first place because it ‘incited
discussion about something not art related’.
Here’s the log of the warning I received and my response, names have been removed, obviously:
So
as you can probably see from reading that I disagreed heavily. I think
the important thing to note here is that as soon as I tagged an admin
someone came to the thread and started logging the comments but DID NOT ACTUALLY INTERVENE. They let it spiral from a 15 or so comment thread to a 170 whilst they sat there
and just I don’t know. Logged. What is logging? Copy and pasting?
Anyway, so that was my first warning. Sadly I have no screenshots of the
thread, but I think that if the racist in question thanked me for being
reasonable and polite with my explanations that’s a great assessment of
my character.
Hixxi Starts Not Enjoying The Moderating
So after this incident a couple of things happened.
The
first was that I created find-a-commission, a tumblr page that just set
up a feed of reblogging artist commission posts for visibility. I
posted the link to the Argent Arts group as many of the artists there
sought commissions and I felt it could be helpful, and asked that if
they wanted me to reblog their posts just submit to the group. Then I
went to work. When I came back it was to the following messages:
It’s
not okay to post something that isn’t 100% for Argent Dawn EU players
in the group, even if it’s created by an Argent Dawn player. Okey dokey
then.
After that I started to become a bit irritated with the
moderating. A lot of people had complaints. Another girl posted asking
if Argent Arts should set up a Discord server and the answer from the
admins was ‘no’ because it would take away from the Facebook group’s
activity and they didn’t want other people posting there.
A month
or two after this post went up, another girl made and posted a link for
a Discord server she had created for people specifically to get help
with art critique and feedback in real time, as often the group went too
slowly. I managed to get in on the Discord link before it was deleted
for admins because, yeah, they were worried it would take away from the
Facebook group. As I understand it, the girl who made the Discord was
messaged attempting to get her to shut it down, but they settled on
changing it’s name.
Then, literally three days later, the adminds post in the Facebook group saying they’re thinking about making their own Discord server for the page. I mean. Uhh. Alright then.
(Btw the Discord server in general is fucking great, populated by great people and it is everything I ever wanted).
Either
way, I barely posted in Argent Arts any more. My own activity had
reached an all time low as stuff I was posting wasn’t getting any
activity (not just me tbh) and I had moved onto NSFW art in general to
which there was another group. I barely commented. However, when I did,
it was to criticise something. So let’s move on to the next part of the
story:
Free Art Get Your Free Art!
Since
I am banned, I cannot go grab screenshots from this, but luckily, since
I’m literally everything that is wrong with Argent Arts, I of course
have my spies. The head admin of the group, one day, decided to post a
thread asking for one of the artists to do her a free piece of art for a
group post. A LOT of people posted on this thread criticising her for
this, as paying artists a fair wage is something that comes up routinely
in the group. I hopped in and wrote a lengthy, blunt, but not rude post
on how I disagreed with her asking this and felt it was particularly
bad in her case as she was the head admin of the group and, if anything
else, I felt she should be advocating the payment of the artists
therein. It went about as well as you expected:
I did not receive any kind of warning or response to this post from the admin team. This is important later.
The W Chronicles
Which
brings me on to a summary of the thing that got me booted from AA.
There is a member who has been in the group a long time. I will refer to
him as W. W is a beginner artist who has big dreams of making it as the
next Blizzard concept designer and routinely posts extremely primitive
sketches and asks for constructive criticism for them. He is notorious
for never taking any of it. Over the past year several people have had
fights with him, including some of the bigger professional artists on
the group, because he asks for help, it is provided, and then he comes
up with a rude and snarky excuse about how they are wrong.
A few days ago he posted a sketch and I made the mistake of commenting on it. I told him to continue to studying his anatomy.
Then
the next day he was back again, and this is the thread that got me
banned. Sadly not all the comments are here because W deleted the thread
the next day, but I was not the only one who commented – there were
about three other people telling him off. I admit to being a bit less
tolerant than I usually am, but this has been going on over a year with W
receiving the same feedback and just being an asshole.
When
I woke up in the morning I had received a PM from someone who posted
asking if I could access the thread. I realised I could not, but also
realised that I could not access the group at all and realised I had
been banned. My initial thought was that since I had already received a
warning that this was my second strike, however I found it odd that I
had not been contacted like before, so I chased it up:
Okay so the admins don’t message people who have been banned to say why. What the frickedy frack.
Anyway, it’s okay because admin 2 is on the case:
YOU
HEARD IT HERE GUYS. THE FOUR TIMES I POSTED ON ARGENT ARTS, A GROUP
WITH 2K MEMBERS, OVER THE LAST MONTH OR SO, IS THE SOLE REASON PEOPLE
ARE NOT POSTING.
IT’S ME. I’M THE PROBLEM.
So
thank you to Argent Arts. I am sure that with my ban great prosperity
will come to the group with all the constructive criticism I will not be
providing. To those that are still in the group, you are more than
welcome to go and search my name, Hayley Sherriff, to corroborate all of
what I have posted and to make sure I’m not leaving out some evil
thread of my past where I told everyone that if they posted wrong I was
coming to get them. Granted, I am a blunt speaker, and you may not agree
with me, but I am never rude.
I’m not upset about this really,
to be honest, it’s no loss and it was only a matter of time until the
admin team came up with a bullshit way of getting rid of me. I have the
NSFW group which is great, and the Discord which is also great. However I
think that the admins need to take a seriously long look at how they
run things, especially their handling of arguments – punishing literally
everyone involved INCLUDING SOMEONE WHO STARTED THE POST THE ARGUMENT
WAS ON is like actually the literal definition of fascism, and removing
people without explaining why but messaging to explain why you’re
receiving a warning is inconsistant and bizarre.
The group was
wonderful when it had it’s old leadership, but it isn’t posters like me
who are responsible for the drop in activity.
It’s the admins.
In my opinion, the group should be handed over to literally anyone else and the rules need to be assessed.
And,
as a last point, if any of the AA admins are reading this (they
probably are, I know at least two are watching me on DA), you might want
to take a look at this in your group sidebar:
I mean let’s just click the link for the drawing pad installation gui-…
Was that…is that my guide written by me for the group?
I’m definitely an asshole who is the sole reason that AA is floundering though.
