Getting Tired

[doniago]

This is a rant, not a statement of policy.

You know, I grant that I've made bad decisions here in the past. I grant that part of being a Mod is expecting people to give you crap because you felt you had to take action against them as part of your job. I grant that people are going to take Warnings and Infractions personally even though 9 out of 10 times they're not worth the amount of energy that people imbue them with. And I grant that my preferred solution to the "please don't report spam threads" problem was not ideal for everyone.

That being said, when I come here and I see people putting snarky messages about reporting spam in their signatures, it really doesn't make me feel compelled to try to do my job any better.

When I came here I owned an X5 and an A2, I had a real interest in learning more about them, I was led to believe I might get some swag as a mod at some point, particularly if I ever did reviews, and I felt that this might be a community of people who were genuinely interested in helping each other out and having a good time. When I accepted the position as Mod I figured I'd be doing it with backup and that 95% of what I did would be maintenance such as moving threads to their proper forums.

Now I don't own an X5, I know everything I need to know about my A2, I have no intentions of buying another Cowon product, I've never even received a hint of swag (granted I've never reviewed a product either), my opinion of the community has taken some fairly serious hits, I've been called out here in public even by my co-moderator, and I spend 95% of my time here deleting spam. My co-moderator is without net access for an unknown amount of time, our administrator is absent, I don't have the ability to take steps that might really be worth taking to try to get some outstanding problems with the board resolved. But the worst part? When on top of that I'm still getting -personal- crap because people don't agree with my -professional- decisions but won't engage in a dialog with me about them, and when I have some serious Life crap going on outside of this board...

...you can see why, when I then get to read signatures where people snark at each other and decisions that the staff has made (not necessarily happily), my attitude just might feel like it's going to swing into "Well the heck with this, then" territory.

I looked at the current spam threads, I looked at people saying "When I reported spam threads in the past (a direct violation of existing policy at the time, which was easily readable) I got a Warning (ohnoes!) for it, so I'm never going to report anything again," and I wonder why I'm doing this to myself.

Quite seriously, I have had friends ask me, after hearing me talk about some of the headaches I've gotten here, why I'm still here. I'd like to have a better answer for them than "because I'm a masochistic moron who doesn't know when to cut his losses."

I'm done ranting now.