User blog:Blade bane/Nostalgia, And in Defence of Myself

This was originally written as a response to the request to de-adminize me and Dark Seer. After seeing the blog was months old, I thought that I might best create a new blog for it, even though I doubt many people will read this. While writing I felt very nostalgic, and so this blog also explores some of the early attitudes of the wiki to help give perspective, in case anyone would care to read.

Firstly on the matter, I wonder why no one bothered to hit me up to tell me that everyone had such big concerns with the wiki and user rights, despite the fact multiple people on here knew how to get in contact with me for real life. It doesn't really matter anymore, but just to briefly defend myself against some of the comments made about me in my absence -

The reason that I made someone a bureaucrat when there were none whom were active, was so that they could set up the user rights for administrators and stuff within the community. I am unsure if it still is the case, but at the time, since all the other bureaucrats were inactive, if someone was voted into adminship, no one could actually give them the wiki user rights. Hence my re-election of whoever it was I did at the time. Interesting that some of you said you had "the right to be mad at me" for it. It was simply something I did to make the community have an easier time when it came to sorting out leadership powers.

To say that I "went behind the back of the community" when I changed user rights, is absolutely incorrect. I was always completely transparent in everything that I did regarding this wiki, I thought that there was a problem with there being no one control user rights and hence tried to fix it. I really did think I was helping, and I had no idea there was a community sanction against the user, like people claimed on this forum there was. I may have been misinformed, but I feel like if the community really felt as strongly as it claims that it did at the time, someone might've actually told me there was a problem with what I'd done. To the best of my knowledge, no one raised concerns to my attention and so I assumed everything was fine.

Additionally, to claim that the things we did to try and organize the wiki were us just 'messing' with it is totally disingenuous. If the community had've asked me to take away my own user rights because it was a community concern, I would've done so - there's no need to attempt to make me out to be a troll who rolled through the community to destroy everything. We built the foundations of this wiki, and even if we aren't active anymore (I don't intend to be in the future to the best of my knowledge, either), we do hope for it's continued community success. Having an issue with some actions I took is fine - in hindsight, I could've handled them better, but when I did give out user rights it seemed like there wasn't actually a real community for me to establish communication with on the matter.

I feel like the attitudes that are harboured against me and Dark Seer which see us as 'trolls' is very misguided. It stems from a time when the original community was here, years and years ago, where we could all give out short and worthless bans as a joke. Newer users look at this as immature and call it out as such, but when this wiki began there was much less seriousness - it was just something we made at school for fun. To try and judge that to the standard the community currently has, which is much more regulated and rule-based, gives a bad impression of us. We really did love running this wiki during our time here, and I am glad to see that something we created in a library and messed around on to look presentable (god, I can even remember what the old layout and format looked like), has grown into something seemingly more mature and cohesive.

The wiki is 4 or 5 years old at this point, and both me and Dark Seer have grown in that time as well. I am unsure if the wiki currently faces any issues like it did during the time that my administrator privileges were taken, but I am hoping the community is much well formed than it was during the struggle it seemed to be going though.

Many well wishes to you all - Blade bane, Ethan.