The Imgur Situation
As many of you know by now, there's been a predicament with imgur, the site that we and many other places online have used predominately for image hosting. The overwhelming majority of images, gifs, etc have been linked on LAW using imgur.com. And sadly, that may have to come to an end. If you're uninitiated/unaware, I'll include a spoiler tab below with the announcement I made in the Discord server so that you can get fully up to speed.
The Previous Announcement Related to This
A lot of members have discussed this on the server already, but imgur has announced that they'll be changing their terms of service on May 15th. I'll leave the relevant links below for those that want a source or want to read it straight from imgur
https://imgurinc.com/rules
https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/article ... l-19-2023- (under the "what are we doing tab")
Here's the TLDR for imgur's ToS update: on May 15th, 2023, imgur will be adopting a policy under which they will be removing images considered to be sexually explicit or pornographic in nature, as well as any images posted to imgur without having logged in or without having used an imgur account
Obviously, this affects some parts of the internet much more than others. But sites and services like reddit, forums, etc are especially affected. The overwhelming majority of images on LAW are posted/linked using imgur. So it's understandable that many of you might have concerns. Many imgur images and imgur albums linked on LAW already have an age restriction or age warning on them administered by imgur. And you can, of course, expect to see those images pulled once this change goes into effect. If you happen to have any images that were uploaded without logging in, or if you just straight up don't have an imgur account, you can expect those images to be deleted as well. A lot of images on LAW will stop working if and when this terms of service update goes live on May 15th
What can you do as a LAW user to prepare for imgur's update?
You can download all the images you have linked in your character profiles, threads, and anywhere else, and you can upload them to a different image hosting site. Or you can make an imgur account and reupload these images if the images aren't considered to be explicit by imgur. This task is arduous. But it is an option.
What's winner gonna do about this?
I'm not going to make any promises about being able to save the day here. But I believe that on paper, it should be possible for me to write software to collect all posts on LAW with imgur links in them and migrate them to some other image hosting site that hopefully won't do this. This would be a bit of a task and it would take some time for such software to run to completion and actually migrate all the images, but on paper it should be possible.
https://imgurinc.com/rules
https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/article ... l-19-2023- (under the "what are we doing tab")
Here's the TLDR for imgur's ToS update: on May 15th, 2023, imgur will be adopting a policy under which they will be removing images considered to be sexually explicit or pornographic in nature, as well as any images posted to imgur without having logged in or without having used an imgur account
Obviously, this affects some parts of the internet much more than others. But sites and services like reddit, forums, etc are especially affected. The overwhelming majority of images on LAW are posted/linked using imgur. So it's understandable that many of you might have concerns. Many imgur images and imgur albums linked on LAW already have an age restriction or age warning on them administered by imgur. And you can, of course, expect to see those images pulled once this change goes into effect. If you happen to have any images that were uploaded without logging in, or if you just straight up don't have an imgur account, you can expect those images to be deleted as well. A lot of images on LAW will stop working if and when this terms of service update goes live on May 15th
What can you do as a LAW user to prepare for imgur's update?
You can download all the images you have linked in your character profiles, threads, and anywhere else, and you can upload them to a different image hosting site. Or you can make an imgur account and reupload these images if the images aren't considered to be explicit by imgur. This task is arduous. But it is an option.
What's winner gonna do about this?
I'm not going to make any promises about being able to save the day here. But I believe that on paper, it should be possible for me to write software to collect all posts on LAW with imgur links in them and migrate them to some other image hosting site that hopefully won't do this. This would be a bit of a task and it would take some time for such software to run to completion and actually migrate all the images, but on paper it should be possible.
On the imgur side, there's been a few updates worth noting. Some of you have noticed that you're no longer able to access some images, that you'll go to imgur links and get a blank page for most everything. I can confirm that since the day of the purge on the 15th of this month, Imgur seems to have gone to lengths to block VPN's from accessing their servers (and I suspect they're blocking web traffic from certain IP ranges/countries in general, so if you have no VPN, but you're not accessing Imgur from The Americas, that might be why all the pages look dead on your end).
I don't know how many of you share my same experience, but on my end, if I turn my VPN off, I'm actually able to access imgur and almost all links I've come across just fine. I wouldn't put much stock in this or even consider it worth mentioning if it was solely my own testing, but there was a small update from imgur that lines up with what I'm observing: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/article ... l-19-2023-
If you check the above link, you'll Imgur's own descriptions for what their plan is for content removal. A lot of it is lip service but it basically boils down to "We're gonna use some metrics (how many recent views your image has, whether or not your image is tied to an account, etc) to see if it is 'inactive' enough for us to consider removing it. Also, all the NSFW's gotta go whether it is tied to an account or not, no objections."
They word it much nicer than that, but the reality is that as a user, it's pretty difficult for you to tell how and when imgur may decide to image remove your image. They have no obligation to tell you when they do. They have no obligation to warn you. As a LAW user, your reference image for a character, move, hold, roster page graphic, etc could be removed tomorrow and you'd only ever find out by looking over that page on LAW, noticing that the image is failing to load, and then going to the link to see if you get a "removed by imgur" message.
"What do I do if I want to continue using imgur going forward?"
I personally don't really recommend it. But the platform technically isn't dead. If you want to continue using imgur, you'll need to go out of your way to satisfy their requirements.
You'll want to 1) make sure you're either not using a VPN or that you're using a VPN cool enough to be able to still access imgur while it's on (routing yourself to certain virtual servers to specific countries may work if imgur isn't blocking traffic from those countries) 2) make sure you create an imgur account and remember to sign into it before you upload pics 3) make sure you're not uploading any NSFW pics that you aren't prepared to have imgur remove
"How do I know if my pic counts as NSFW? How many pics have been removed already? How much have we lost?"
If you have the link to the image gallery that your pic belongs to, you can actually see if it's NSFW by going there. I'll show you an example. If you're still able to access imgur now, at this current point in time, this gallery should still be accessible if your VPN is off:
Code: Select all
https://imgur.com/a/cefkMxDAs for images that have already been removed, as of the time of this post, I actually don't think anything has. At least, while I was working on this the past few days, I didn't notice any massive spike in dead imgur links at LAW. There were maybe 100 or so "removed by imgur" messages on many old images, but my intuition tells me that they haven't started purging en masse yet, and the dead links I found were either super old or removed by the user, themselves. But that doesn't mean that your stuff will remain safe. Whenever it goes, it goes. And if you don't have a copy saved, that's it I'm afraid.
"What options do I have outside of imgur? What do you recommend?"
There are actually quite a number of options. Here's a chart
Obviously, there are even more options out there beyond what you see above. The vast majority of you might actually prefer to just use discord. Based on what I've seen from official discord staff via reddit and other platforms, they actually keep your image forever provided it's attached to a message and uploaded to a server. So creating a private server for your images and uploading your images in discord messages there should be a viable way to go for you guys.
If discord doesn't float your boat, there are other options. I haven't explored all image hosting sites out there, but catbox.moe, pixhost.to, and imgbox.com all seem good and well from my testing. Feel free to do some exploring if none of the above options work for you.
Please remember that if you want to link an image on LAW, you'll typically require a direct link to the image. The link that comes after uploading your desired image and then right-clicking it and opening it in a new tab.
"Was winner able to do something about this after all?"
Yeah.
Winner appreciates the efforts of everyone that tried to back up their images or switch off of imgur and upload their pics somewhere else. Winner especially strongly appreciates users that tried to archive imgur links on LAW to try and preserve them before the images get purged someday either for inactivity or for being NSFW.
But what was I able to actually do? I wrote some code on the night of the 14th in a last-ditch effort to see what I could accomplish. I faced very many challenges. And I couldn't get a totally complete run done until very late on the night of the 17th. I'll spare you the technical detail on this part. The more immediate concern is that I went into the site's database and updated everyone's posts in the site's history that used an imgur link to an image on imgur. Everyone's. Posts.
If you go through your posts with images, you surely will see the changes. I've pushed everyone's imgur images from imgur to pixhost. Then I swapped the imgur links with pixhost links. You'll see these everywhere in your posts when you go to edit them and in posts with images that you hit the quote button on.
"That sounds like a lot. Did anyone lose posts or images? Did anything go wrong?"
I consider myself a pretty good programmer. On your end, the process should have been completely seamless. No one should have lost any pics that weren't already lost. And hopefully, none of your work was compromised by my changes. But no one is perfect and no code is perfect. There exists the extremely small, but still non-zero chance that I may have completely wrecked someone's roster page, character profile, twitter post, etc. And if you're able to find a post where that has happened, please let me know via site PM. I took a backup of the whole database before making any changes. I should hopefully be able to restore the old post if I did mess up anywhere.
From what I can see, though, all should hopefully be well.
"Were there any images that couldn't be migrated?"
Yes. I rushed to do this. There were certain things that I couldn't save that I found challenges with.
First, an obvious but important disclaimer. Obviously, I cannot save/archive future imgur links. I cannot have a constant process running that spots new imgur links and then pushes them to some other image hosting site.
In terms of what I couldn't migrate elsewhere. LAW renders imgur gallery links, or at least it tries to. I couldn't back up the gallery links, the gif links, the mp4 links, the webp links, or any imgur links that were posted to the forum within like the past 48 hours or so.
Gallery Links - these would have required me to implement logic to open the links, fetch every image in the gallery, and then create a gallery somewhere else on a new site (which typically requires a few extra steps rather than just using/uploading a direct image). To put it simply, they were more work and I was in a hurry. Most image links on LAW are direct image links anyways, so I didn't spare the effort to fetch all the imgur galleries linked on LAW.
Gif Links - This was tricky for me. I primarily code in java by trade. And so, I tried to tackle this problem with Java. I hadn't learned until trying to solve this problem that Java actually doesn't have a good native library for downloading gifs. I would have had to find some easy-to-use API in a hurry for fetching gifs and I didn't know how much time I had. Native java would force me to download each individual frame of the gif and then stitch it all back together into a gif file myself, and that's work.
Webp Links - Webp sucks bro, I'm sorry. I don't know a single technical person that enjoys working with webp files. Don't use it. Here's the converter I use to convert a webp file to png whenever I'm forced to work with one: https://ezgif.com/webp-to-png
Last 48 Hours - It was from this point that I got the copy of the database I was working with. If you uploaded an imgur image to the forum within that time, I would have missed it. I don't think there were that many, though.
"You pushed everything to pixhost? Why pixhost?"
In laymen's terms, it's because the circumstances made it easier for me to work with pixhost over most other services.
For the nerds out there, it's because pixhost's API is 1) available (not all these services expose their API), 2) requires no authentication and imposes no rate limiting, which is one less step for me to worry about in my code. I must have hit their API a few hundred thousand times while working on this and not once was I flagged, blocked, or rate limited. 3) pixhost and their API supports galleries. If I find time to go back and migrate all the gallery images, I'll be able to do that via API/code with pixhost.
Metrics for Nerds
There were about 19,980+ posts on the forum with imgur links in them before I started migrating images. Across those ~20k posts, I was able to migrate 181,980 imgur images to pixhost and swap out the corresponding imgur links on the site with pixhost links. After doing this, there are about 1.8k posts remaining with imgur links in them. These posts are largely imgur galleries, with many posts containing strictly gifs/mp4s.
Conclusion
For your own peace of mind, I recommend uploading images to be shared on LAW somewhere besides imgur going forward. Most of your old images should be safe as of now, I hope.
How's winner holding up after all this?
I'm not.
I stayed up all night on the 14th. I ran my code all day on the 15th. I discovered a bug that night that saw me only migrate a quarter of the images. So I had to try again all day on the 16th and then find a way to feed it all into the database when it finally finished running on the night of the 17th.
I ran out of RAM a good 4-5 times, causing my computer to lock up and black screen on me a few times. With 180k+ images across ~20k posts, it took my application about 10 hours to run each time if I wanted to cover everything, and each run tied up my home computer the entire time.
Needless to say, the whole ordeal took a great deal of time and effort. I am in great pain.
The imgur situation affects darn near everyone. So I wanted to get the word out about it. The rest of this post is my thoughts and feelings. While I do hope people continue reading ahead, you don't have to.
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LAW Lore - Fun Facts
I wanted to take some time to write a fun part of this series of messages. I didn't want all of it to be strictly business.
Did you know? LAW was founded on the night of May 13th, 2017
I joke around about not knowing how old LAW is a lot. But that's the truth.
In 2017 on May 13th, I made the decision to purchase the domain for LAW from our web host. That's the night it all began. I'm sure some of the more curious readers will read this and wonder about things like what the site looked like when it was first created and what sorts of things were done to get it off the ground. I don't have time to go over everything in detail right here right now. But here's a glimpse.
Did you know? The tourneys for the Inaugural Weight Division Championships, Lightweight, Middleweight, and Heavyweight, were all overseen and largely booked by me
I've seen more than a few users within the last few years converse with each other under the false assumption that the community booked these events and tourneys themselves, or that the community somehow decided on inaugural champions between themselves. But like most events, the moderators ran these tourneys and most tourneys on the site. I organized and booked the Middleweight and Heavyweight tourneys for the Inaugural Championships for both divisions. And with my help, Vcom who was a moderator at the time, booked and organized the Inaugural Lightweight Championship Tournament.
There's actually a lot of revisionist history in discourse surrounding LAW, but this one comes to mind as harmless trivia to bring up. Speaking of harmless trivia...
Did you know? With this post, I'll finally hit 5k posts on LAW! Go me :^)
It took a whole 6 years but hurray for 5k!
Did you know? While I was always the admin of the forum, I didn't start off as the admin of the LAW Discord Server.
It's true. User Lunaspark created the server and served as the admin there for a good while before swapping with me and having me take over as admin there. Furthermore, I didn't come up the ideas for LAW Twitter or LAW Magazine. User Devilish53 thought up both ideas. I just implemented them. Users come up with a lot of great ideas. I'm just happy to have the chance to help bring them to life. I think the community has some pretty neat ideas at times and I look forward to trying to manifest them wherever and however I can.
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My Own Lore - Winner's Thoughts and Feelings
This is one big, jumbled mess of a post. I strongly considered making this a few separate topics rather than one large post. But ultimately, I decided that I'd prefer to have everything in one place out of fear that some things I say here might be taken out of context and quoted/used to make me sound mean-spirited or antagonistic.
There's gonna be a lot here. And if you choose to stick through it all, I ask that you please bear in mind that I'm not out to disparage any one person or any group of people. I only mean to share things that I feel are pertinent to how far LAW has come and what I want for LAW in the future.
The title of this section is misleading. I couldn't think of a better title for it. Going through all of my adventures and doing an autobiography of my life in RP and the RP wrestling community online would take me ages to compile. I'd have to scour the internet for any signs of screenshots of dead messaging services like yahoo messenger and trillian so that I could compile a list of evidence for my stories so that people wouldn't call me crazy. I couldn't possibly recount all the tales of everything I've experienced in this single post. But I can share a couple of stories. And I'm choosing to share them now because I feel that they'll help me illustrate my point by the end of this section.
Those of you that have been doing this a very long time or those of you have are/have been just plain nosy might know that a long time ago, I was a member of AFW, another wrestling rp forum.
From the day I founded LAW, I actively chose to avoid discussing AFW publicly. And almost everywhere I could, I tried to avoid talking about it privately, as well. I never wanted to come across like I had it out for that place or its community. I never wanted to run the risk of enforcing any feelings of tribalism, sowing dissent between communities, or giving anyone a bad/hard time. I wanted to remain professional, cordial, and helpful to everyone wherever I could be, no matter what community they vibed with or cared about.
Years went by, and as they did, it became more and more apparent to me that if I never talked about or explained my history as an RP'er and how that might relate to me forming LAW, other people would do that for me whether I want them to or not. And so, I hope that sharing some firsthand accounts of my own experiences helps better inform some people's opinions. This is the story of what spurred me to double down on trying to make LAW a thing. This was my "last straw".
If you read the previous section, you would have learned that LAW was created on the night of May 13th, 2017. I still remember that night very vividly, even years later. I purchased the domain late that night and I began studying the forum software on my old Macbook. The thing was on its last legs. My Macbook couldn't stay on without being plugged into a power source. Like, it turned off if the cord bent at the wrong angle, among many other problems. It had gotten me through my entire undergrad career in college and a couple of years after that. It long for this world.
I stayed up alone in my small studio apartment. And one of my last acts with that laptop was pulling an all-nighter and getting the forum up in some kind of working order for people to be able to join, create characters, and have matches. The most basic of basic stuff. I didn't know anything about webhosting, domains, or forums at the time. Yet on my dying laptop and my meager "can barely afford anything more than rent each month" salary, we managed to get something in working order. Needless to say, I was ultimately very content with myself by the following afternoon. That's my "in a cave with a box of scraps" story.
But it didn't go down seamlessly at all. When I was actually purchasing the domain, I took time to needlessly harass one of the IT support guys in the chat service they offered. I was asking this poor man basic stuff over and over again. Stuff that I already knew the answers to or stuff that I could just google the answers for. I was a nervous wreck at the time. I'm sure the guy could tell even through text.
At one point during my line of questioning, during the actual transaction, the guy asks me something along the lines of "Hey man, are you sure you want to buy this domain? You don't have to make this purchase, you know?" And it took me a good few minutes to answer him. I'm sure that in another timeline, I just turned in for the night and this website never came to be.
I reflected upon his question. This guy is paid to support customers and to sell this product to customers, but even he sees how apprehensive I am. I could tell that owning this domain and trying to cultivate a community and take care of was gonna be hard. Real hard, actually. It would be literal years of time and effort and I honestly didn't know if I was up to the task. I had never run a website before then. I had never worked as an admin or a moderator for anything. I had never done peer mediation, I didn't have a ton of people's skills, never dabbled in SEO, online adverts, etc. I had never felt more unqualified for this than I did at that moment. And as I dug deep to try and find some reaosn to say yes, I tabbed over to AFW and I opened by PM's. Not to send a message, but to read some old ones.
I've seldom talked to anyone about this at the time, and I don't think I've ever talked to anyone about how the ordeal made me feel. But the very last thing I tried to do in service to AFW before leaving was organize a tournament there. I called it the "One Night Elimination Tourney". There were some kayfabe implications for the name, but that wasn't the important part. The important part was that I had used the site's notice board to demonstrate that many active users wanted to participate. And the equally important part was that I was told to approach the admin at the time (wassup Kelsea) with the idea to try to get it greenlit and possibly get it off the ground.
The notice board post was a success. Over well over 8 prospective participants chimed in about wanting to partake. The challenge was that posts to the notice board get autopruned after a few days. And the admin wasn't the sort to get back to a guy like me within a few days. When I finally did hear back, I was given a few reasons for why they weren't too big a fan of the idea, with the biggest reason being no way to prove user interest. I was given a decent amount of pushback, but I at least heard something back and got feedback I got try to work with. After some back and forth and after taking into account the feedback I was given, we agreed that if I could demonstrate enough people's willingness with screenshots and that if the tourney was run as an "unofficial" event in kayfabe, it could be greenlit.
Not ideal but I was willing to play ball. I did exactly as I was asked, collecting responses and screenshots from users at the time via site PM's and trillian (the dark days before Discord) and relaying them to the admin, and agreeing to take responsibility for spearheading it before I could finally be given the go-ahead.
Now, I was hardly the first person to want to organize an event in that community. But after I finally got it off the ground, I found out from multiple sources I trust, including a moderator, that I was the first person to be made to jump through that many hoops. Multiple tourneys and events were done before I came along and that's fine. But I learned that none of the people who organized those events were made to suffer through the task of capturing individual responses like that. None had the same level of doubt cast upon them. No one else had to fight through days of discussion and pushback. I came to find out after the fact that my event idea, and really most of the ideas I had tried to implement throughout my time there, were perceived not as earnest attempts at contributing to the community, but as "grabs for power" - some sort of weird posturing to try and poise myself as important.
I was down when I found out about all this, but that wasn't anything new for me when it came to trying to contribute to that community. What did stick with me, and what really got me was that in all the prior instances, it was always a user that gave me the cold shoulder, talked down to me, or ostracized me. Oftentimes it was a well-known and highly active user, but a regular user nonetheless. What stuck with me here in my story was that I was it was the very first time I had the same attitude enforced to me by the guy in charge, by a community leader, the guy who should be setting the example for how people's efforts should be acknowledged in his community.
And so, coming back to me trying to buy the domain for LAW. When I can pull up my PM's and remind myself that the perception of me as an rp'er and as an active member of the community would be based not on the merits or failings of my plans, my efforts, my work, my ability to work well with others- when all of that took a backseat to how chummy I am with the admins, moderators, and leaders, it lit a fire under me. It made me answer "Yes, I want to buy this domain" because I thought people deserved better. And I thought that if I tried, maybe I could give it to them.
I wasted a lot of your time with my story. But if you stuck it out to read it all, the reason I went out of my way to share it is this: I never want anyone on LAW to be made to feel the same way winner was made to feel on AFW.
So long as I'm in charge, I don't think that we'll ever see blatant cronyism and favoritism on LAW. But my worry is that in my view, there are absolutely seeds of it. So much so that I'm confident enough to say that if I wasn't in charge, I feel like LAW would begin to look more and more like the types of attitudes and cliquishness that I was explicitly trying to get away from and overcome in my past life.
To state my opinion plainly: it is my belief that some of you are more interested in servicing yourselves and your immediate friends and friend group than you are in trying to come together as a community to work towards the benefit of everyone as a whole. A select few folks - active, prominent users on LAW, from what I've seen, straight up don't care about the community at large.
It is not my intention to shame anyone or to call anyone out. At the end of the day, no one owes this community anything. It should be each individual person's priority to make sure they're getting what they want out of LAW. You should be making sure that you're having a good time. You should be looking out for yourself. I merely want to remind the people who need this reminder that there's more to it than that. We're a collaborative play-by-post wrestling roleplay forum. And I feel like a lot of people forget to put emphasis on the "collaborative" part. LAW is not a best friends club to me. I'm not here for the 2 cool guys I know or the 5 cool girls 10 cool guys. I'm not here to stick to a specific group or to service a specific group of people. I truly believe that LAW is at its very best across the board (in terms of community vibe and appeal, fun and productive discourse, character creation, even storytelling, and more) when people approach things with a level of compassion and an openness to try and facilitate a good time with not just their immediate friend groups, but with anyone that's willing.
Again, I don't mean to shame anyone. There's nothing wrong with having a regular set of friends you vibe with and RP with. I just want everyone to be cognizant of the fact that there's so more to LAW than just that. LAW is absolutely teeming with awesome and fun people to be around, talented writers and storytellers, and people who go out of their way to be chill with most everybody. And I feel we could all stand to be a little more like them.
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Changes in Management
It's time for me to openly admit something I should have openly admitted years ago. The moderator system we've been using since LAW's inception simply doesn't work for me and it never has.
Oftentimes, moderators are seen as general purpose. And so, a lot of responsibility falls onto them. For your average LAW user, your typical day might entail of waking up, saying wassup in the server, maybe joking around a bit. Saying hi to some friends there and in DM's and such, working up the will to post maybe, joking about it whether you're able to post or not, and then kinda going back to chilling. I'm sure there's a ton of variance but I'm also sure that for most people, it looks something like that.
I'm also sure that our mods don't have it rough every day, but here's a typical day for me. Wake up, check notifications -> check for general inquiries and questions users need help with, figure out action items and requests (private threads, moving profiles between forums (weight class change/enroll or unenroll in Young Lioness Program/etc), help with character idea or thread idea, make sure things are copacetic in the server; log into LAW -> check to see if a new user has submitted their first character, review said character and offer constructive feedback, make suggestions and work closely with them until I am able to approve the profile, check back on discord to see who I can say hi to, handle any incidents. Before I can even think about RP, there's many bases I have to cover.
Mods have to do a lot. Pretty much every mod I've ever had that's excelled at their job has either expressed relief after no longer being mod, or stress over the many duties being a mod entails. Being a moderator historically has fluctuated between either having too much one one's plate to take care of and having nothing to do because the issues are things unique to winner that he must fix.
Currently, the mod team is just CaptainL on the forums and Discord, and Bare on Discord. Even if there were another 2 or three of us, I'm not sure that would be enough to handle all things on every front. Even if there was another one or two of me, I'm still not sure I could handle everything because can be so much for a given mod to handle at any given time.
Having finally brought myself to the point where I can admit that this system really doesn't work, I think it's high time I took a friend's advice. Rather than just have general purpose mods, or even forum mods and discord mods, I think there would be a lot to gain from simply enumerating the roles and tasks I take on daily, and opening these responsibilities up to people that might be interested.
Discord Mod
- Ideal Workforce: Like 4-6 people that aren't me, preferably at least one that lives in a timezone that's not the Americas. The discord mod team has been understaffed for literal years. There are so many channels and so much to be cognizant of that it's just not possible for 3 people to always stay on top of everything all the time.
- Ideal Candidates: Someone in good standing with the community. Someone prudent enough to know default to de-escalation where possible but stern enough to put their foot down where needed. A willingness to enforce the rules.
Coordinator/Secretary/Assistant
- Ideal Workforce: Either 1 person with very good organizational skills or 2 people.
- Ideal Candidates: Someone that's good with multitasking or keeping cognizant of multiple things. Someone that likes to keep dates/a schedule. Someone stern enough to communicate what's scheduled to be done or what needs to be prioritized.
Event Organizer
- Ideal Workforce: Like 1-2 people
- Ideal Candidates: People that are good at corralling others and good at structuring events. People that are good at making failsafes and salvaging things should something go wrong.
Technical Specialist/Assistant
- Ideal Workforce: Like 1-2 people
- Ideal Candidates: Someone that's a nerd and programs/cares for the inner workings of the forum and/or the discord server.
Profile Approveer
- Ideal Workforce: 1 person besides myself.
- Ideal Candidates: Someone that values the impact of the review process for a new user's first character.
Notes: I made this list from the first few roles I could think up from the top of my head. I'm sure there are more tasks I tend to daily that I could think to include here later, stuff I do very regularly. I know it looks like a job application and all that, and if any of these interest you, you can send me a site PM. But please don't misunderstand. None of this is a call to action. No one has to step up to fill any of these.
Each of these listings is much more work than I make it seem like above.
Being a discord moderator is tough in and of itself. Dealing with everyone in a role that directly faces everyone is a lot of responsibility and challenge. I've always been too nice to people to be a strict mod. Having served as a moderator has weighed on me so much that I genuinely don't wanna be a Discord mod anymore, and will be looking to operate in a reduced capacity where I can provided we get more mods.
Coordination sounds trivial but it's no joke. Apex for sorting out the middleweight and openweight titles, the situation with the loser title since user arktriumph went radio silent months ago, the next big PPV which I've been asked about many a time, not to mention keeping a backlog of user requests/things to work on that people might take interest in (many of your have requested a dark mode for the site, a return of the match compendium, and more), And all these items are just things that surfaced as of this year. At some point, it becomes hard to keep track of it all. And having a dedicated person to help with that would go a long way, I feel.
Technical Support is vital. The imgur situation made that painfully clear. Even without the imgur thing, innovating by finding ways to integrate technology into what we do has been super useful to the community, I feel. The spotlight bots in the discord server, the social media bot, not to mention the things to be worked on like dark mode, or bringing back the match compendium are all things that would need to be executed by someone who actually has the means to construct and execute these things.
Profile Approver is self-explanatory enough. And it's the one job I'd want to keep doing as long as I can. I cannot voice enough how much new users have appreciated having someone genuinely go through their first profiles and offer useful, constructive feedback. It really does seem to go a long way for everyone.
I've gone over a lot of responsibilities and tasks that can be assigned separately. I definitely haven't encompassed everything. Managing titles and making sure each one is in a good spot, having dedicated people to gauge community morale and desires, and so on, are all very important things to stay on top of.
I'm sure some of you find it weird that I've suddenly come back and made this massive post. If you managed to read this far, I implore you to look over all the jobs and tasks I've listed once more and then reflect upon the fact that I am just....one dude. No matter how high or how lowly you may think of me, I swear to you, reader, that we are not that different. I live, laugh, smile, and cry, just like anyone else, I assure you.
I think it's obvious that having a single admin or mod service most of this stuff is outlandish. And yet I've tried to handle nearly all of it on my own for literal years. I don't know how many sets of hands I would need to count for you how many meals I've had soured, workouts and commutes I've had ruined, or whole days I've had go to crap because I was trying so hard to do it all. I'm just...tired. Dog Tired. I'm tired of putting in the emotional labor to play my best impression of therapist for users that were having meltdowns or tantrums. I'm tired of spreading myself so thin to stay on top of everything that I burn out every 3-5 weeks and end up receding. I'm tired of losing time and effort to all of these tasks pretty much every single day, sometimes suddenly and without warning when someone chooses to act out. I'm tired of spending more time talking about RP than actually RP'ing. At the end of the day, much like most of you, I just wanna RP and tell fun, sometimes sexy stories. And looking after the community gets in the way of that for me nearly daily.
I just came back from being radio silent for something like three weeks because I had a breakdown and receded. For a long stretch, I was really thinking about retiring and hanging it up for good. I was worried that forcing myself to try and do a good enough job to keep LAW a success was slowly ripping away my sanity, and honestly, it has been. But the longer I've thought about it, the more I've come to realize that it's my self-sacrifice and my overcommitment that's hurt me more than anything.
I'm not getting any younger. One day, I will be faced with the painful reality of having to retire. But this isn't a retirement post. It's a post to inform the community that I'm gonna continue doing what I can, but without overburdening myself. I'm going to pace myself where I need to and I'm not going to beat myself up if that means that some deadlines aren't met or some I's aren't dotted or some t's aren't crossed, that's okay. I'm only one person. Maybe one day I'll be able to lean on the community to help me get around that fact.
Thanks, everyone.
Links to stuff I wish more people would read
Peace, Love, and Sexy Wrestling Roleplay Stories 
