Today I would like to share a selection of constructive criticism. This constructive criticism comes with not a small amount of deliberation on my part. Over the past several weeks, I have been writing down observations and ideas. I have collected a shoebox of notes which I have herein coalesced into a formative and specific analysis based on the observations of myself and others.
Wolfery has problems that are characteristic of fandom chat platforms, and they are blossoming in a similar fashion. A number of people, including several former staff, have been very vocal about these problems wherever possible. Much of what I have to say here is redundant to their voices; Iâm concatenating and amplifying.
After I joined the platform I invited twelve people, six of whom joined, and of those people five invited between one and five other people. Subsequently, five of the total new referrals actively departed and stated such to me while several others left and did not return, without comment. From those who left I conducted exit interviews to learn about their experiences. These interviews were conducted on a volunteer basis.
I was also engaged without solicitation by at least two former staff members who wanted to complain about specific issues that they had voiced concerns about. They indicated that a primary motivator in their decision to leave staff was that they observed significant corruption, nepotism, abuse of power and inappropriate handling of complaints. They stated that they felt their concerns were not being heard, or that they were being heard but dismissed without adequate consideration.
These are the most frequently mentioned problems:
- Silencing of dissenters
There have been incidents where people who complained either on the forums or on the platform itself have had their complaints silenced. Posts were locked, deleted or selectively edited and then administrators or moderators made comments to which the original complainant and the community were not able to respond, thereby taking away the voice of the userbase and replacing it with a single voice whose opinion was fashioned into the defining position on the matter. In several cases, these were not forum moderator actions, but actions taken by individuals who are also administrators or other senior staff on the platform itself.
Silencing of the public voice is a sign of weak leadership. When the staff are more concerned with saving face than in hearing the voice of their userbase, it does not mean that people are no longer complaining. It means that their complaints are heard by other users who are hearing them and then quietly choosing to leave. For every person who complains, there are five people who are leaving without complaint.
- Nepotism
Another complaint I listened to was personal selectivism of staff and preferential treatment based on personal relationships. Things like âI chose this person for this role because I know them as an administrator/moderator on another platformâ or âI chose this person because they are a long time friend and I trust them based on my personal experiences with them.â
People also mentioned that they noticed a specific senior staff member from a popular MU* who has raised a large number of ethical complaints had been signing onto Wolfery with a note in their profile stating that they were there expressly for the purpose of advising, in a senior capacity, from the perspective of a âmore experiencedâ administrator. One person stated they left the platform after seeing this profile online and two others expressed that they had significant concerns about this person influencing the staff on Wolfery, and stated their intent to leave if the person continued to show up with that profile.
The problem of nepotism reaches far and wide. In a system where there is no transparency to users about when and how leadership is chosen, ranked and given the powers of moderation and administration, corruption happens. You can choose to fix this by giving transparency to every staffing decision. Each time a person is selected, promoted, demoted or removed where there is any effect on their power to control or influence users, there should be a notice that is visible to all with information about why the action was taken, when it took effect and with specifics about all of the organizational changes that resulted. Users should be consulted when there are major changes to staffing or leadership and their input taken, acknowledged and acted upon.
A not significant number of former staff members have, on multiple occasions, loudly expressed that they chose to resign from staff because of disagreements with superior staff with regard to selection, implementation and retention of staff based on inadequate premises. And where certain staffâs decisions carried more weight because of their relationships with senior staff; or because these staff members carried roles that were deemed essential to the platformâs success, such as builders, coders and those with ownership interest.
- Victim blaming
Several people complained that when they brought complaints to staff, their complaint was turned around on them and used against them. Iâve seen this happen on other fandom chat platforms, and specifically it is endemic on furry chat platforms. Often this problem occurs when a junior member of staff receives a complaint and either is not sure how to handle it, or they do not wish to raise a complaint with more senior staff for various reasons. One of the big reasons is when a complaint is brought against a superior. With a tendency among fandom platform admins to kill the messenger when a junior staff member raises a complaint on behalf of a user about a senior staff member, it is easier for the junior staff member receiving the complaint to turn the complaint around and make it seem as though the victim brought the abuse on themselves than to prod the sleeping dragon.
Another cause is when a junior staff member brings the complaint to their superiors, but their superiors are hiding behind the front line staff and do not want to address the problem. So as to not deal with the problem, they will instruct the junior staff member to simply tell the victim that they are needlessly complaining, or that the person who attacked them was âjust kiddingâ or âthey did it in characterâ or âif you donât want to hear them you should mute them,â and etc. On a platform where anyone can create many characters and muting one of them does not mute all of that personâs characters, this is not an acceptable or substantive solution.
A third cause of victim blaming is when a user is frequently the target of harassment due to attracting negative attention. Whether the user has a controversial fursona, they have kinks that are unpopular or they simply differ from the popular consensus of what is considered normal, some users get harassed more than the average user does. In these cases, staff will sometimes choose to begin blaming the user for their being harassed in an effort to make the problem go away as a strategy to reduce work. By collecting enough incidents where the victim is blamed for the actions of others, the staff can amass sufficient cause to take administrative action against that user, thus âfixing the problemâ and eliminating the work of protecting their user from abuse.
- Abuse of power
I heard complaints about problems where owners of popular areas made bad use of their power to control the space when players:
- Refused to RP with them
- Muted or otherwise ignored them after being harassed or verbally abused by them
- Declined to take an action on their own character that the player deemed out of cannon or not in keeping with their characterâs lore
The specific uses of power included asking players to leave, sweeping or banning players without consulting a staff member and verbally abusing the players in front of other players in ways that affected their personal relationships with other players, or caused other players to leave the area. Three users who appealed to staff after these incidents were informed that the owners of the area have absolute power in the rooms that they own and do not require any staff oversight to speak to other players in any way they wish or to sweep, ban or otherwise exclude those players from what are considered to be public areas by the general population.
In another case, a player complained that they had read on the forums that staff do not generally have access to a list of characters that belong to a player. When they raised a complaint about behavior from another player, the staff member they spoke to refused to take action even though logs demonstrating the problem behavior had been provided upon request and the staff member had confirmed they had reviewed the logs. In an attempt to resolve the problem themselves, the player decided to delete the character that had been the target of the problem behavior, so they signed the character off and went ahead with deleting it. The player then logged on another character to find that the staff member they had interacted with had sent them a follow-up mail message with regard to their previous interaction. Upon engaging the staff member about their concern that their character information had been accessed, the staff member first claimed that they had pulled the information about the playerâs list of characters from the game themselves, and that they had direct access to that information. When the player mentioned to the staff member that they were under the impression that only administrators had access to a list of a playerâs characters, the staff member then changed their story and said that they had consulted with an administrator who had provided the information about their other characters. This constitutes a violation of implied privacy, since it establishes that at least some non-administrative staff do, in fact, have access to not only a list of characters belonging to each player, but also sufficient information to know when they have woken and used those characters, as would be required to target a message to that character prior to that character signing on that day.
- Selective enforcement
People complained that they had been contacted by staff when another player complained about their behavior where the staff required them to stop the behavior. They claimed that later, when they complained to staff about having the same behavior targeted at them, and they complained, that no action was taken against the offending player and they were given the standard answer of âmute them or leave the area.â Again, muting a character who has offensive behavior toward another is not effective because it does not stop the behavior, it only stops the victim from seeing the behavior, while others in the room still see it. And muting one character only mutes one of that playerâs characters, leaving them free to pursue the undesired behavior through other characters. If a behavior is not right from one player, itâs also not right from other players, and the problem should be equally dealt with for all complainants.
There have also been incidents where certain rules were enforced tightly in earlier days, but later when the problems became more frequent, staff instead turned a blind eye. The enforcement, for example, of disallowing multiple âcloneâ profiles which are essentially the same character, but with a slightly different name, so that a player can be in several areas with the same character at once. Players complained that they had been required to delete or significantly alter their characters in prior years or months, but that recently, there had been an influx of clone characters, some of whom had been there for weeks or months with no action taken against their players. Players who complained about this felt that the rule had been unfairly enforced on them, and that now they are seeing all these clone characters around, it feels like two-faced policy enforcement.
- Urban sprawl
This is a topic that comes up frequently on the platform. People complain that there is just too much stuff. There are too many rooms. The ways and means of moving from one place to another are complicated and confusing. People complain that itâs hard to find other like-minded people because the areas created for people with specific interests are too far apart, take too long to move between or are difficult to locate. There has been a lot of discussion about this problem both on the platform and on the forums. Additionally, people want to create new areas to add to the already overwhelming choice: People join, they create new areas to explore, then theyâre disappointed because no one visits them.
Staff has made it clear that there is a vision for what Wolfery should be in terms of geography, and that there is no room for suggestions that the size and complexity of the environment might be causing issues with population retention due to inability to form cohesive bonds with other players.
New areas should be added based on population demand. Adding more areas just for the sake of âimmersionâ or ârealismâ or âto create a storyâ does not build on or retain population. While it is important for the platform to have an established theme, the theme should take a backseat to the primary objective, which is to bring people together in a shared story world. Instead, the existing sprawl lends a sensation of existential woe, as the player moves from room to room to dozens of rooms trying to find like-minded people.
None of the areas should take more than three commands to access from the central population space and users should be allowed to teleport directly to the foyer of any of the distinct RP aras. The distinct RP areas should each have a default entry in the playerâs list of teleport destinations with clear descriptions of what each area is for.
This is the starting formula for a successful map for furry chat/RP platform. It has been tested over decades and proven to work. I would strongly suggest that Wolfery staff take into consideration the layout of a once very large and populous MUCK that many people consider to be the founding furry MUCK.
In conclusion:
It is unlikely that any significant portion of the population would be offended if a majority of the unused, remote areas of the Wolfery map simply vanished one day following a statement by the administration that there had been a renewed interest in focusing on the interest of their player base in terms of creating a cohesive, easy to navigate, functional roleplay environment.
I also strongly encourage the administrators with the greatest interest in the success of the platform to assess their reasoning for choosing and retaining each member of their staff and to reconsider some of their roles. It is clear from many voices that the time for a reorganization is now.
Finally, I understand that administering a staff on a volunteer basis can be very taxing. I realize that nobody is being paid or getting any compensation for doing so. However, I invite Wolferyâs admins to deliberate on the variety and reach of the power in their hands. There are people who depend on Wolfery as a significant portion of their social lives. For some of them, itâs a haven from other platforms they have left where they had significant relationships, but left because they were mistreated. These people want to do the significant work of migrating others to Wolfery as an alternative to the platforms they left for many of the same reasons they have now begun to leave Wolfery.
The actions you choose have a far reaching impact on the social lives of others.
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) when the staff punishes them right along with everybody else who broke the rules. Sometimes nothing more than a warning and they lose their mind.