Community Call to Arms

This is a response to Mama Carole's Epic Rant

For those that are wondering about yon old days, I remember when I could read every single post on the entire forums, and for several months including before I was a moderator, I read every post on the entire forum and the number of posts that needed moderation was nearly 0. I think that I was a moderator for only a month or two before the posting volume became too large for me to keep reading it all, and at that point there was also a shift from useful information into the drivel that we see today. There have been I think 10 or 20 new boards created for the forums, and about half of those is to section off a portion of the spam. Things like the Hamachi sub-section in the forums, the Herobrine forum, and games areas among others.

I remember when I helped create a server that was open to all members on PMC and a great number of the community was active on that server. Now, I would not even think twice about telling 95% of you that I would never allow you on my server because of the attitude and immaturity that I see. For anyone that wants some fun numbers, my whitelist is not much bigger than my banlist, and 95% of that banlist are people that have never even been on my server because they could not follow the simple instruction of "PM, not comment".

While I am sorry that some of us Moderators that are older than the age of majority may seem cynical, rude, or overly sarcastic, it is because we have seen this community transform from a harmonious beacon of Minecraft Creativity to an island of harmony surrounded by a sea of strife. I do not want PMC to [b]have[/b] an island of calm in the storm of the Minecraft community, I want PMC to [b][i]be[/i][/b] an island of calm within the storm of crap that this community has.

There are three main problems that I see that are causing harm to the Planet Minecraft community. I would say that 90% or more of the problems on PMC are a lack of nrespect and courtesy between members both to each other and to nthemselves. Unfortunately when people have the illusion of being nanonymous and never needing to see the people that they are talking to, nthey are willing to do things that they would not even think of. My hopen is that people will think of others and overcome these urges. An nexample is my desire to log on to every server that offers free op as a nselling point and use the op powers to turn the server off. I do not do nthis because I know that I represent PMC as one of the moderators and I nhope that the server owners will grow to do something better in the nfuture.

Another problem that plagues the community is the theft nthat goes on where people take skins, textures, and other things and npost them for their own recognition because people do not seem to want nto share in another persons accomplishment, they want all the glory for nthemselves. Some of this comes from people simply not knowing that it isn not right, like the people that use the skin parts pickers to assemble nskins instead of creating them from scratch, and the other people are ndoing it simply because they want someone to like them. One example nagain with me, is the fact that I used to have the highest voted projectn on all of PMC, which was my Moria project. When some of the projects nthat hold incredible ratings now were posted, I felt sad for a moment, nbut instead of wanting to rage against the projects that took my place nat the top, I was glad to see something of such quality and it made me nwant to make my project even better. As Block_Fortress stated so well, "[i]Get better, not bitter[/i]".

The last thing that I think nthat we can do is to bring a certain level of maturity to the community.n Keep the funny fart jokes to yourself and leave the spam at home. I nknow that most younger users are still in the stage in life where n'trolling' is funny, but if we can help them step up, we can not only nhelp them here, but later on (think of how important it is to be nliterate when you go get a job).

With these issues and potential solutions in mind, let us band together and work towards bringing this community to its former diamond days of glory when all were treated fairly by their fellows and moderators were not needed. My hand is extended, will you take it and join me?

More Blogs by ZaralithView All