I received a couple of messages in my inbox this morning expressing disappointment that only old time members were included on the moderator team, and I just want to address a couple of these issues publicly to let everyone know where I'm coming from.
First, I haven't been around in many, many years and when I realized I had to assemble a moderator team, I realized I don't know very many of the new people! Catspaw would certainly have helped me in this regard, but it got me thinking of who I would appoint if I could, and so I reached out to many of my old ToO friends to see if they would be interested in coming back like I did. It was a great excuse to bring back some traffic to the site, plus I'm still in touch with nearly everyone on the Council. Hopefully their old enthusiasm for the board, along with everyone
else's enthusiasm, will help rub off on each other and we can start something great again!
Secondly, once I decided the theme for this term would be Legends, I naturally thought of people and figures from the past who would, by all accounts, be considered legends. Not everyone on the list are the best people for the job, and I've already encountered many wonderful midbies and newbies on here that I would love to work alongside! But once I got stuck on that theme, I wanted to stick with it and made a personal rule to only appoint people from the first few terms where I ran the board. I wasn't intentionally ignoring anyone when putting the team together, and I certainly don't believe any of you deserve to be a moderator any less (in fact, probably WAY more so!). It's just the theme for the term, and once I was able to convince some old time members to come back, it was a done deal.
Thirdly, this is just one term. The appointments, like all moderator appointments, aren't permanent and there are people here who have earned positions of power and responsibility, and those positions will still come in the Fall! As for the allegations of nepotism... I'm afraid I'm not related to anyone I appointed.
Lastly, and this isn't meant to be disrespectful, but one of the largest differences I see between the core ToO citizens today and the group that existed many years ago, is that things are sometimes taken too seriously and too personally nowadays. This board was created to be a fun place to come, chat about Odyssey, God, life and everything in between. You may find it hard to believe, but there was a time where debates were
banned because of the problems we had on the Town Hall when things got too serious, and it made that place not very fun to visit. I can't control how you personally react to situations that develop and how you feel about this moderator team, but what I can do is ask that you try to see if for the fun that it is and the fun that it will become. Appointing this group of individuals is not a slight against any of you, it's simply a fun thing to try out for a term and see how things turn out. Guess what? It might fail miserably, and I will shoulder all that blame myself. But if we don't give it a chance and try to have fun with it, it's going to make it difficult for it to be a success.
Don't forget. This is the same group that invented the ToO Story Arc. And I wouldn't count us out... just yet.
It's great to see so many names from the past. This should be an unique term! About half the list looks like there's a significant representation from the first few mod and admin teams in the ToO's history, which is very fun!
