Jackstick wrote:

Nice. It's like codeporn.

Back in 2009, following the rollback, the people that truly wanted to bring the site back showed their colours tenfold; the rest watched as the site already in shambles was brought back from the brink.

Back when we still had an honest shot at keeping current with guides and features there were only a group of maybe fifteen that actively tried to do anything.
Majority of which were coasting along to see what would come of RV2.0, waiting for the otherwise unresponsive coding team to say anything, something I am partially guilty of. I did, however, step back from the coding team and remained as a part of the web development team.
The others were maybe a group of five that worked tirelessly on the guides- writing, editing, and publishing through old archaic means, following rules that could have very well been improved but was never done.
We constantly had to wait for someone with active abilities to push the topics around in the forums or for someone with upload permissions to finally push something out to the live site, when in all honesty, everyone that was around working on the guides could have easily bore the otherwise weightless burdens ourselves.

Topics would sit in limbo waiting for a "lead editor" to come in and give a guide a once-over to make sure there was nothing wrong with the guide, this was completely unnecessary.
When it finally came time for a guide to be uploaded, we had to wait on one of two people to actually upload the guide, and we had absolutely no idea when they would show up, when it could have been done maybe fifteen minutes after the final product was posted in the forum.

This isn't to say we're completely without blame however. Should we have included the general userbase with us in our discussions? Maybe.
Should any of us have actually spoken out about the archaic way things were done? Perhaps. Who's to say we wouldn't have been brushed aside, to be dealt with at a later date?

---

Shortly after the brief reprieve we caught from the work that Scar and a couple others whose names escape me, I was grandfathered in to the Clan Chat rework; becoming a moderator and taking on one of the most unusual aspects of running the site.

I did very much enjoy my time working with Goten at the helm and the other moderators, thriving toward making the clan chat a pretty awesome place to be, but it was often an exercise in my already waning patience.
While I cannot confirm 100% this was an issue for the other parts of the site, we were always held back by internal inactivity -- Duties for regularly maintaining punishment lists and pruning discussion topics fell upon a couple at best. Calls for activity checks were made, but none of them ever saw anything.
Whether it have been the utmost kindness from the administration to not push anyone down to elder or seeing the dreaded "you're inactive confirm/deny" private message prompting a response is beyond me.
I've mentioned it before, but the management of the step list for the clan chat and the pruning of punishment discussion topics were, for a lack of better terms, run wholly by myself. Tanksandguns would also pitch in on topics I might have missed, but the entire ordeal was slowed down massively by inactivity, and we could never have our group pruned to the point of smooth efficiency that it actually needed.
Not aided at all by the fact that Goten had some real life issues crop up, and was effectively gone until further notice. (I don't hold him accountable at all for this; it was out of his power.) Some of us had contact with him, but from then onward it fell on a couple of us to run the show the best we could, but that only went so far.

It may have just been me, but it never felt like my place to approach an administrator (rather than our clan chat administrator) about an activity check or promotion of a couple users to cover our weak spots. Due in part the fact that I was just a moderator, nothing more, nothing less. I may have assumed some of the responsibility that came with being the head of the clan chat, but I never was.

At the same time, things started becoming more desperate behind the scenes. We knew we were quickly falling out of a short window we made for ourselves, but we could never do anything about it.
Each time an idea was presented it came upon hiker at the time to either sort of approve or completely shut down our ideas... We were always held back by a greater force. Despite bringing the site back from the brink, we still weren't trusted enough to try and shape the site for what we, as a collective staff, saw was for the better. I mean not to mince words here, but by that point we had actively done more than hiker had to try and improve the site, and were only vetoed at the last moment because despite everything else, he was still the lead administrator and founder, and that's all there was to it.

Shortly thereafter I burnt out. Goten and I had exchanged through private messages time and time again that the more we did for the site felt like we were just putting money back in to an empty machine. Nothing more we could do would possibly shape the site's future for the better, and our efforts were probably best left elsewhere.
I stepped down from both my moderation position and my staff position, as I was no longer going to assume the responsibility that any of them held, nor did I want to keep a rank I was not actively earning.

I left with a heavy heart. The site had become a shell of its former self before my eyes, and nothing we had done over the years to try and bring it back worked.
Parting with the gargantuan amount of effort I had poured into the site cut deeply. The same as parting with the people I had once said I could never be without.