Week 1 (October 1-7)
We all started our Famiboards adventure from somewhere. Some of us journeyed from the old sites, others joined the party over time. How did you find the forum, and why did you join?
16 pages in and I'm finally answering this!
I was on Era when the Media Create drama exploded. I wasn't involved with it, but I
did lurk the thread and read through every post after it all went down. I remember the absolute shock at the "You all have lost your absolute fucking minds" post, and I remember distinctly thinking "oh, this isn't going to be another Era mod drama which blows over, people are
done".
I was on Pipeline, but I wasn't super active. But when talk started of creating our own damn forum, first as just a suggestion but then as a much more real idea, it was obvious we couldn't really do that on Era itself, so discussion moved to Pipeline. It was decided very quickly that the Nintendo forum and the sales forum would be different forums, so the sales folk went their own way and created what is now Install Base. The Pipeline admins created a channel, #new-nintendo-forum-plan, to discuss creating a new Nintendo forum (that channel still exists! It's locked and only visible if you were involved at the time, but it's all still there!) which I joined after maybe a day or two. I do some light coding for my job, but I have little confidence and no experience in web dev, so it wasn't immediately clear what role I would take, if any. I settled on "drumming up hype". I'd frequently post in the Nintendo General Discussion OT to let people know we were in the planning stages of a new forum, and sent invites to Pipeline periodically. Things moved
super quickly, and before I knew it, we had a list of people who had volunteered to be on staff in some capacity all together in a new Discord server (after a failed attempt at a group chat when we realized you could have a maximum of 10 people), which became what is now the staff server.
With no dev or project management experience, my staff role defaulted to moderator. Again, I must reiterate, things moved
extremely quickly - we went from "here are the list of staff and vague roles" to "here is a basically functional version of the site" in like, a couple of days. We required email approval at first, so a bunch of us took on the role of "taking email addresses of interested users to approve". Then we decided that that kind of personal information should be limited in who has access to it, so mods had that permission revoked it was given solely to admins. (By this time we had decided mods would rotate in some capacity, so my role wasn't to be permanent, although we hadn't finalized how rotation would work yet.) Within a few days, we were basically ready to launch, and so I believe it was at this point we gave up on the email approval process and opened up registration publicly.
It should be pointed out that, in some ways, we moved
too quickly. We hadn't finalized our moderation policies, and the staff list was a bit volatile at the start -- we had a few people who volunteered for admin or dev positions who either left the team completely or entirely stopped participating right away, and we had to add two more moderators within the first few weeks. But having said that, given that our staff selection process at the start was "if you volunteer, you've got it", things went remarkably well. I'm especially proud of the first batch of moderators. There's now a much more thorough selection process (which we actually helped implement), so the fact that the initial team basically all turned out to be pretty suitable and do a good job despite not going through this process was quite lucky, I think.
Fast forward a year, and I'm celebrating our first Famiversary as a regular user instead of a moderator. Another year later -- I've now officially been a regular user longer than I was a moderator -- and things continue to run well. The moderation team is very dedicated and has a knack for selecting great new candidates, and the admin team do an excellent job of keeping the lights on and running things behind the scenes while taking on feedback and ensuring this board continues to be essentially community run. I'm proud of my time on staff and I'm looking forward to see where this place goes next. Happy Famiversary, everyone!
), and I just think it needs more eyes on it period
