Donnie Smith
Your Sick Uncle Morti
As many of you are doubtlessly aware, I am one of the Admins on www.reptilehaven.net formerly known as www.redtailboa.net. I have been silent on the current issues at hand, but I wanted to share my perception of the story.
We have recently had a little "falling out" amongst the admins and moderators. A good story usually begins with "It all started when..." but this situation is a bit more difficult to track down a starting point... So I will start at the Begining...
It all started when Shane Jordan (AKA Natas, site owner of reptilehaven.net) decided to open up a fourm site to talk about boas. That was somewhere around November of 2000 if my memory serves correctly. At the time, most of our few members were all also active members of kingsnake.com. Natas broke a cardinal rule of kingsnake: He posted a "come look at my new website" post. He was subsiquently banned from JeffB's little world and a bunch of kingsnake members jumped ship and came to redtailboa.net. Great times.
This story really has nothing to do with any of that though.
I was made into an admin literally before the site ever even went public. Some time not too awfully long after that, Lori Kehoe joined our little community. She hung around as a regular member for a while, she was made a moderator, and eventually an admin. She started turining her rescue service into a regular business around that time, and she had some really interesting ideas about the direction that redtailboa.net should go. I did not get the chance to voice my oppinion much then, due to the fact that she was handling just about everyting. Eventually she started doing the things that only I did... such as the surveys that I so enjoyed doing. This is when I left the site for a while.
When i was convinced by some friends to come back, it was not the same anymore... it was the same site with most of the same people, but there was a definite sense of who was in charge. My role was reduced to trying to keep everybody from killing everybody else. I did this through personal im's, in chat, and e-mail. My neverending battle cry was "Why can't we all just get along?!?" This was the status quo for... oh... about a year.
Just very recently, Lori made an administrative decision that a LOT of the other admins had a hard time with. She reorganized all moderators of all the forums... to the best of my knowledge, this was done without mentioning it to any other admins. She didn't even send a "by your leave" to the moderators that she was changing. There was at least one person who was made a mod that did not even want to be one.
This created, for lack of a better word, a general uprising amongst most of the other admins. I had said my famous "Why can't we all just get along" for the last time... it was too serious. We scheduled a chat meeting and things were not going well... I was a little disheartened by the fact that neither Natas nor Lori deigned us worthy of their presence (this was my initial conception of the events). Throughout the meeting, one member continuously made comments that led me to believe my initial suspicions were right... that Natas did not sanction the meeting, that everything we were deciding and all the progress we were making would be overturned. The worst of it was that I felt WAY out of the loop. I kept wondering how it was possible that everyone seemed to have talked to Natas except me. In the heat of that moment, I decided to resign. I spent an entire weekend without beeing an admin.
When Natas got wind of the procedings, he was furious, but not for the reasons I suspected and feared... He was not willing to accept my resignation or that of the other admins who resigned. He sent me a personal e-mail and explained his situation and that yes, in fact, he did like the ideas that we were coming up with together. It was shortly after this came about that I first heard from Lori. What I heard was simply that she had resigned.
Since then we have had another chat meeting and all the admins have been in constant contact with each other. We are seeing long lost memebers of the community come back for another look. The site is hopping agian, and I think that we have nothing but bright things in our future. There is, once again, that sense of community that kept me glued to my monitor for hours on end... just to share in each others triumphs and tradgedys.
In Short... Redtailboa.net is Back! Granted, we are back as Reptilehaven.net, but the fact remains... we are working on being a family again. A family of 3500 registered members.
I Invite everyone to come back and take another look at reptilehaven.net as we are doing the good stuff agian.
-Your Sick Uncle Morti.
**Edited to correct one bad spelling error and a couple of gramar mistakes**
We have recently had a little "falling out" amongst the admins and moderators. A good story usually begins with "It all started when..." but this situation is a bit more difficult to track down a starting point... So I will start at the Begining...
It all started when Shane Jordan (AKA Natas, site owner of reptilehaven.net) decided to open up a fourm site to talk about boas. That was somewhere around November of 2000 if my memory serves correctly. At the time, most of our few members were all also active members of kingsnake.com. Natas broke a cardinal rule of kingsnake: He posted a "come look at my new website" post. He was subsiquently banned from JeffB's little world and a bunch of kingsnake members jumped ship and came to redtailboa.net. Great times.
This story really has nothing to do with any of that though.
I was made into an admin literally before the site ever even went public. Some time not too awfully long after that, Lori Kehoe joined our little community. She hung around as a regular member for a while, she was made a moderator, and eventually an admin. She started turining her rescue service into a regular business around that time, and she had some really interesting ideas about the direction that redtailboa.net should go. I did not get the chance to voice my oppinion much then, due to the fact that she was handling just about everyting. Eventually she started doing the things that only I did... such as the surveys that I so enjoyed doing. This is when I left the site for a while.
When i was convinced by some friends to come back, it was not the same anymore... it was the same site with most of the same people, but there was a definite sense of who was in charge. My role was reduced to trying to keep everybody from killing everybody else. I did this through personal im's, in chat, and e-mail. My neverending battle cry was "Why can't we all just get along?!?" This was the status quo for... oh... about a year.
Just very recently, Lori made an administrative decision that a LOT of the other admins had a hard time with. She reorganized all moderators of all the forums... to the best of my knowledge, this was done without mentioning it to any other admins. She didn't even send a "by your leave" to the moderators that she was changing. There was at least one person who was made a mod that did not even want to be one.
This created, for lack of a better word, a general uprising amongst most of the other admins. I had said my famous "Why can't we all just get along" for the last time... it was too serious. We scheduled a chat meeting and things were not going well... I was a little disheartened by the fact that neither Natas nor Lori deigned us worthy of their presence (this was my initial conception of the events). Throughout the meeting, one member continuously made comments that led me to believe my initial suspicions were right... that Natas did not sanction the meeting, that everything we were deciding and all the progress we were making would be overturned. The worst of it was that I felt WAY out of the loop. I kept wondering how it was possible that everyone seemed to have talked to Natas except me. In the heat of that moment, I decided to resign. I spent an entire weekend without beeing an admin.
When Natas got wind of the procedings, he was furious, but not for the reasons I suspected and feared... He was not willing to accept my resignation or that of the other admins who resigned. He sent me a personal e-mail and explained his situation and that yes, in fact, he did like the ideas that we were coming up with together. It was shortly after this came about that I first heard from Lori. What I heard was simply that she had resigned.
Since then we have had another chat meeting and all the admins have been in constant contact with each other. We are seeing long lost memebers of the community come back for another look. The site is hopping agian, and I think that we have nothing but bright things in our future. There is, once again, that sense of community that kept me glued to my monitor for hours on end... just to share in each others triumphs and tradgedys.
In Short... Redtailboa.net is Back! Granted, we are back as Reptilehaven.net, but the fact remains... we are working on being a family again. A family of 3500 registered members.
I Invite everyone to come back and take another look at reptilehaven.net as we are doing the good stuff agian.
-Your Sick Uncle Morti.
**Edited to correct one bad spelling error and a couple of gramar mistakes**
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