Animation Source Forums

Yep, but as you see, there are not enough mods now. Steet wanted to reduce the number of mods, so he let some things on the site, just as characters be automatically approved. Now we see what it came to. There are too many sites as well.
Some sub-admins and more mods could reduce this freedom of sparking...

The amount of sites these moderators are expected to cover are just ridiculous. I can't blame them for taking one look at the workload and thinking 'oh, God,' and turning off the computer. I couldn't do it, especially with school work and such. Yeah, it's great having a hub of websites dedicated to animated films that are really a copy and paste of the other website you've been on anyway but you need people to maintain them and, God, I hope the same moderators on BS aren't expected to do that AND the forums as well. That's a good example of virtual slave labour. 8(

It would make for a dandy situation to close down every site that exhibits little to no activity. What a waste of effort and space they are! Certainly Balto Source, The Lion King Source, Spirit Source, and maybe even All Dogs Go To Heaven Source seem to be continually active. But I haven't even seen that much activity on TSS (of course, that's steet's special baby, so we KNOW that's not going anywhere). As much as I like some of the movies that inspired the other sources, I don't see that as reason alone to keep up sources dedicated to them that are otherwise dead as the proverbial doornail, or very nearly so.

The moderator thing? Meh. I'll decline to comment on that. While it HAS been better than the last batch (and many prior to that...but that last batch most especially), I daresay that things not only seem to have fallen of somewhat, but...yeah. And I'll say it again -- a person agrees to take a staff position, or volunteers and actually gets accepted, they presume and assume the responsibilities that go with it. And the work load. Should they not also have a life and not prioritize to their real-world responsibilities? Does anyone REALLY think I am implying that? Because I am not, and never have. But I have always maintained, and still believe, that if you want or accept the responsibility, you take on all that goes with it...and have a duty to keep up with it.

Of course, as has been said here, it would help tons if the webmaster actually stopped cocooning himself into TSS and occasionally reprimanding all of us for not appreciating all he's been through (yes yes yes...we KNOW he did a slam-bang job creating the site and doing all the coding work and maintaining the logistics of keeping it up and running. We get that. And we appreciate it all. Is that justification for leaving the staff to engage in guesswork and taking liberties? Uh uh.)

This place certainly hasn't been as strapped and laden with drama as it was in the past. And I've seen good things come of last year's house-cleaning by himself. BUT the automated approval stuff...the innumerable glitches...the stuff that was turned off and left in limbo by knee-jerk changes by the webmaster when confronting the trolling attacks of last year (such as the groups/packs thing)...the rampant character mess AND those freaking sparkley things? And new sources in the offing? They MUST be dealt with.

Hell, I'm even for ditching the source I was even working on rather than seeing it activated (as much as I love that movie) if everyone really believes we ought to put a stop to new sources (ALL new sources).

Yes, but Steet clearly has more important things to do? Didn't he once publicly dismiss everyone's concerns and basically say 'shoo, shoo, you boring people. Let me fuss about bears flying planes whilst you worry about wolfdogs saving Alaskan towns'?

Oh, I understand that these websites have had a lot of effort put into them but maintaining them is the real challenge. I would see it as being far more painful to see your work be wasted on a website that will never be looked at or appreciated rather than just closing it. I miss the days where it was just a Balto site and the most popular one. It gave away a sense of 'yes, Balto is under-appreciated but we're proud to like it' and now it's all 'yeah, Balto is a film like all these other animated films... BUT TALESPIN IS THE BEST HURR DURR'. All I'm saying is: can't this webspace be focused on one subject, please? I would imagine it to be quite overwhelming to anyone visiting this place and seeing all of these websites being cut off from the main hub. It is for me and I've been aware of this website since I was 12.

But, gearing back onto topic slightly, I would love people to follow Cat's example and Jersey's and make characters solely related to Balto's universe and not their own little stories about the struggles of their own BBA-esque wolf packs. Sure, I have one character that doesn't really have anything to do with Balto except for living in Nome but, hey, at least he's a dog. lol

Praise to Cat again, but yeah. Many kiddos thing their characters must be teenage mutant ninja turtledog to be speeshfool and originul, but hey, look at Cat. She have whole bunch of well-made, non-sparkle, Balto-related characters here. It's not that hard, so use your brain instead of rainbow crayon.

Back to topic basics again, do you think we should report all non-fursona non-Balto related chars? that would be sweet

Yes, I know, so we're back to the "too much sites, not enough mods" topic that was discussed already xD


Ya know what bothers me too? When people create non-Balto realted sparkledog then fill their image gallery with not theirs and not even Balto linears(like Kay Fedewa and many other DA linearts) colored into those characters. Not only character isn't balto realted, but the image isn't Balto related at all...

^ And at that, no one, at least me, gives a who to view that stuff. Congrats, you can use the flood fill tool.

Unfortunately, the chances of any of these things happened (websites getting deleted, more moderators being selected) are very slim. Simply because my interests do not represent the whole hub's, Steet has taken residence in Teletubby Land, it'll take a miracle for things to just go back the way they were and you will have people complaining about having their 'favourite' websites deleted, even if they never visited them or contributed to them when they were around. In short, a lot of drama and arguing.

Moderators being selected is harder, in my opinion, because it is finding people who have the interest and the time to do these things and, honestly, I couldn't imagine anything worse to do with my free time than sort through thousands of reports (some which may have been parroted, as Jersey brought up in another topic sort of) about sparkledogs. Which is why I can't hardly complain about the current mods now. :/

Not like Steet even wanted people who offered their help to be a mod, lawl...

Probably didn't want to admit things have gone to pot, my paranoid mind says. Don't bend to the will of your unhappy public, as the best British politicians do. xDD