Friends - staffer and non-staffer alike - have pointed me to this post while I'm supposedly "on leave" (XD) and well, here are my ugly two cents!
To start off, statements like "We are not democracy" is assumed naturally legitimate at organizations like TAFL. Staffers are
required to have faith in their own decisions for two main reasons:
(1) Try being indecisive and you'll be buried with backlogs and contact forms tomorrow. (For Characters/Series? In less than 6 hours
(2) Nobody was a staffer before they became one. (We
do know what being rejected is about!)
The feelings involved when we approve or reject are absolutely serious: it's a pure sense of responsibility of keeping our evergrowing database for as organized as possible, of doing what we think would lessen the level of potential dissatisfaction among members. Whether we're successful is another story, but please understand that the motivation is always there
I hope the SS won't mind me saying this, but we staffers also face official warnings through e-mail if we don't update once a month unless there's a good reason: you can't avoid miscommunication 100% esp. when most of us live in different time zones and have different life styles.
Now to speak from the view of a fanlisting owner: let's try to be a bit more positive about the situation we're placed in. To writers of the original post: will you be confident that if one day all your needs are met, you will be forever happy at the board? Not likely. It's human nature to constantly strive for the higher and better, so one need being fulfilled would simply lead to the urge of finding another "problem". Therefore the real problem as an individual fanlisting maintainer would be: is it really something I must do without? I admit that in spite of being a staffer myself, I've secretly hoped for the relationship limit to be lifted for certain subjects I like. But I also realize that it'd get out of hands if we don't sacrifice a bit of personal desire for a more stable future. Everyone who decides to participate at TAFL should know that there's always a price to pay: it won't be as "thrilling", for lack of better words, to be approved for something if it's easily acquired.
On the other hand, I'm sure the chosen tone in the original post is what instantly triggered the list of defense after. To the posters of this topic: I personally believe that you probably didn't mean half of the negatively worded comments in your original post, but you see, people are easily deceived by words
As a result, I would suggest a different approach from now on, such as using this board to discuss how you think would improve the quality of your application among friends and fellow FL owners. I'm sure a lot of people are willing to share those little tips they have, using what Chisa said as an example: mentioning that you have already finished X and Y upcomings in an application proves to be a really good trick to eliminate potential bias well. (I've tried that a few times myself ^^)
My bottom line? Let's just save ourselves some work, be happy about what we have and keep a smile
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