Dannic, The Prince of Cats

Posted by Dannic on December 21st, 2004 in Rants

I have been running websites and games off and on for the last 6 years or so. Different games, different websites. Always trying to improve on them.

None of them really take up that much of my time.

I have given thought to having help on occasion. Especially when I’m in the middle of finals(yes, even us old farts have finals) and something comes up where one or more of my websites needs some attention. Most of the time I’ve been able to get by with what I have and the feeling of needing assistance from others passes.

Now comes the fun part.

It never seems to fail. I’ll be actively working on something. Game, website or something where people just log on and have fun. I’ll have someone who wants to be a “GOD” or “ADMIN” just because they want to. Of course these people are generally young. Probably school age kids. Highschool I would imagine. I never ask.

Usually tell them up front I don’t need any help. Then the begging begins. All kinds of sob stories as to why they could be a good admin for my site or game. How they would help other users. Of course they have only been a registered user of my services for 15 minutes by this time.

After being a registered user for about 30 minutes I finally pry out of them some information that I would need to know if I had decided to make them an admin anyway. Usually find out that they were banned from other sites for being major pains. Or that they want some experience before running their own site/game.

Both of these send up really big flashing red flags.

The later one is the one I usually worry about the most though. This one indicates that the person in question has doing this for the “good” of my game as a temporary interest. Possibly to lure users away from my services to theirs once they get theirs going. Maybe even to lift ideas and code from what I have written for my services.

I think you would agree that this isn’t exactly what you would want from someone to help you with something.

Then we usually spend about an hour of other time where the “helper” tries everything except for what you suggested they do to become on your good side.

I usually ask anyone who is serious about helping that they spend some time doing it as a user/player before I even consider them for a position. Yes, I have actually given people those positions. Its not often and I usually spend a bunch of time getting to know them and trust that they know what I am trying to accomplish.

Most of the time these new users are more into forcing their way into being in control of your services than they are of actually doing a service for you.

Once they figure out that you aren’t going to give in to your demands you usually get something like this.

as i can see you dont need any help and i dont really like being a Farmie so i do believe im going to leave soon and go to a site where im a god

Which makes you feel really good about deciding not to give in.

Of course my reply to the above statement is usally on the lines of “Ok, Have fun.”

Its always good to see them back the very next day trying the same thing.