the community felt pretty tight knit and I liked the atmosphere it gave out compared to now on how majority is filled with rules that are actually being implemented
Just wanna point this out because I feel some people pass judgement without knowing all the information. FA didn't need as many rules
because the community was tight knit. Stone and I never felt the need to hammer complex rules down people's throats because the only time rules were even needed were when new members would join the community. Once they got used to how things were they became a part of us and rarely did we need to remind them of the rules. When we took over here we were immediately dealing with an entirely different beast where the same style of administration wasn't working. You have to understand that SP was pretty much in disarray administratively when we took over, so we were faced with transplanting a small ordered community into a bigger one that wasn't. We couldn't expect the SP members to "just get it" like the FA members would. We felt it was necessary to tighten the rules in order to make sure everyone was on the same page and not guessing at what we would find acceptable, as the point was to revitalize SP with a more active animation community. This also applied to the moderators to make sure they were consistent, because when the rules are enforced inconsistently it delivers a mixed message and we needed everyone on the same page. That served it's purpose well and in the last year or so I've been taking steps back to relax certain rules which no longer needed to be so strict.
However, clarifying the rules is still an important part of making sure everyone is treated fairly, as it's still an ongoing issue that we're actively working on. Even as recently as yesterday I received a complaint about fairness on the forums, so I know it's still an area we need to improve in and I'm still seeing what works best. There are no easy answers. The point of clarifying the rules is to
close loopholes, and the clarifications generally come as a result of these loopholes being abused. Not the other way around. Zed hasn't been active here in a while so I don't think it would have been fair for him to bring that argument up and I appreciate him recognizing that. He doesn't have any insight into how things have been behind the scenes and thus doesn't have the perspective necessary to make an informed judgement, he can only make assumptions and guess what he thinks would work. Please keep this in mind.
I don't think my healthy distrust in authority figures is a bad thing as he suggests since I like to lead by example by being reasonably transparent and not being unethical or corrupt. Through experience I personally believe that authority can and does corrupt too easily, and I can back this up with 12+ years of examples just from the stick animation community so I generally prefer to keep a respectful eye on the mods as they're the ones actually carrying out the brunt of the work. I value and trust each of them a significant amount (more than I think I get credit for but my public image is not that important to me as long as things are running well) but I still maintain a reasonable awareness that any of them could abuse that trust if they wanted. That doesn't mean I think they are going to or expect them to, it just means I have protections in place just in case and I need to be able to react quickly for the community's sake. I actually do have hard data on how effective different administrative styles are as I have done this song and dance for a long time and I will make changes to find better ways of doing things. Each time I do I pay very close attention to the impact it has on a number of things and if it doesn't work then I accept the loss and draw up a new plan.
The thing is that no two communities are the same, so there really isn't a "one size fits all" solution that I can just blanket across and make everyone content. We have a target demographic we're aiming for and so to reach them we keep altering our approach until we hit a sweet spot that let's us reach the widest audience. That's where we are heading at the moment now that the resources are available. The administration seems to be holding up the demographic we want, and now we're rebuilding the site to attract more of that demographic. When the new site launches there will be an increase in new members so it's more important than ever to make sure we're all on the same page. We've tried the "golen rule" style of administration before and it just doesn't work going in to what we have planned. SP needs to succeed as a website before it will succeed as a community, if we ever hit a point where relaxed leadership would be a benefit then you can bet I'll be the first to implement it. Until then I think we're in a good space and I feel confident about our direction. I am extremely excited about the future of SP, sticking around here will be worth it for those that enjoyed what this community and FA's community once was.