Small constructive rant from a tired wizden headmin on what I've learned. (Word slop.)
I've been an admin of wizden for a very long time, and before that have done the rounds on multiple other servers for 4-5 years now. Is that a lot? Probably not according to some people. Shut up, you're not writing this post anyways.
These are just some observations that I think would be interesting for other players and admins to read up on. Since there's no Wizden forum, I thought I might as well post it here.
As an admin, work with your other admins contributors, and maintainers. You can get far more done with them than without them.
Try your hardest to keep an eye on the server culture that you are fostering. This is a weirdly difficult thing to keep tabs on, but you need to keep on top of general metacliques, metagrudges, and toxicity as an admin. The moment your server gets known as "the toxic server" you're going to lose players, and keep losing players. Don't be afraid to get rid of people catalyzing negative behavior in your server even if they don't technically violate any rules.
RP levels aren't real. NRP, LRP, MRP, HRP, ERP (maybe not that last one) don't actually mean anything. When you're naming your server, new players are NOT going to look at the RP levels of your server. They are just going to connect if you have pop and are appealing enough to them. All this does is flag experienced players onto the general vibe of how many rules you have written down, and in a lot of cases, it still doesn't mean anything because the definition is entirely arbitrary.
Whitelisting (in my opinion) doesn't work. The higher the barrier of entry of your server is, the more insular it becomes. Insular servers eventually become toxic metaclique driven servers that almost always drive away new players. I strongly reccomend against having whitelists on your server. Whitelisted *content* is different from whitelisting the entire server. Whitelisted content is still inclusive, but doesn't create insular cliques and communities.
Foster your new players. If you have systems in place to guide new players, make it as accessible as possible. Make it annoyingly accessible, and if you have a Mhelp system, make sure it's manned by people who are willing to answer extremely basic questions without being condescending. Contrary to what some people think, new players are what keep your server active. New players are willing to do stupid things that keep rounds interesting unlike John Robusta with 10k hours as security.
There is no such thing as a "good server to learn the game on". Space station 14 and 13 are both hilariously dense games to pick up. The more systems you have, the more different and difficult it will be to transfer over to a different fork.
Contrary to 6 above. Play other forks. Learn what is out there. Don't get trapped on one server, there's an entire world out there besides the server you are used to. You don't have to like the content or culture of the server you try, but you should be open to trying new things.
Playtime limits for roles/jobs. Don't abuse your players time. Don't create excessively long grinds to get "high tier" jobs. Not everyone has time to play 8 hours a day, a lot of people might *maybe* get to play a single shift or even less a week. Playtime limits are a good thing for stopping egregious issues, like raiders getting into higher impact roles. However, high playtime requirements end up causing major problems for the health of your community, and the players. Find a good, sane middle ground for playtime. I personally think 5 hours for a department is more than enough to get command roles in the case of Wizden, but I have also seen some servers who demand 100+ hours to be command of a department, which is absurd, and does not respect the players time.
People are going to hate me for this one. Sometimes, the players are just wrong. If you are pushing a major content change, of course listen to the player feedback, but don't let people bully you into changing the game if you believe that it will result in a better game for those players. We saw it happen with listinv to gridinv, and we saw it a few more times with other features I've forgotten about at this point.
I'm gonna leave this here at this point, but these thoughts were bouncing around in my head for a while before the major drama happened, so I thought it'd be a good idea to post it somewhere.