My time as a moderator of Send Pokemon began on the facebook discussion boards for the application. Charles Yong, the sole developer of the application, noticed my activity in answering recurring questions along with another member by the name of TK Campo and approached us both about being moderators in the application.

The position appealled to me, of course, so I expressed interest, refering to my time as a moderator on The Abyss. A short while later, both names (Neike Taika-Tessaro and TK Campo) were cited as veterans and helpers on the about page of the application, though neither of us were granted any power, "yet", simply because there was nothing much to give us power on.

By ourselves, we created a channel on Darkmyst, #pokemon, and advertised a CGI:IRC means to connect to it on the boards, using it to talk to the community more immediately and of course to each other. We also used our authority to quell some disputes, though the lack of power meant it was a fickle construct.

Charles' plan, meanwhile, was to have each town in the MMORPG style pokémon game he was creating for the application have a chat room. It was primarily for these that he wanted moderators.

So far, so good, in theory.

Given the intended scope of the MMORPG and chat, Charles Yong thought it best to have more than two people helping him as staff, and requested the help of the community in an open letter. Four positions were available for applicants to choose from:

Artists, Game Master, Quest Master and Moderator. Game Masters were meant to be technical game supervisors and in-game moderators, primarily tasked with answering questions as they arose, as well as punishing people for exploiting bugs, multi-accounting or otherwise disturbing the peace in the actual game. Quest Masters were to be storytellers and responsible for creating new quests and handling roles in them. Moderators, like the primary purpose of TK and I, were intended to keep the peace in chatrooms, forums and the general community.

Applications were sent to a gmail address that, for the longest time, only Charles had access to, without that he was known to be responding to any of them.

It was probably at this point that it became apparent that Charles was trying to govern something mostly by himself that was far too large for him to handle. Nonetheless, TK and I continued to help him as universal staff, since he was (and remains) a nice person and we figured once staff was properly appointed and power given to the mods, he'd have time to focus on what he sought to focus on: Coding.

TK and I at this point had pre-picked a handful of moderators at Charles' request. Two of the more active ones went by the name liz_is and PringlesTheAlmadirro respectively. When Charles approached us about being the ones to sort through the applications, we asked him if we could rope them in as helpers, which he was fine with.

Together, we waded through what was at the time about four thousand applications and questions and sorted them according to what they'd applied for, as well as sending out responses to artist applications, for which Charles had created a group on facebook. (The idea of the group was to aggregate all artists and assign the active ones to spriting / illustrating tasks as they cropped up.)

Charles mentioned that he'd ask for our help in ultimately picking people who'd applied in all the other fields, but unfortunately never got more specific.

Eventually, I caved in, no longer wanting to wait, and pestered him via facebook chat. After some prying, I got express permission to take on the slew of moderators, and opened a facebook group for them, then began throwing psychologically taxing questions at the applicants until they either proved to have admirable integrity and a good personality or were riddled with bullet holes.

Superficially, it was a fairly laid-back process, but the rigour behind it paid off.

[on a topic crafted as a The Abyss moderator]
[15:37] <Finbar> As for expanding um..
[15:38] <Finbar> Well what can I say? The topic was covered extensively.. I would have to think for a long period of time to be able to add to that list
[15:38] <Neike> Pick holes into it.
[15:38] <Finbar> Okay well hmm..
[15:38] <Neike> This is a challenge, not a walk in the park! Bwaha.
[15:38] <Neike> :D
[15:38] <Finbar> <.<
[15:38] <Finbar> Bah
[15:40] <Finbar> Out of curiosity, do people actually ask one of the volunteers to be a mediator or to give a neutral opinion?
[15:40] <Neike> Sir, I applaud you for being perceptive. No, basically not. :P
[15:40] <Finbar> I would have been suprised if you said yes

On the map that Charles Yong was gradually creating for the community, each town was meant to have its own chatroom. TK and I had lobbied for these to be on IRC since the concept first cropped up, IRC being an established protocol allowing for fairly powerful moderation, and Charles had seemed in general agreement. However, when it came down to it, instead, he opted for more eye-candy: meebo.

The decision to use something less aged than IRC, itself, is hardly worth condemning. Chat programs in this day and age tend to be more flashy than IRC clients, though they rarely offer more functionality, short of font manipulation. Truly, TK and I might have been happy with meebo, had we and the pre-picked moderators been given any sort of power in it - but we were regular users like everyone else.

On meebo, everyone can warn another, and if a certain amount of warns is issued in a certain timespan, a user is muted. The cooldown period to warn a user is longer than the timespan the user is muted for (sensibly). Additionally, being muted does not inhibit one's own ability to warn. As such, it just takes one malicious user and their friends to mute all perfectly well-behaved users in a chat. 'Moderating' thus was, for a long while, a chore of having enough moderator-friendly people at your side to deal with trouble-causers. The rule not to warn anyone without provocation, of course, was entirely unenforcable.

Once moderator powers were finally instated, it became painfully obvious that waiting for them had been a hilarious waste of time: The only power a moderator had that other users did not was the ability to ban. Permanently. Irreversibly. By name.

For most cases of rule breaking, this was a complete overkill, of course. The people that truly deserved it, however, were persistent trolls that would simply come back using another name. As such, the permanent banning feature was essentially useless for moderation, leaving the moderators still lacking any sort of power.

However, while the moderators were used to that, we were not used to what happened when the floodgates were opened - in the form of a more complex version of the MMORPG being opened to the public - and activity in the chat rooms peaked to an all-time high: Only permitting a certain amount of users in a single room, meebo silently created overflow rooms. These quickly became impossible for the moderators to keep up with due to their sheer number, even in the off-chance that they were all discovered.

Again the moderator team lobbied for Charles to bring the chats to IRC and out of meebo. The community was largely out of hand, held together only by a few thin threads, and the moderators were not only essentially powerless, but often a laughing stock.

On the 28th of September 2008, Charles finally caved to moderator request and linked to #pallet.town on irc.darkmyst.org via mibbit. Reception from the community was mixed - nicknames of course handle very differently on IRC than it does in most other chats, which was the primary source of confusion, but the moderators were abruptly vastly more effective, causing a large net gain.

Further channels were registered for Charles, but not linked to, making #pallet.town an insanely fast-paced chat; anyone using the application that wanted to chat was just one click away from coming there. Nonetheless, the moderators were happy: They could kick users from the chats, temporarily mute the room if spammers got out of hand, and ban IPs or names for any length of time. Additionally, we had a backing of mIRC Remotes to help us answer common questions with a simple !trigger.

On the 30th of September, I logged on to find that the channels were comparatively empty from the bustle on the day(s) before. There was no notice on the moderator board from Charles, nor had anyone else in the mod team been notified, but he'd changed back to meebo. Thankfully, since meebo keeps semi-permanent public logs of all public channels, we were able to find a statement from him, after digging for it ourselves.

[18:44] <Neike> What happened to make Charles change back to meebo?
[18:44] <Backstage> I've been asking people. No one seems to have a clue. But people in meebo were complaining about the switch back, so...that's a semi-win?
[...]
[18:47] <Backstage> Checking the meebo logs.
[18:47] <Neike> Thanks.
[18:49] <Backstage> 02:16 Charles: the other chat
[18:49] <Backstage> 02:16 Charles: died
[18:49] <Backstage> 02:16 Charles: like the server hosting it
[18:49] <Backstage> 02:16 Charles: went down
[18:49] <Backstage> That's all I found on an explanation.
[18:50] <Neike> Yay, mibbit hiccuped.
[18:50] <Neike> Well, fuck this.
[18:50] <Neike> If he's not changing it back, I'm gone.

To cut to the chase: It wasn't changed back. Accordingly, I left, no longer wanting to swim uphill and battle for a semblance of order in the community if the developer wasn't going to give me (or my co-moderators) the tools to do so.

To this date, it has yet to be changed back to IRC, though Charles has repeatedly acknowledged its superiority to staff.

Aside from maintaining order in the massive gmail inbox - which kept getting new applications for an extremely long time despite us asking Charles to take the open letter down - Charles Yong's staff, myself included, did a lot for the community he rarely gave an indication for caring about.

At his request, I created a comprehensive FAQ, allowing questions to be bumped by IP votes. It's acknowledged on the about page of the application and still a common place for people to get the answers they seek. It's currently being maintained by Kitlen.

The majority of my work was to simply organise the moderators, keep knowledge of bugs current, and generally keep the moderator group on facebook active and up to date. Amongst other things, I created a mIRC alias/remote for them that would let them moderator in channels whether they had operator status or not, providing they were identified to NickServ. /flex and its -op, -voice, -ban and -kick variants determined whether or not you had operator privileges on the channel and, if not, tried to route the command through ChanServ. Of course, given that we were mostly stuck on meebo, this was moot.

Much of my work with Darkmyst's User Experience team was spurned by being involved in the Send Pokemon community. The skin I created for CGI:IRC, DarkmIRC, the shifting from CGI:IRC to mibbit that I had part in, all those were in large parts caused by Charles Yong's thick skull in regards to IRC having an outdated feel that he didn't want to subject his community to. (However, he was clearly quite willing to subject them to unstoppable trolls instead.)

In turn for the hard work, neither I nor any of my fellow staff were ever informed about anything. If a new feature was introduced, the first we tended to know about it was someone asking us about it. If a bug popped up, Charles rarely bothered to fix it, leading to confused people asking us about why it was still possible; most notable example being that Mew and other legendaries were available for training via simple hackery, even though they were unavailable via legal means.

Game Masters and Quest Masters are still not being drafted.

Application development has ground to a painful halt, without that Charles Yong has bothered to tell his staff much about the future of the application. It's probably abandoned.

I initially left on polite terms because I understand how real life can slow things down, but Charles Yong has repeatedly ignored all offers of help from his own staff in regards to coding help, ignores the most basic pleas from them, and while on one day claiming that he's happy to hear from his staff at any point is easy to dismiss chat for the sake of, instead, coding, but then complains if no one ever talks to him, while in the same breath never posting in the moderator group - or really any staff group, barring fleeting appearances in the one for Artists, which petered out into glaring inactivity despite lax or (during some phases) open membership.

At time of this writing (the start of May, 2009), it's been half a year since I left the application. Since my leaving, a single update has been churned out. The community is slowly dying off, though some veterans are admirably sticking around, especially on IRC, with most of the staff team still available in some fashion.

It makes for a sorry sight.

What can be salvaged, of course, is the friendships crafted, and in that, the entire ordeal was worth it. However, if anyone thinking to work for Charles Yong is reading this, I unfortunately have to implore to caution - I cannot in good conscience let that go unstated.

All other staff, however, have been superb to work with, especially Backstage, Kitlen, Gliynn, Kairi and ajnrules (though the latter two are not on the visual chart above). Others were an exceptional charm, too, but didn't have the time to reach full moderator potential, but certainly deserve mention as exceptional people: liz_is (Lechku), PringlesTheAlmadirro, Tarwedge, Scarthem.

A++. Would work with you guys again.