Hello everyone,
As most of you are probably aware, I am the series moderator for Mario Kart. I'm not really involved in the MKW community, so I usually let the MKW-specific moderators handle the game's leaderboards and forum.
However, it was recently brought to my attention that several issues with the current state of the leaderboards have been brought up on the forum, and that the game-specific moderators have been ignoring them entirely.
Given the situation, I felt that it was necessary for me to step in and make some changes to the game's moderation. That being said, it would have been inappropriate for me to blindly intervene and appoint new moderators on a whim while going behind the current moderators' backs.
I exchanged Twitch PMs with Jcool after being told that he was the only active moderator at the moment (which seemed likely after a cursory glance at the MKW moderation log and the other moderators' profiles). He confirmed to me that he has been the only active moderator for a while now. I also asked him about his general take on the current state of the leaderboards and why he hadn't addressed any of the forum threads. His response gave me the impression that he isn't particularly motivated to do anything beyond approving runs. Jcool, please correct me if I'm wrong. (As an aside for all readers, please note that this is in no way criticism of Jcool or the other moderators, nor of the work that they've put in for the leaderboards here. All moderators are volunteers spending their own free time and energy on helping out with the site.)
At this point I felt that it was necessary to find a new "head moderator" for MKW, so I read through the relevant forum threads. I know that many users have expressed interest in becoming a moderator, but ultimately I decided that the person who best met what I value in a moderator (see https://www.speedrun.com/mario_kart/thread/ermcv/1#plqc0) was charlocharlie. I talked with him privately on Discord, and he agreed to take the position.
Unfortunately, the timing of all of this happened in such a way that after several days of planning and discussing with relevant parties on my end, I went to make changes to the moderator team only to find that a few hours prior, kirkq had written this post: https://www.speedrun.com/mkw/thread/ict1t/1#czsy6.
I contacted kirkq privately on Discord to explain what I had been working on and asked him to revert his change, which he agreed to do. An additional hitch came from the fact that I was away for the entire weekend and wasn't able to write this post until now. I apologize to all for the confusion this caused.
I hope that everything I've written above makes my reasoning clear and properly explains why I am making the following changes in moderation, effective immediately:
- all current moderators, except for Jcool, are removed.
- charlocharlie is now the unofficial "head moderator" of MKW (which in practice means that he's a super mod).
I leave it to charlocharlie to appoint new moderators as he sees fit.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc., please feel free to respond in this thread.
Regards, Lafungo.
That's not exactly what I had in mind with the last sentence of my previous post, but I'll answer anyways.
I assume you wrote your post because you sent me a friend request at some point and I denied it. When I receive a friend request from a name I don't recognize, I will usually do the following:
- send the person a PM asking who they are and if I know them. This often does not work because the person has a setting enabled which doesn't allow me to send a message without accepting their friend request first.
- check if I share any servers/friends with the person. If I do, this is a good indicator that the request is legitimate and I'll usually accept it.
- if I have reason to believe that the person is from speedrun.com, I'll look them up on the site to see if there's a matching username.
Since I presumably denied your friend request, that most likely means that I went through the above steps and didn't find a satisfactory reason to accept the request. Feel free to send me another one if there's something you'd like to discuss.
