User blog comment:StrangerThanTad/What happened to Slimebeast's pastas?/@comment-5943448-20170929184631/@comment-2240864-20170929215712

The amount of featured admin on the front page has currently been only Banning, Empy, and Christian. We have featured Shadowswimmer77 and Grey Owl, who are a discussions moderator and a rollbacker respectively. The others have all been prolific writers, as seen on the Featured Author archives which can be viewed here.

Out of twelve, only five have been users with extra rights, and of those only three have been admin.

Full disclosure, I have been approached to be featured and have not at this time written my piece and will likely choose to delay my featuring to allow for a regular user to be featured be featured instead of two admins in a row with the probability that I will request multiple regular users be featured before I appear there because I don't feel like spotlighting multiple admin in a row is fair to the regular users.

From what I understand of the process is that MrDupin approaches users here to write up a featured author piece and then submit it to him. There is no internal discussion that I have ever witnessed to collude or otherwise act in a way that would indicate to me that the intention of this feature is to promote admin front and center on the main page.

Furthermore, when I had a hand in redesigning the front page with former admin psychobilly2422, I specifically organized the front page features to spotlight first a featured story of the month (in place of the then-defunct PotM system) in order to give higher visibility to users' stories above a single authors' works. The featured story (aka admin pick) was something all admin voted on and the stories to be selected were suggested by the users at large. Going back through the months of discussions in our admin discord, there is no evidence that the voting was used to self-promote.

In particular I would like to point out that from the very outset of the PotM system and on into the admin pick system no user was allowed to nominate their own stories, nor was it ever evident to me that the admin were using their position to self-promote or to have someone nominate their stories for recognition, profit, etc. However, if there is direct evidence of this, it would constitute blatant abuse of power and I would have to strongly consider removing the admin(s) in question from their position at once as I do not want this site to be a platform for such disgusting activities.

When the current administrator team were all confirmed by a majority of the users, it was trusted by either myself or another b-crat who granted them rights that they would not abuse their power and would use their best judgement in all matters of the site.

Now, it has come to my attention that the way we handle deletions on this site is in need of some measure of reigning in. I'm hesitant myself to delete stories that are not pure spam or generally an unedited mess because I don't feel I have the qualifications or the time to interpret and measure the stories' content due to my job and schedule. I do, though, trust my admin team to exercise their best judgement in these deletion matters. That being said, though, I also have been fostering the notion, as you pointed out Slimebeast,that deletions are vastly subjective and have been handled in a way that is perhaps bordering on the far-to-strict end of the spectrum.

I am putting together ways to resolve such conflicts, and will try to have proposals to discuss with both my admin team and with the users at large as to a way that will better handle deletions on this site.

If you have any questions, comments, etc., you can discuss them with me here, my talk page, twitter, discord, email, or any other method with which you are comfortable. This invitation is extended to everyone, be they authors, users, narrators, etc. I want to hear how the community feels about this site and gather suggestions/feedback from everyone because I do truly care about this site and the way it handles things.

Thank you everyone for your time reading this.