Aside from my job at the Nevada Daily Mail I volunteer forum moderate for a company based in California that hosts multiple online games for free. I help moderate a forum for one of the games that they host, play the game, and help out other players. Also I basically make sure everyone follows the rules, move topics in the forums if they are posted in the wrong place, write guides on how to use the game the forums are for, lock topics that break the rules, and for another week I'm helping test the beta of the newest version of the game set to come out next Tuesday. It's not an overly glamorous job, but I enjoy doing it. There is just something about looking at your roommate and responding "I'm working", when they ask "Why are you still playing on that game?". In a way I get to somewhat live out one of my dreams in a way. When I was in high school I was between video game development/management and graphic design. I chose graphic design because I love it and it was something I didn't see myself maybe growing out of someday.

However, there is, as with most things, a not so good side to being a volunteer moderator. Being in somewhat a position of power, you're always subject to criticism. I once spent weeks writing a new guide for the forums, making sure all my information was correct, and implementing html codes into it to make it more interesting and easy to read. The day I posted it someone else had posted their own version of the same type of guide. Not only that but they were somewhat similar. I was then accused of plagiarism and it eventually was cleared up and taken care of. In the end the guide I worked so hard on had to be taken down and revamped completely. It ended out to be a completely different guide all together that is now somewhat popular on the forums (yay me).

Another thing that isn't so wonderful about moderating is that people tend to get angry at one another, as is human nature. Not only that, but it seems more often than not, it's not handled in the right way. Instead of everyone talking it out they just end up yelling at one another. As a moderator I have to step in, stop the argument, and lock the topic. This has made me semi unpopular with some people since they don't like their arguments put to a sudden stop before they could "finish the fight" (ha ha, Halo 3 reference). The whole situation reminds me of a picture my friend Evan showed me once. It was a little comic of two people at separate computers far away from one another just yelling at each other. Somehow they end up in the same room, and they have nothing to say to one another. It's just so much easier to yell at people through a computer than it is to their face. Sometimes I understand that people feel the need to fight for what they believe in and get angry. However, from the fights I've seen on the forums I volunteer for, most of them were over petty things that reminded me of school yard skirmishes. I think if they could step back and actually look at what they were yelling at each other for, they would probably be somewhat embarrassed that it got so out of hand.

I know that I have really only listed bad things about my volunteer job in this blog, but for every one bad thing that I have to deal with there are 10 things that are just wonderful. I guess if you take nothing else way from this entry I want you to take away just to play nice (and that I have wicked awesome paying and volunteer jobs). Before you get mad at anyone on the Internet or whatever, just take a step back, look at what you're really arguing, and ask yourself is it really worth it. Either that, or picture the person you're arguing back and forth with in your head; imagine that you were really there face to face. What would you really say? Please, do it for us, the moderators. :)