The whole Lugnet admin thing…
Well, I guess it’s not important to most people, but it’s important to me, so I apologise in advance for the long post.
For those that don’t know, Lugnet is a LEGO fan site, started by Todd L and Suzanne R-G. While they were both heavily involved in the site, it ran quite well, minor bitches here and there, but generally OK. Then just in the last year or so 2 things happened to change that:
- The membership increased, and
- both Todd & Suz decided they would like to delegate a lot of the running of the site to others.
Now this isn’t anything really unique. It has happened many times before, to many different groups. But none of them were quite so important to me.
Anyway, a transition team was created, and everyone was happy for a while. No-one outside the team really saw much of what they were doing, but that was OK, because we assumed they wouldn’t screw anything up too badly.
Then the team made a few injudicious decisions – well several people saw them that way, anyhow – and suddenly we all realised that maybe things weren’t changing as we’d like. And a few nasty things were said and done, and people complained, so the transition team decided they needed a set of guidelines, to avoid making more mistakes. So a review committee was set up, initially to review a document setting down policies and procedures for Lugnet admins. But due to internal friction, and possibly some mis-communication, 2 members of the review committee resigned, and then a member of the transition team also resigned, giving his opinion that the RC had failed.
Well, after some heated public bickering, one of the RC members that had resigned decided to give it another go, and hopefully that will produce favourable results.
Meanwhile, I’d like to put my thoughts forward in a forum where it hopefully won’t cause such heated bickering.
I first met Larry P in 2001, when I had a holiday in the US. It was a fun holiday, and Larrry even invited me to stay at his place, which I gladly accepted, but only for 1 night. After that holiday, I formed an opinion of Larry that was basically “Nice guy, doesn’t like to lose”. I didn’t really spend enough time to form any deeper opinion.
Since then, my opinion has changed somewhat, and although I still see his positive side occasionally, I see more negative. Mostly behind the scenes, Larry seems to go to great lengths to make sure his public persona is squeaky clean. And mind you, most of my opinion is now second hand – I have had very little to do with him personally in recent times. But I have formed the very strong opinion that he should not be part of the “public face” of Lugnet.
But that’s just my own opinion. Many others have much higher opinions of him, no doubt in part due to his own efforts in making his public persona so positive. But the fact is, a vast majority of the negative incidents on Lugnet have been centred around Larry. And he has even acknowledged that his delivery can leave a lot to be desired sometimes.
Is he really the best option we have for the tasks he has taken on? I don’t know. But I would certainly be disappointed if that was the case.