User blog:ChocoMingo/An important announcment about my ownership of the Polandball Wiki

UPDATE (9/21/2020): I have some news to share with you in regards to who will be the server owner. Before I get to that, I have something to say.

Last month, there were controversies that were going on that involved two mods. One of them got under fire by the staff for saying very bad takes on another server for the sake of "edginess" while another was alleged to have abused their mod powers, the latter turning out to have been nothing more than a smear attack against her. Those two mods are Collisions and Avery respectively.

Collisions said around 4-5 months ago very controversial stuff on another Discord server separate from the wiki that had a lot of ridiculous elements to them & I wasn't very pleased about what I saw from him. While it didn't impact the confidence I have in him moderating the wiki, it did made me lose a bit of confidence Collisions will moderate the wiki server effectively & responsibly. For that reason, he WON'T be the owner of the PBW Discord Server. However, he'll still be on track to become wiki owner in 5 days from now. 'Please keep discussion about this civil. Any comments that try to start a ruckus or a flame war will be removed'

As for Avery, one guy who was banned almost lured us to demote her for allegedly abusing her powers for her own benefit. At first, me and Colli thought what he said was plausible enough to hear. However, Colli then came to grips that he almost let his own bias of Avery from past experiences determine her fate. Unfortunately for that guy who we banned, when we told him the r-word (an ableist slur commonly used against disabled & neurodivergent folks) has been banned, he had a problem with the ban and it led us to believe he might've had malicious intent, going as far as to him having anti-staff circles. When we realized that, we decided to drop the case & permaban him, and in turn, support Avery even more.

Personally, I feel like he wanted me to remain as owner against my wishes as he said nothing when I told him I will be stepping down as owner soon, not to mention he didn't like anyone who would be the potential server owner.

Anyway, with that to the side, I'm here to announce something very important. I decided that I will be making UsualInferno (Avery) the new owner of the Polandball Wiki Discord Server. On October 1st, I'll be transferring ownership of the server to her, while Collisions will basically be the co-owner of the server, as he will have the Wiki Owner role, in which that role is in between the owner role & mod role.

I'm hopeful both of them will take good care of the wiki server & wiki respectively after I step down as owner and as I'm adjust myself to the next step in my life. I really appreciate the time I had as the head of the wiki for over a year, but right now, while I plan to stick around and help out when needed, I want to spend more time taking care of myself and planning for the future ahead. Once again, thank you all for helping me get by during my time as owner.

- ChocoMingo 💙💜💙🦩 (Owner: July 1st, 2019-September 30, 2020)

''Disclaimer: Here are 3 parts of my voice recording of this post, so you can listen to this announcement while you put your focus on other stuff you had in mind. I know this will be a long post and it took me around 20-30 minutes to fully read this, but at the same time, I don't know how to do a TL;DR of this so this, is the least I can do''.

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

Dear Polandball Wiki,

First off, I just wanted to say I deeply apologize for my inactivity on this wiki. There have been a lot of things in my mind in the past few months or so. Ever since quarantine started, I felt very nervous about everything and worried about myself coming back to the wiki, with so much I have to do both on the wiki and elsewhere. I’m looking at many ways to help me take care of myself, although even I don’t know where to begin. So for now, to go off on what I want to do to take care of myself, I’m making this statement. This will be pretty long, so you might want to settle down for a bit.

Let me tell you something. I’m kinda glad to be back on the wiki after a lot of time off, but on the other hand, coming back to the wiki has put a lot of anxiety on me.

Polandball has been a part of my life for about 4 years and I appreciate those I have met throughout my time, especially on this wiki. Whenever I think of satirical geopolitical comics and media, the first thing that comes into my mind is Polandball. To everyone I know and trust, to Bain, Collisions, WKBK, Avery, Byz, and everyone else, thank you for being there for me and helping me out and thank you all for your concerns about me. I am doing OK physically, but there’s a lot of things I’ve been dealing with for quite some time. Now comes the part where I talk about what’s been happening with my life and what I plan on doing for myself and the wiki going forward. I want to be transparent as much as possible, so I appreciate it if you can take the time to listen to what I have to say.

When I was handed over ownership by Antonio, I thought I could make lots of things happen, lots of changes for the better, to make the Polandball Wiki a place where everyone can feel welcome as an individual. Never did I expected things to be this hard, not at all. I fully appreciate the good gesture he had in giving me ownership to the wiki and I know he meant well, but when I was given ownership, it came at a time where my life had turned upside-down, for better or worse.

2019 was a very eventful year for me, as I graduated from high school, entered college, and grew more interested in the furry fandom (surprise, the owner is a furry). As time went on, as I entered college, I started to feel like I had too much on my hands. I owned a wiki that used to be on Fandom’s Top 100 Wikis list by WAM Score, had a YouTube channel where I made local news open compilations of TV stations in the US and some in Australia as well (which I’ll address about later in this long rant), became active in a few communities (i.e. TV news enthusiasts, furry servers, etc.), and drew some art from time to time.

At the same time, I also had to deal with the stress of doing homework for 4 classes, constantly worrying in my head about never having time to do all of them in time, and worrying I’d have to make some sacrifices in one class in order to help out my grades for another. The latter is a position I never want to be in at all because I want to do well in all my classes, but I also want to help others in this community. I thought I was able to multitask at stuff, but all it has done is build up more distress on me. I didn’t realize that until the COVID-19 pandemic forced most of us into having classes online. As someone who’s autistic, it’s hard for me to find time to look after a wiki about geopolitical and historical satire filled with people who are mostly under 18 (no offense) and it’s respective server, on top of trying to focus on my schoolwork and having to deal with having all my classes online, sometimes where I have to do things at my own time, and I tend to suck at online classes, as much as I want to do well.

Some have told me that I should manage my time, but for me, as a result of having important roles to play in many places, whether it’s in real life or in the online communities I’m in, the stress has built up on me so much that I felt like I had no time to manage my time, at all. Ever since March, I’ve felt like I lost control of my life. I tried to hide it from all of you because I was stubborn as heck and I was super nervous about what people will think about me if I speak the truth, but doing that has only made things worse for me, so all I can do is be upfront and honest about where I’m at. In short, as much as I appreciate you fellas, over time, me being the owner of the wiki has become less of a benefit and more of a personal liability to me in real life.

I don’t know what has happened to the wiki while I was gone, nor do I know what I need to do to help out. I don’t know what has changed and don’t know what’s no longer on the wiki. People have come and gone (which is par for the course), some voluntarily, others because they did horrific things. I wish I could’ve done better, helped people out, and deescalate tough situations. I just feel like every move I make on this wiki, I worry I’ll get criticized for it, even if I’m trying to do as much as I can to make this wiki a better place. I fully get and understand that as the owner, I take full responsibility for what the wiki does, especially when it comes to content moderation and what we do when we see someone acting up.

I never expected I would have to deal with promoting new moderators, moderate the wiki, and dealing with drama and controversy on the wiki, all while having to deal with college, homework, and other interests. I don’t get paid to control this wiki, nor does anyone get paid to moderate it. I emphasize on that because it’s important to remember. We all volunteer to take time from our day to look after you guys. At the end of the day, we’re not bots, we’re people with lives of our own, with things to do, friends of our own, other interests, the list goes on. I shouldn’t have to say that, but here we are.

There have been moments I reflect on that make me wonder whether it’s worth it remaining as the owner of this wiki. Two events that made me feel like remaining as owner is becoming more of a personal liability to me was the alt raids done by that one troll last year and the dilemma between two individuals on this wiki months ago.

The first event that made me think being the owner has now become a liability was the raid done by a troll named HolyWarMartyr and his sockpuppets/alts. Back in September, HWM bombarded the wiki by vandalizing images by replacing them with NSFW stuff. Normally, this is something that we can handle by banning him and reverting back the images he vandalized. However, his type of vandalism is fast and hard to detect since his vandalism doesn’t show up in the “recent wiki activity” section.

What made this worse is that one day, on September 24th of last year, as I got out of class, HWM came back and vandalized again. I managed to ban him, but people were constantly pinging the mods to help revert the images back to normal and delete the disgusting images he posted. They had every right to do so, considering the severity of the situation, but unfortunately, I was alone at the time and everyone was either offline or on mobile, and it didn’t help the fact that I was still in public when that happened or that it was slow for VSTF to respond. I had to take an hour deleting the NSFW images while making sure nobody sees the disgusting things HWM posted as I’m trying to delete them. I felt very uncomfortable and I was pretty pissed because I had to singlehandedly delete the ridiculous stuff he posted.

As a result of his constant vandalism week after week, I had no choice but to contact Fandom and make it so that only mods can change images. I really did not want it to come to that, but I had to do that so stuff like this doesn’t happen again.

The other event was a feud on the wiki server between someone who’s now a mod (A) and another individual (B). There was an argument between them about the term “transtrender”, uttered out by B, and even though I personally thought that word is transphobic, the way it was talked about and worded had me confused as heck. I wanted to know the details, but things were so complicated and not clear and cut, I didn’t know what to do in that situation, especially with A (who is trans herself) on the verge of being promoted to her current position at the time. Weeks after the conflict though, as I was on my long break, she told me that the situation was apparently mutually settled, which paved the way for me to promote her. I’m glad the situation was dealt with, but boy, did it stress me out with the feeling of sensory overload. Just a heads up, please do NOT go after anyone involved in this, especially considering this issue is now resolved and just water under the bridge now.

Among other things that happened on this wiki I can’t recall on top of my head, remaining as owner is giving me a lot of anxiety, and as a result, it had my grades go down, it’s made me lose sleep, made me feel depressed when I go to bed, gave me a heckton of sensory overload from time to time, the list goes on. I’ve had this constant fear where I worry if it’s too late to change course, if it’s too late to fix the mistakes I’ve made and as a result of that fear, it led me to become distracted from important stuff where I just lurk through the web and do stuff unrelated to what I need to do, pretty much what some people might call “procrastinating”, and it hit me hard because as I said, I cannot concentrate on online classes AT ALL.

When I entered college last year, I imagined myself working for a TV station or media in my local area, likely somewhere behind the scenes or covering sports, probably even radio, more or less. Initially, I chose mass communications but after I thought maybe I want to get into animating stuff, I changed it to graphic design, not realizing that one, animation and graphic design are two different subjects, & two, as much as I love making mock and fantasy logos and furry art, personally, it’s just a hobby to me. What I really want to focus on is video editing.

If you haven’t read about what I do outside of the wiki, I run a YouTube channel that focuses on local TV news history from stations in the US and some in Australia, from news open compilations to clips from places like NewsActive3 and channels that no longer exist, even some radio clips on a rare occasion. I’ve been a TV news geek for almost a decade and it’s one of my favorite hobbies, so much, I took a TV production class as an elective throughout my entire time in high school. I’m still working on getting my compilations uploaded or new vids, but the reason why it’s been hard to get back to things is due to not only college work, but also the time it takes to break down clips from NA3’s compilations one video at a time on VSDC, the program I use to edit videos. There used to be a video trimming site I used often which made the process go by quicker, but it appears like it no longer works for some reason. Once I’m prepared, once I got everything I needed from NA3’s vids, rest assured, I’ll be back to doing things on that channel. I also will probably add in something to my compilations, and that is giving credit to the original posters in the description, which will require me to take more time into my compilations to connect each clip to its original poster via a Word document.

I’ve also noticed someone’s been ripping my compilations without telling me in advance so I’ll probably have to deal with him in his YouTube comments, which is my ‘’only’’ option because he has no other way for me to contact him. That sucks, because I don’t like directly confronting someone about a serious issue in public as it makes me feel uncomfortable. Other than that, I won’t discuss any further details about it here, as this situation is irrelevant to the wiki.

Looking back, switching to GD from mass com was a major mistake I made (no pun intended), especially considering I was right the first time. I just want a do-over or something that can get me on the right track. I want to focus on getting back to Mass Com. again. I just don’t know where to start, given all this COVID mess. I’ll probably discuss with people I know and trust in my college (the staff over there) about disenrolling from the summer semester and joining back in the fall, just for the sake of my mental health and to sort things out before I get back next semester.

I hope I can take classes in person once the fall semester begins, of course, taking every precaution like wearing a mask, washing my hands, etc. If I have to take them online, oh boy, I have no idea what to do, because things will be rough. It sucks balls living through what could be a depression while you just entered college, all because the federal government in my country has failed to help their own people by not having any adequate safety nets in place for the US to get through this pandemic on top of having a wacko duck guy as our president who thinks this virus doesn’t exist and only cares about clout. It’s pretty much a colossal failure from the top down, but political rant aside, THIS HECKIN’ SUCKS.

That being said, because I want to focus on getting back on the right track in college, I have an VERY IMPORTANT announcement to make. I’ve decided that I’ll be starting the process of stepping down as the owner of the Polandball Wiki and its respective Discord server. I’ll remain as a moderator on both the wiki and the server and keep my bureaucrat status (like my predecessor, Antonio), but my time as the owner of this wiki is slowly fading out into the sunset. This was not an easy decision to make, and I have thought about this for a few months. I still want to be the owner, but now I’m realizing that will only lead me to have more instances of sensory overload, so I believe stepping down will ultimately be the right decision for me.

Not only that, it’ll probably be the best path for me on this wiki moving forward, so I can focus on other stuff not just in real life or outside the wiki, but on the wiki as well, like the Polandball Wiki Song Contest, which has pretty much been in limbo since the end of last year. I’ve been reluctant to transfer ownership of the contest to someone else because sadly, I didn’t find anyone that would be interested and also having experience to manage this contest. Procimus, the founder of the contest, attempted to do a “test contest” on the dead wiki server last month and I was really hesitant to do so because not only did it add to the anxiety I’ve already been having for a while, but also because there was no plan in place to begin with. Someone can’t singlehandedly moderate the PWSC and expect it to do well, the PWSC requires a team to make it work and a plan in place such as rules, how the results will be presented, etc. His plan, or lack thereof, to do things as we went along, for something as sophisticated as the PWSC, will only end up in disaster. By stepping down as owner of the wiki, it might make it possible for me to resume the contest again and have it done more efficiently.

I’ve also had my interest in Polandball wane a bit, although I still have some focus on it, so it’s not the main reason why I’m stepping down. And with that, I think it’s time to pave the way for someone else to be owner while I focus more on college and take care of myself, which is why I’ve chosen Collisions to be my successor. I’ve talked with him about how to do this, and we thought the best way to get through this process is a transition period. Starting on July 25th, both me and Colli will own the wiki and the Discord server for around 2 months. After that, on September 25th, I will be stepping down as the owner of the wiki & the server. Colli will be the full owner of the wiki and I’ll be transferring ownership of the server to him. In the meantime, I’ll hopefully be making some much-needed changes, such as being stricter against unironic xenophobia towards marginalized groups, so that I can make this wiki a place where everyone is comfortable to be in.

By the way, this won’t have an impact on me being the owner of the Companyball Wiki. I will still remain as the owner of that wiki, mostly because I have yet to find anyone who will make sure it maintains similar rules to the main wiki, let alone any mods that will enforce those rules such as the no circle tool rule, no pages of companies not on Wikipedia rule, etc. In fact, I think stepping down as the owner of the Polandball Wiki might also be a good opportunity to focus on that wiki a bit more in my free time.

I’m grateful for the time I spent being the owner of the wiki, but sometimes, life just hits you and it bites you in the butt really bad, and sadly, you just gotta let some things go. To the mods and everyone else, thank you all for helping me get by as the owner of this wiki for the past year. I’m hopeful that Collisions will help me make this transition go smoothly and I hope he does well for the wiki once I pass the mantle onto him. Once again, thank you.

- ChocoMingo

P.S. I’ll also be more selective and restrained when it comes to friend requests and that goes for both the wiki, Discord, and elsewhere. That is why I’m going to be purging my friends list on Discord, only leaving out those I know and have stayed in touch with. Understand that I am doing this to take care of myself, so please don’t take this personally. I might also put in a guideline to address to the wiki to not send friend requests to any mod without given approval. Just because you posted a friend request on the wiki or on Discord doesn’t mean we’re should respond to it or accept it. The mods have the right to decline a friend request for any reason.

I also don’t want to be put in a position where I’m conflicted on anything, because I have other things to do in my life that are way more important than handling little controversies and edit wars. Along with that, I’ll be leaving a few servers I’m no longer active in, as in not the ones I was regularly at but the ones I pretty much never interacted with. I’ll also be unfollowing some accounts on Twitter (mostly news accounts that aren’t from my local area and political shows) so I can make room for other folks that will make my timeline better.

I also missed a lot of stuff over the past few months I needed to do something about, so I’m going to be adding a staff to-do list on the Discord server on things the staff have yet to work on. That way, we can focus on other stuff in our lives while also implementing things we plan on doing.