So I'll chime in here because we're already way off of topic, and I can't split this out on to it's own post which I would like to because it's a fair topic.
Historically the separation of duties has not been intentional, or for any reason as I understand it, other than that Mark did not have the desire / technical knowledge to maintain those platforms. I came up with the idea of the discord, set it up and showed it back to Mark, offered it and he was happy to let me do my own thing with it, with some stipulations on what could ensure it retained it's official status and what not.
My personal view is if I've been voted in to act as the owner of this server, that includes all of it's platforms, else it's not really being the owner, and if I'm honest that I think is what pushed Seth to where he got to, and it's a genuinely uncomfortable feeling which I've had myself. I've not yet ran the numbers, but TF in it's current format isn't that cheap to host, which is fine, I own the server, it's my "Problem" to find the money to pay for it - As soon as people start wanting to split chunks of TF off you end up with 2 things.
1 - If you still expect me to pay for it, you're making me look and feel like a fool because you want to get the perks of running a server, without needing to pay for it.
2 - You end up with no clear person running the server, with everyone running their own little bits, and over time things will fracture and split, and the community will end up divided / no more at all.
I personally feel I've been as transparent as is reasonably possible with how I intend to run the server, and I won't repeat that here, but in short I'll do what I think is best, even if that's against the popular vote. If people don't like it, we have an ownership policy and you can vote me off.
With regards to the admin voting, unfortunately at the time we had ended up setting up Flarum, it was a near new release and because Flarum is a buggy shitty piece of crap none of the plugins including polling was updated. The choice was between waiting potentially 2-4 weeks for that to be updated and leave the server in limbo, or to do the poll via a trusted 3rd party application. The e-mails were sent to every admin on the Flarum forums at the time, and if people chose not to vote then to be honest I'm not sure what more I could do given it was 3 clicks from the e-mail to open the poll, click a choice and hit submit... People were given a lot of warning and notice and reminders to vote, and we followed the policy to the letter and only deviated where there were technical limitations preventing us from doing so.
What I will also say, is if people want to start taking chunks of the server "Away from me" to run under different people, then I will need to personally review my thoughts and feelings on the matter, as I've said before, I'm not here to bankroll a server I have no real power / involvement in, and I can't see the server surviving for that long on only community donations. There are also a whole host of legal concerns that come up once you start splitting ownership, and a lot of these I'm still working through for things like privacy policies, data protection laws and all that absolute mess that comes with running platforms such as this.
I would also ask the community to tread carefully, because there are only so many of us willing to put our neck out there to run the server, and when people start wanting to take chunks of it away it screams of "You're not doing a good enough job, fuck you I'll take that" which I've been on the receiving side of oh so many times before, and it's not a healthy way to run and maintain a server.
I will also say because this has come up a few times, I'm not running TF as any sort of democracy, at the end of the day I do own this server, and I'll do what I feel best. If that means moving to new platforms, overhauling things drastic changes and the community doesn't like it, then they have the ownership policy that they can vote me out with, or they can always play on another server. To put everything to a community vote especially when it does come to larger things like the hosting and platform of the server, is not a sustainable or sensible way to run things, when most people I don't feel will have both the knowledge required to make a FULL and informed decision, and will almost certainly have their own motives often not to change / move forward because they can't see / aren't aware of the bigger picture at play.
I hope I've not missed anything out, but it feels like I've covered the major points here.
