I suppose it's time for me to break my silence. Your constant attempts to rope the public into this situation shows that you want it out here, so let's not beat around the bush anymore. You want an analysis? You've got one, and I'm not going to hold back.
The New Thread
Seems fitting to open with this, given that this is the part that pertains most to me.
I'll never stop apologising for how long the turnaround time has been on a fix for your blog thread. While I wouldn't necessarily say the issue killed the thread altogether, it
did make things horribly awkward for any updates. As I've told you before, it's simply a memory issue with the text editor, and something we'll hopefully have rectified in our new theme rewrite as well. I can understand that this has been a nightmare for you, and even I'm disappointed that we haven't found a solution in what seems to be over a year now either.
Obviously, I made the recommendation to make a new thread as you've clearly quoted there, but I think you're horribly misunderstanding exactly what I was granting there. Your blog thread clearly wasn't updatable, and my suggestion of a new blog thread was to ensure that you'd have the post space to use to not have to deal with the issues with the text editor. As I clearly state, you'd have picked up the first few posts in the thread to ensure you had space for your updates and editor issues wouldn't be an issue and, when a solution is in place, we would merge the new thread to keep everything intact.
This suggestion was
not a grant of permission to create a second thread to advertise a Kickstarter campaign, and then seemingly use my post as a means of permission. It was to remake your blog thread, and us lock your existing one to preserve it until we merged it. I'm very disappointed that you seem to have twisted my grant of permission into something that was 100% not what we discussed.
This is a first example of the manipulation going on here.
Our Stance on the Kickstarter
While I didn't think it needs to be said, I'll say it here and now;
we do not have an issue with this Kickstarter being run on the WBO. At no point have we prevented this Kickstarter from happening, despite having Kickstarters run on-site being a grey area for us. The WBO has supported the project for years, and we're not pulling our support here. We're just not providing any extended support either.
As you can imagine, it's a situation we haven't had to face before. We hadn't considered our stance on something like this until you posted yours. For us, there's always a lot to consider; we cannot directly give our support to a project like this - it's like supporting a competitor really. But we have no issue housing a thread for your brand and your project.
Think of it like our Battle Strikers situation in a way; we will not directly support Battle Strikers, but we're happy to house an off-topic thread for it. We're not directly supporting it by keeping a thread for it as that's supporting a competitor again. It's like silent support for it in a way? And the same is evident for your project here as well; if we directly support it, it's an issue. Silent support by giving it a place to live is our best approach, but there's nothing more we can or will do for the project unfortunately. I hope you understand the logistical nightmare here, haha.
But yes, bottom-line for those who may have the wrong idea; we have never stopped this Kickstarter from being run on-site, and we don't intend on stopping it either. Why some people believe we're out to stop the campaign entirely, I don't know, but I sincerely hope this isn't misleading from you because I can assure you, we have the evidence that this is not the case.
Beyblade General
Honestly, given how I joined the Committee after the decision was made, there's not much I can comment on for it's past. As I understand it, because of how it basically went over the history of Beigoma and Beyblade, and detailed the physics behind it, I'd imagine that's why it made it to Beyblade General.
I think this was fine until the thread became focused on Silver Shell. At that point, it wasn't really Beyblade anymore. It becomes the equivalent of having Battle Strikers or another spinning top franchise in Beyblade General; it's not right, not as intended and it's categorically wrong. Allowing this means we'd have to allow more things here.
To clarify on what you're claiming Kei is lying about; no, I didn't grant permission for the thread to be in Beyblade General. Yes, you did message me at one point asking about whether the new thread should go in Your Creations or Beyblade General, but I didn't read this message until after the thread was posted, which read receipts should back up. I unfortunately do have a large backlog of messages and this built up quite a bit over December, when I was focusing on development of our new theme and general holiday festivities. I also was receiving a lot of messages with addressses for prizes of previous giveaways, so as you can imagine, this got lost in the abyss that is my inbox, haha.
The correct place for the thread is Your Creations, not Beyblade General, and this is something the Committee all agreed on, and also came with understanding from other forum members who also thought it was appropriate. I mean heck, even projects like Manicben's MBG series is in the Your Creations section, and that
is Beyblade related. It's literally where we want it. Silver Shell is your creation, and it's not Beyblade related either.
Kei has not messed anything up, and he wasn't acting independently at all. He was merely the one speaking for us as a collective. Negotiating that in PMs is also appropriate; we deal with warnings and matters like that privately to not kick up a fuss to the community. It's just a bother to everyone and ropes in people that don't even need to be involved, though you seem horribly insistent on doing it, hence the public reply now.
Please don't misunderstand and manipulate the answer you've received or the way you've received said answer.
The WBO Impact on Fundraising Totals
There's two factors to detail here; the impact of threads not being in Beyblade General, and the impact from the WBO overall.
To start with Beyblade General; you've actually been told privately that it's not even the best place to see threads. Our most visited page on the site is Latest Posts, which your thread appears on. It's literally front and center there on the list, and people can visit it. Funnily enough, if your thread and project is receiving the attention it deserves, it'll consistently end up high on the list on Latest Posts.
I recently spoke to some members off-site about how many people use individual forums, and whether they think the site would be any different if every thread came under one mega-forum. The answer was literally that some people don't bother looking at categories, and use Latest Posts for everything as it'll show everything new. If an answer like that from the very community you're trying to appeal to isn't enough, I don't know what is.
"I am utterly confident no one else on the WBO believes there was anything wrong with posting the topic in the General section." - I think you should've researched this a bit more and asked around, rather than making assumptions.
To outline it; Beyblade General is not an indicator of success or a way to highlight specific threads. It doesn't provide extra attention these days, and I'd say you're more than welcome to go ask this very community rather than assuming. That's what I've done at least, and I've come to the answer that I thought was true based on our back-end statistics anyway.
Regarding WBO impact; I think you're severely overestimating the impact the WBO has on your Kickstarter. What are you expecting, half your campaign to be fulfilled? You're looking for what is essentially $10,000 USD, which I can tell you for sure, is above and beyond what you'll get here.
Being transparent, our fundraisers vary between $500-1000 when we do them. You're asking for 10-20x more than that from what I'd say is a smaller community these days. If you're relying on the WBO's community for the majority of that, I don't think you've looked into this enough. The WBO should never have been your main basis for this, you should've been speaking to our resident YouTubers, who I'm quite aware are now onboard to help you. If you wanted a basis of what to expect, you should've and could've spoken to us and asked how our fundraisers have worked, and we would happily have told you to help you set your expectations realistically.
The occurance with the thread has not destroyed your target audience. In fact, I'd say it hasn't changed a thing, and your blame is sorely misplaced. You've also moaned about how Kei's post had somewhat tarnished the thread before, but are you seriously trying to imply that your actions haven't done more? Had this been handled privately, your actions wouldn't affect this as much. But you've made this public with a multi-PM, and now you're making it public on your thread. If anything, I'd say you've ruined this more than we apparently have. I'd say you're manipulating people into believing we've taken different approaches than we actually have.
Overall
Overall...there's really nothing more to say. I think you've already exagerrated a lot of the impact and our input on things. There's a lot of things we've said or done that you're either
misunderstanding or horribly
manipulating to your audience. If you sincerely think we've destroyed your campaign
because of the location of a thread and a polite in-thread message, I think you take a step back and look at the situation again. If you were so reliant on us, the campaign was never going to take off in the first place, I'll tell you that now.
As always, we're happy to discuss this further. My PMs are always open, and my mailbox is relatively empty at the moment, and any of the Committee are approachable and will speak on behalf of all of us as a collective.
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