User blog:ZZeph/Venting

I used to want to be here. I used to feel happy to be here. Now I don't feel happy to be here. Now it's a chore and an obligation.

I feel bad whenever I rant about this one topic because I don't mean to be talking bad about the person who did it. The person who did it is still my friend, I just don't like the fact that it was done. My dissatisfaction started when said person had all those collector items on the wiki with high values. I don't think the "collector system" they used made any sense and I think we should have had a vote or at least something like that before they were all over the wiki. I don't think listing the values as things only a few people on AJ trade is good (this was back then, the wiki isn't like this now). I know from experience when I had some of these items that even collectors themselves were trading massively less than the listed values because they knew the average player would never offer those values. I would bring it up a lot but nothing was a good solution until everyone involved understood and finally those pages were removed.

But that never fixed the wiki's reputation and that forever affected AJ trading (I still see people asking for black longs for things like Pirates Treasures and Ocean Plugs). Ever since then, the wiki has always been regarded as trash and the staff have been treated like trash by most players. Despite my best efforts to turn the whole thing around after we deleted those pages, which were appreciated by some people who used to think of the wiki as trash, most people still in their mind had it ingrained that we were garbage, that we were inaccurate, and some people even go as far as to call the entire wiki a scam.

They never looked back at it since then, or they look at one incident like the Slippers thing to blame it all on us. For context on the Snow Leopard Slippers incident, I had multiple pairs of Slippers around that time. I really was getting offered more and more in that time period and people were commenting that they had as well, hence the page changes. When they started going down, that wasn't my fault and I tried to re-adjust it each time they went down. I don't know what more of me you expect me to do in that situation, I can't control when items go down; it'd be like blaming me for when the Beta Set randomly was going up rapidly then dropped.

And it hurts. I already feel like trash most of the time and this just validates all of that. It hurts to know that edgelords have names for others like "xd wikia followers" / "xd fandom followers" as an insult on the game.

I'm trying my very hardest but it feels like I'm the only one changing "big rare" pages most of the time. But sometimes I'm not always available 24/7 and I can't always be on AJ everyday trying to monitor if an item drops by a little. Threre's been multiple weeks where I wasn't able to be on AJ at all or I was on AJ for a few minutes maximum each day due to other things in my life or just my computer breaking (which happened a lot). And I also don't always have all the big rares that people are saying are changing, so I don't know what to do when I desperately need more information on an item's worth in that case - I really don't want to trade for items solely for trade attempts if I don't like the item (for example: I've never liked any of the items in the Beta Set, I hate the Beta Set, I have never traded for nor owned any piece of it because of how much I hate it - if you ask me for what one's worth or tell me it changed by a black long, I have no experience on that item and I don't know how to help as quickly as I can with something like that and I'm sorry but I don't know just how much you expect of one single person). And instead of people trying to offer me help or trade attempts, all they do is just yell at me that it's been inaccurate as of one millisecond ago. All they do is tell me everything I do is wrong without telling me how to fix it. I do appreciate that some people do give me very good criticism and tell me when something needs to be updated and in those cases, I really thank you and I think you're a great person if you do that - but the majority of people just tell me this wiki is trash and that I'm trash without explaining anything and it's slowly driving me insane.

If I could, I would just leave. I don't want to be here anymore. I don't care anymore. I can't take the stress that this has been putting on my mental health. But then if I do, will you still have enough people changing the big pages that people care the most about as often? Will the wiki be regarded as even more trash if we have even less people helping? That's the only reason why I haven't already left.

I also think the execution of this wiki was a bad idea. I think a place of reference for rarity is good, but the way this was done is bad. Wikia is an AWFUL, awful platform for something that you only want trusted people to edit. Wikia is fine for information on a franchise, such as the regular Animal Jam Wiki. But when there's something people have to GAIN from vandalism, that's where Wikia isn't a good thing for whatever project you're trying to make. And people do try to take advantage of this wiki by editing falsely. That's why most pages are locked. Oh yeah and people who hate us and think we're absolute living piles of garbage also like to bring up the point of "xddd anyone can change it so its bad1111!1!!" despite the fact most popular pages are protected so that only staff can edit them.

But even then, they still go to random pages of things like in-store items and try to vandalize those so that they can scam. And it's REALLY frustrating, especially when I know all of this could easily be avoided had this have never been on Wikia in the first place. We should have used something like Instagram, or just bought an actual website for this - but I wasn't around when this wiki was first made nor was I the one who made it. If someone wasn't willing to put the money into a real website, at the very least something like Weebly where people couldn't edit would be better. The only positive to this being on Wikia is that people have the comment section and forums which is a really good way of communicating trades. But otherwise, it being on Wikia just causes SO many problems. For one, like I said, we have to deal with constant vandalism and people creating new pages for their trades which wouldn't even be a problem we'd have to monitor constantly if this wasn't a wiki. Secondly, Wikia has so many flaws that I'm not even going to get into because I know people would take advantage of those flaws if I went into them. Thirdly, we don't even have complete control over the wiki, because FANDOM/Wikia still controls a great deal of things regarding wikis as a whole and all.