In which NER fails at guild drama

Sometimes, guildies want to do things that are destructive. You warn them it is a bad idea, but they want to do it anyway. So you let them and everything you expected to go wrong, does.

This time around, a well meaning guildie wanted to put up a "gripe" thread in the raiding forums. We actually already have a mechanism for dealing with gripes privately - a forum in which the guild leaders and the person writing the post can discuss an issue privately without interruption from random qq'ers. It works well when people actually use it. So, I lock the thread and tell people to use that mechanism.

But no. They start another thread for airing dirty laundry, and guess what happened? You got it, it went way off topic. So I split off those topics and lock that thread, leaving the original there. Of course, it left the weekend with a bitter taste in my mouth and me really upset all weekend.

As a guild leader, I take all criticisms of officers on my shoulders - that is my job. The guild knows that, they tell me not to do it, but someone has to, and that someone is me. Duh - I am the figurehead GL. The off topic-ness was about a decision I made earlier that week based on not enough information and no way to get the information I needed for a proper decision. So I made a call and a recently returned guildie gquit. It was all a massive misunderstanding and said guildie is back now. But while this was going on, all qqing guildie could see was "waah we lost another good raider because of bad decisions" and started citing examples FROM OVER A YEAR AGO! WHAAAT? Please, let it go. The leavers you are citing all left for reasons in their RL, not because of anything I could talk about!

And they wondered why I took it personally or got upset on behalf of the officers. They were destructively criticising decisions I was responsible for. How can I not take that personally?

So - never let guildies start a QQ thread. No matter how many well meaning posts there are, there are always going to be ones that are not and cause more damage overall than the ones that are good. If you do allow such a thread in your forums, police it, and say up front that qqing posts WILL be deleted.

Personally, I recommend against it if you can.