When I first started my job as a moderator for Other Entertainment back in the day, I was pretty strict. Not because I necessarily felt the need to be, but in order for me to have any kind of work at all, I had to be more strict than I felt was necessary. Otherwise, my position would have been really pointless. Back then, Other Entertainment just wasn't a go-to forum for anybody. Nowadays, some people have made it their home forum, but back then, those members weren't here, and despite how hard I tried, I couldn't make that forum what I wanted it to be, and what I felt it should be. My frame of mindset was simple. Everyone here listens to music, watches TV, and reads. Why wouldn't they want to talk about it?
I went on demoted leave of absences so many times because I got frustrated and wanted time away from dealing with things. When I came back from one of them, I was added as an additional moderator to Other Voting Polls. I don't really remember much of what I did here. A little while later, I was promoted to smod.
When I was promoted to smod, my views on the forums shifted dramatically. Even though I was already headed in that direction anyway, because of things going on in my life, I didn't view things as that big of a deal around here. One of the threads that I made when I became smod was the Moderator Guidelines. Its by far my most favorite thread that I've created here, and in it, I made a sort of guidebook to someone's first days as a moderator that they would be able to look at as a reference for how to handle problems. I used myself and how I deal with issues as a basis on it.
The thing I love the most about my position is definitely HQ. I've wanted to become part of it for a long time before I finally got the chance, and I think I'm better suited for smod than I am for mod. If I was a mod again at this point in time, I don't think I would be a very good one. I don't view things as seriously as I think a moderator should to be able to do their job as well as I would expect them to. As far as the rules are concerned, I don't care about upholding the majority of them. The only one that I care about is respecting each other, because I feel that that is the only one that should matter. If someone posts in a thread that's been dead for two years, so what? If someone doesn't have four words and twenty-five characters in their post, who cares? Those things, I don't deal with the way that the rules say we should. Most I'd do is remove the problem. I feel like punishing members by infracting them for things that aren't important to me is unnecessary because, more often than not, I view infracting to be unnecessary.
Unfortunately, because of how honest I can be, the way that I structure my thoughts, and because of how strict I was when I started, I feel that that kind of follows me and people just assume that I'm much stricter than I actually am.