Taking a step back

tl;dr

I'm stepping down from the EtternaOnline staff team and shutting down the OtFD forums. Still going to play the game and chart sometimes though.

Regarding EO

I've honestly been thinking about stepping down for a long time. The main motivation I had for moderating was gone by around late 2022-2023ish, but I stuck around just because it was easier to just do nothing than step down. Plus I always figured "maybe in the future I'll regain the motivation I had in 2020-2021", but that never ended up happening. So, I'm stepping down instead of being one of those staff members that just does nothing; especially since the reason I became mod in the first place was because I was complaining about the staff being ineffective.

On that note, I'll mention that I never really wanted to be staff in the first place; I had moderated communities enough times in the past to know that it's basically volunteer work except people hate you the more you do your job. It only happened because I was complaining about EO in the leftovers discord back in 2020 and Rop went "Want to become mod"? The way I saw it was that if I turned it down I couldn't complain about EO anymore because it'd be unfair to complain after I turned down the offer to do something about it, and back then I had a lot of complaints. I don't have any complaints anymore though, so...

Anyway, I think the discord will do just fine without me (It already has, I've barely been looking in it since April). There's still the rest of the staff (along with some recent welcome additions, like Dash). Plus honestly since 2023 it's been poco doing most of the work anyway, I think the only notable moderation work I've done in recent memory is helping de-escalate after the anh vu banwave (Which I never explicitly talked about in modchat... whoops).

I'll also mention that if Zeta wants me to help out with ESA again I'll still do that (It's mostly his event anyway, I just help with pooling files and occasionally updating whenever he's not around to).

Regarding the OtFD forums

Interest just isn't high enough for me to justify keeping it up. Nobody's fault in particular so don't feel bad; I could've also done a lot more to keep it alive but I felt like if the idea had merit it would succeed without me having to promote it that hard. I've archived some of the more notable threads on archive.org and still have the SQLite database if anyone wants anything else from it. Thank you to all who participated, in particular Durvin and Noire who were the main ones who stuck around after the initial hype died.

Still around

Want to make it clear that this isn't an "I quit Etterna" post. If I ever quit it's going to be more like a slow fizzle out instead of a bang. (The way I see it, if you care enough to make a big deal about it, then you're too attached to quit in the first place)

I'll still play the game and chart sometimes, and I'll probably show up in EO whenever there's a conversation that interests me. I'll also still write about the game on this website sometimes. It's just that interacting with the community isn't as much of a priority for me as it was in the past, and I want to reflect that by stepping down from some of my community commitments.

6/17/26 update

I realized a few days ago that I forgot about the 6K discord. I passed ownership to nonyu.