What went wrong.

I've always wanted to write a pastebin after reading everyone else's on a weekly basis, but I've never really known where or when to start. Either that or I was lazy on the day I felt like writing one. After the recent events in the Super Metroid community I feel now is the best time to finally write one.

If you're from the Super Metroid community then you may or may not have noticed that I recently left both the SM SRL Discord, and the tournament Discord. I'm not going to go into the exact reasons for this, but long story short I'm tired of all the drama that never seems to go away, and I'm tired of spending time trying to help people get along, even though that was the original reason I became a mod in the first place. To explain where I'm going with this pastebin I'd like to talk about my IRL workplace for a moment.

At work I'm regularly told I'm one of the best, if not the best manager that people have worked with. And whilst that's nice to hear and I'm not sure I'm personally worthy of people saying that to me, I feel there's two reasons why it could possibly be true.
1. I never really take a break or sit in the office like the other managers at my workplace. I put in so much time helping my colleagues do their jobs so they can hit their targets, I'm always there to listen to someone when they need to talk, I stand up for someone when they need someone to stand up for them and I will go out of my way to go the extra mile for people. and...
2. There's clear rules in place and disciplinary procedures to follow should someone step out of line. So in the rare event that I do have to discipline someone, they don't hate me or dislike what I'm doing or disagree, because the rules were there to see. They can see and understand that I'm just following the rules.
I guess where I'm going with this is while part 1 translated well to the community, I put in so much of my own time into the community (as do many others), whether that be moderating the Discord, organising the tournaments, updating SRC leaderboard manually, or even just helping out a newer runner with strats or just lurking in their stream to give them a small boost in viewers. But it's option 2 where I (and other mods) failed. There were no clearly defined rules for when someone steps out of line or does something that upsets someone else. No procedures to follow. So when this did happen, like it seems to regularly, everyone had a different idea of how to deal with the situation and how it should be handled.
I don't want to see anyone banned or exiled from a community that they love to be a part of, but there were no rules saying this would be a last resort and is unlikely to happen. When someone shows a clear improvement from how they used to act in the Discord, I feel this should be taken into account when deciding what to do about an incident, but again it wasn't made clear that this is (or could be) the case. Instead we get lots of people shouting BAN BAN BAN, even if in my eyes that person is not worthy of a ban, and if (perhaps most especially) I would consider that person a friend. I guess I'm referring to one particular event here but there are several notable events in recent months that are worthy of this pastebin.

So I guess that's what happened, and where it went wrong. I hope I made some sense there.

Will I rejoin the Discord(s)? Maybe.

Will it be in a moderator role? Again, maybe. But if it is it would be on the condition that there are clear rules and guidelines made on what to do and how to act when the next drama unfolds.

One final and more positive point here: Every time I take a break from the community I always rediscover my love for casual gaming and discover one or two hidden gems, and the same is true in this instance. The Talos Principle is an awesome game! If you made it this far, thanks for reading.