Unpaid volunteer work for BYOND has traditionally been a slow moving and/or haphazard process. A group of people report to one person and wait for a solid decision to be posted before they act. Normally that person is Tom. More recently that was myself as well.

I found the guild system more efficient in this regard. We were free to act within our own sandbox. We could attempt to recruit help whenever necessary. If someone needed more authority, we could give them the blog and forum tools. BYOND Volunteers, with a generous lifetime membership from Tom, is my attempt to bring that agility back with all of the volunteers in one spot.

More than that, my hope is that this place will eventually bring in a cycle of new blood. There's a lot of work that can be done without accessing the actual site controls. We can train people and/or simplify jobs for crowdsourcing.

I've been here for roughly a decade. I've seen people come and go. Some have lost their enthusiasm very quickly. My repeated advice has been not to expect unpaid volunteers join a cause. It doesn't matter how great you think the end result could be.

I'm attempting to make my efforts a contained part of the site. You don't have to work with me if you don't want to. My plan is to allow the old guard of volunteers to recruit for whatever duty they see fit and we'll grow from there.

I've drafted Stephen001 to share my BV Handler rank. He's under no obligation. I don't know what he'll choose to work on. He might just plain refuse. I just know I'd like someone who is used to dealing more hands-on with the community and isn't afraid to let new people in as long as they're doing the work.

For those of you *cough*suckers*cough* itching to take part in a brave new world of volunteer work, please be patient. I don't know how my fellow volunteers are going to choose to use this tool. Some don't even know they have access.

Meanwhile, you'll have to give me some time to get my featured games operation running in full gear. You can read about what I expect in the previous post and note how anal retentive I am with the standards. Don't go nuts on me. You should know by now that I'll keep you posted. If this doesn't work then you likely won't have featured games at all. Let me give a reason for spamming the same games on Facebook over and over again. ;)

I've been working on this all night and need to get some sleep. I won't be around to calm anyone down so please be respectful as I leave the comments open. Bold text!