Official Reason For MCToolkit Closure
The MCToolkit closure is a complicated topic to explain. Though people were quick to come up with their own reasons why I closed the community their view on it is a personal opinion. The official reason is more complex and goes back a while for issues the team was having long long-term.
Simply put the MCToolkit discord server has been closed down. The longer version below explains why I closed it down and the reasons leading up to my decision. Though later on I could see better ways of handling the issue at hand I still did what I knew I had options for at the given time.
Years ago I made a discord server for my NorthWestTrees community due to a request from my community. It became a hub for people to get MCreator help. One post from Klemen (founder of MCreator) contributed to MCReator communities being created. I talked to a few core members of the Community about founding a new community.
This resulted in the creation of a new server called MCToolkit with two other admins. One of the admins retired and moved on a few years ago and we promoted a team manager to admin. There were a few years of inactivity from the admin that we promoted.
Difficulties arose and through unfortunate circumstances spilled over into the core team running the server, as well as within the MCToolkit community resulting in the other founding admin leaving the team, and I was in a position where I had to find people to help with the admin duties.
Both of our team managers at this time wanted to step down, leaving me with concerns about how this could have affected the community. Having had issues finding people to help with moderation, I did what I could and stepped down from admin and promoted the two team managers to admin.
More recently, After having worked through our differences, I spoke to the founding admin who left to come back, and they decided to do so. It was important to me that they wouldn't be pushed aside after having their years of contributions to the community. They decided to come back to the team in the end.
After having stepped down from the admin position, I became concerned for the health of the server and community regarding the behaviour of one specific member of staff the new admins promoted. I tried, unsuccessfully, to express my legal concerns about being the Owner of the server to the team admin members about the recent events that were taking place.
That specific member showed different behaviour in the past when they were moderators and things started to seem like they were testing boundaries to see how far they could go. I began to take notice when he removed an admin from their role and then gave themself the admin role.
They made remarks after giving themselves an admin role about kicking me from the server. A few days after that the same member asked for more personal information about who I was with for my website host. This caused serious concerns that they were looking for vulnerabilities in my site to try to attack it. And more recently, the same member had posted a video that could have been offensive to people following the faith of Christianity. This strictly went against the policies and rules of the server.
After voicing my concerns to the admin team about this member's actions, I was accused of personalizing the situation by targeting this specific member and told to let them do their job.
When I stepped down one of the things that I clearly stated was that I would still voice legal concerns if any situations arose regarding the server violating any of the Discords rules, and how my account would be affected because I was the owner.
My concerns for the health of the community, the positivity of the team managing the server and how it would impact the community, and the personal responsibilities that I carried in being the owner of the server were not taken seriously or given supportive consideration through open dialogue to resolve the issues at hand.
I looked at the options in front of me: I could have removed the two new admins, but this could have caused conflict within the team and made things worse; or, I could delete the server.
The issues that I was facing were that we were on the Discord Discovery program, and I could not give another person ownership of the (MCToolkit) Discord server. This would have broken the contract that I agreed to when I joined the program. I could have contacted Discord and asked for the Discovery program to be removed and they may, or may not, have let this happen. The other option was to delete the community.
Because of the lack of unity and cohesion in the management team that was now in place on the server, I felt that I had been left with no other option than to make an independent decision.
In good faith and trust, I attempted to put aside these personal attacks against me and give 24 hours for a server to be created that would allow people to migrate over to their community.
When I got up the following day the member who had been creating and posting their animosity toward me had posted rude messages on the MCToolkit discord server. This only made matters worse for everyone and was a clear reflection of what this community was destined to become. With this in mind, I took steps to delete the community early.
The trust that I had held for the community and team members to make the transition in a peaceful, respectful, and professional manner, was clearly not evident in the behaviours being exhibited.
If I had the legal right to pass ownership to the other founding admin, this would have been my first choice and I would have done so. However, transferring ownership while on the Discovery program was not an option due to how Discord has its policies set up.
Regarding the future: I don't see the need to have another NorthWestTrees gaming discord server. There is no demand for my gaming community to have a place to discuss things about my channel and I can simply post any news on the community tab on my YouTube channels.
After my many years of dedication and commitment to the MCToolkit community, I would like to express to the people who have supported us on the server, especially the people with whom I had worked closely during this time and felt a friendship with, I am extremely saddened by the way things turned out, and I wish only the very best for the MCreator community now and in the future.