Its you, and the userbase. You aren't at fault at all, but your expectations certainly are.
My advice: You've been doing a good job so far (despite being mormon and loving dragons). A better job than zok anyways.
Don't set your expectations too high, and don't put in too much effort. Don't burn yourself out. I feel like that's what zok did. He went all in, and then quit. Be here, but don't be obsessed with this website. Maintain your sanity and personal life above all else. This thread in itself is proof enough of that. Trying to mod every thread in the forum for drama is suicide. I get that you want quality posts, but you can not, and will not, be able to enforce that. Its something that had to evolve on its own. Yes, some moderation is needed, but if you try to babysit the entire website, you are going to have a bad time, and just rage quit or go into exile like zok did. Don't make that mistake. Chill out.
My two cents anyways.
I should say, I'm not going to move ALL the drama to this thread. Only the more egregious examples of it. Also, this thread is most likely only going to be used temporarily. When everything finally starts to actually die down some, I'm going to decommission it.
Moving on to what you said about burning out mainly though, funnily enough, I got this same speech from an old poster from totse2 that used to post here as well. While it's all well and good to relax and stop trying to take care of this site so much, I just don't see how I can do that. Even what I'm doing now doesn't seem to be enough at all.
As far as I can tell, hes the only real chief here. Yeah, there are other mods, but none can take his place for shit as far as I can tell. Jeff and zok were absent for months at a time, and shit kept running because they delegated basic tasks to others. Arnox needs to do the same, especially if he is this stressed out after only a few weeks. This is an interesting period, but if the site is a success, the level of stress is sure to increase from this point. Employing proper stress management techniques, site expectations, delegation, and policy are all crucial to the long term survival of this site.
Honestly, I don't feel that there's anyone here who I could trust to take my place who's actually active. I could call in a few very trusted friends I suppose but they're all busy. They don't have the time for this nonsense. ML is busy and Idio has a life. There's no one really so... I'm kind of alone. And even I may be about to join their ranks soon and begin to become very busy as well.
I'm a firm believer in positive reinforcement in communities like this. You have to treat us all like children because that's kind of what we are when given free agency. You don't hit children, you show them you respect them by talking to them frankly about the bad behavior and reward them for good behavior.
We have these useless stars on the left. Arnox, maybe you could implement a thanks-like system that only allows you to hand out thanks? And they could show up there on the left as stars. And when a person collects 5 stars, they can trade them in for something neat. Like maybe they would be able to reverse a ban placed on another member! Within reason of course. CP spammers need to stay gone forever. But people like power to do things, and reversing a ban is always a positive thing for a person to do. It could maybe strengthen the community in unexpected ways.
I say if you want more people to care, give them some limited powers or something as a reward when they start being consistently constructive and friendly. Or something.
Just an idea.
Well, sure it would encourage good posts and niceness, but for all the wrong reasons. People will now be sucking up to me/the staff more than ever now just so they can get that extra power. And power to reverse a ban... Nope, bans are always given for good reason here.
Equa, you're just simply too nice. To put it bluntly, some people are unreasonable and/or just don't care and all they do is disrupt the community and drive away the actually good members. Some people.... Just want to watch the world burn. (heh) So sometimes a ban is needed.
