User blog:Big the cat 10/My 5 Year Story + Q&A

Hey everyone, as part of my 5 year anniversary celebrations, I will be sharing my experiences on this wiki as well as doing a Q&A. Without further or do, let’s get started!

My Story
My story begins in 2013 at the age of 11 when I went onto YouTube and found this video where Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker were pitted against each other in a battle to the death. Having a interest in history/battles as well as being a fan of the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises, I decided to give the video a watch and was quite intrigued by it. I found this “Harry Potter VS Luke Skywalker” video was part of a series called DEATH BATTLE! where fictional characters would be pitted against each other. For the next 2 years, I only had a vague interest in the show and only watched episodes with characters that I was familiar with such as Sonic VS Mario, Luigi VS Tails and Spider-Man VS Batman.

That all changed in the summer of 2015 when I gradually became more interested in DEATH BATTLE show as a result of the Darth Vader VS Doctor Doom, Goku VS Superman 2 Knuckles VS Donkey Kong battles being released which all contained combatants that I was familiar with. At the same time, I was also watching another VS Show called Cartoon Fight Club (CFC) and on 1st September 2015, the CFC Mario vs Sonic Total War episode was released which I throughly enjoyed at the time. In the following days, I looked up random Mario vs Sonic matchups on the internet and that brought me onto a certain website called the Death Battle Fanon Wiki. Most of the Mario vs Sonic fights that I found belonged to a user called Chompy-King, but I gradually read the fights of other users such as Hipper and Nkstjoa/Nk.

Over the next two months my interest in the wiki grew and grew as I continued to read other user’s battles. Seeing how fun these users were having creating their own fan made DEATH BATTLES made me want to join in the fun as well. However since the current Head Bureaucrat, Nk had adjusted the wiki’s settings so that only registered wiki/FANDOM users could contribute to the DBFW, this would mean that I would have to create my own account if I wanted to create my own What-If? DEATH BATTLES. Finally, on November 2nd 2015 at the age of 13, I created a wiki account and named it after my favourite Sonic character, Big the cat.

Having made my first ever edit on the Omochao combatant page, I set about making minor modifications to other character pages and creating my first few What-If? DEATH BATTLES (e.g. King Vegeta VS Black Doom and Hagrid VS Chewbacca). Considering where I am now, you probably think I was pretty popular back then, however that couldn’t have been further from the truth. When I first joined the site, I tended to make friends with the outcasts of the DBF community and was pretty annoying/immature due to my young age which caused me to be unpopular with the key users of the wiki. By around June 2016 though, I had begun to somewhat mature as an individual, making friends with users as Shadow7615, Ancient-One-And-Only, Cletus16 and SlashLion5K.

Whilst things were beginning to look up for me, the DBFW’s overall level of stability was significantly decreasing. Nk who was responsible for kickstarting the wiki’s popularity stepped down as Head Bureaucrat in May 2016. Without a clear leader, the site’s moral standards began to slip with popular users bullying outcasts off of the site and people frequently making offensive jokes in Chat. Bureaucrat Fedora Lord Para made a thread on these issues calling for them to cease immediately. Despite having crap grammar and spelling at the time, I decided to give my two cents on the situation which impressed Para and some of the other key wiki users at the time. A couple months later in August 2016, many of the wiki’s ‘elder admins’ were starting to retire or fade into inactivity which resulted in popular wiki user, Arigarmy making a thread expressing his opinion on current wiki issues and calling for the promotion of several users to the staff team. I was nominated for the position of Chat Moderator due to my increasing maturity levels/frequent Chat attendance and was promoted on 22nd August 2016.

To show my gratitude towards Ari for helping me to join the staff team, I supported his wiki improvement policies once he became Head Bureaucrat of the wiki in a period known as the “DBF revolution”. As 2016 turned into 2017, I did my best to carry out my duties as a Chat Mod, kicking and banning users who broke the Chat Rules. On 1st August 2017, I was made an Admin by Ari after the departure of two previous Admins from the wiki.

Towards the end of 2017, another crisis emerged on the wiki. From June - November 2017 several of the 2015 generation of users had begun to lose interest in the wiki due to the increasing number of memes being posted on the site as well as the toxic nature of the wiki’s public discord server. By December 2017, the situation had become quite serious and with Ari’s permission, I stepped up to resolve the crisis by clamping down on the amount of memes being posted on the wiki and having the public server shut down. For my efforts, Ari made me a Bureaucrat in January 2018. Throughout the next two months, I continued to make improvements to the wiki (e.g. creating rules about group battles and setting up the ‘Help Threads’ forum board) until on 25th February 2018, I received an unexpected message on my wall. It was Ari who planned to step down as Head Bureaucrat due to school commitments and wanted me to take his place. I accepted his offer and thus became the leader of a 20,000 page wiki after 2.5 years of contributing to the site at the age of 15.

Having never taken up a position of great leadership before due to my introverted personality, I first found the role of Head Bureaucrat to be overwhelming and lacked the confidence to take bold site decisions, however as the months went on, my level of confidence increased and I became more comfortable in my leadership role. When Ari retired, the DBF senior staff team was pretty bare with only myself, Shadow7615, Commander Ghost and Withersoul 235 holding the position of Admin. Shadow, Ghost and Wither proved to key advisors as I set about rebuilding the wiki and expanding the staff team with Shadow eventually being named my heir and Ghost and Wither being named Deputy Head Bureaucrats.

Despite being busy with school at the time, by December 2018 I had managed to put the DBFW on the path to recovery, however there was one thing that prevented the site from truly prospering. The internet trolls. Whilst the DBFW had experienced on and off instances of trolling from 2016 - 2018, throughout 2018 a group of trolls with similar usernames made a habit of posting NSFW images and racial slurs on the wiki that the staff team would have to quickly remove to reduce the negative impact they would have on the community. In December 2018, I messaged the FANDOM Staff about the troll situation who suggested that they install an Abuse Filter which would prevent the trolls from typing racial slurs anywhere on the site. I agreed to their proposal, but unexpectedly whilst the FANDOM Staff were installing the filter, they unintentionally locked down the entire wiki which prevented any users from editing it. While it took a few days for the FANDOM Staff to unlock the wiki, they did managed to successfully install the Abuse Filter which kept the trolls at bay.

Apart from the establishment of monthly Chat Parties, 2019 was a largely uneventful year with the staff team and general community continuing to expand. It was in 2020, however, that things took a more interesting turn. In March 2020, my country (the UK) went into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst the national situation became uncertain as a result of the pandemic, the fact that I was online more meant I got to grow closer with my fellow staff members (in particular Shadow, Wither, BakaLord and Zacisawesome101) and spend more time bantering with them. The pandemic also gave me the chance to work on my joke blog battle series, the DBFCU which has been a pleasure to write.

As the national lockdown began to subside in the summer of 2020, another issue was beginning to loom over the wiki, the introduction of the Unified Community Platform (UCP) software by the FANDOM Staff. UCP's goal was to remove the FANDOM network's older features such as the Chat, the Forums and the Wiki Activity page and replace them with newer, but more controversial Discussions and Recent Changes features. Considering that the Chat had been the springboard for staff career, I was especially sad to see it go and whilst myself and Wither made blogs calling for UCP to be made more user friendly, we alongside the hundreds of other UCP critics across the FANDOM network were simply as viewed by the FANDOM Staff as being part of a "vocal minority" and had our concerns mostly ignored. UCP was implemented on the DBFW on Wednesday 28th October with the new software making it more difficult for many users to contribute to the site. While I at first considering stepping down as a result of the changes, upon further reflection, I thought this would be unfair to the community who would be looking to me to strengthen them in this time of great unrest and change and so, unless the FANDOM Staff releases another software update that makes it impossible for me to contribute to the wiki, I shall continue to lead and serve the Death Battle Fanon Wiki community until the day of my retirement comes and I end up stepping down as Head Bureaucrat.

To conclude, I guess you could say that the moral of this story is while life will invietably place obstacles in your way, if you retain a positive attitude and keep striving to be the best person you can be, you will overcome said obstacles and be a lot more sastified with yourself as a result. If you made it the end of this  REALLY long blog without falling asleep, then you are an incredibly resilient person! 😂 Jokes aside, thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this blog.

Q&A
Now is the chance for you all to ask me some questions not only relating to the wiki, but also about me as an individual. As long as your questions aren’t too personal then it’s all good!

Also, to differentiate this 5 year anniversary Q&A from my previous two Q&A sessions, this time around I will be allowing individual users to request reviews of up to 2 battles that they have written so that they can receive constructive criticism on their battles from this site’s leader and hopefully get a clear idea of how they can improve their writing skills. However, please note that it may take me some time to answer all your questions and get through all your reviews due to me having to attend to wiki matters as well as matters in my personal life.

That aside, please ask away!