Dragon Cave and User Freedom

Consider this an anti-shrine.

On Dragon Cave, you are powerless. In most ways, you have no recourse if something happens to you on the site, or even offsite within officially-run chatrooms. The entire site is a ghost ship run by a skeleton crew of the most unreasonable people you'll ever meet.

This isn't about the mods. But it is about the description approval system, which is tangentially related.

The process to approve a user-written description for a dragon is, let's say outdated. If you are familiar with the more successful site, Flight Rising, you may know that when a description is written for a dragon, it will instantly appear under the dragon's main stats, and can be edited any time. Although these must abide by site guidelines and can be moderated by site staff at any time if they break TOS, the site trusts its users to customize their dragons freely.

Not so on Dragon Cave.

In order to write a custom description, it must first go through an approval process by a site moderator who is appointed to this duty. At the time of writing this, there are only two moderators appointed. Generously; perhaps it is only one, after all. As a result, there is a backlog of unapproved descriptions thousands of entries long. The queue is quite literally years long. And unlike Flight Rising, you are not free to be as creative as possible. You cannot break site lore, you must write with good grammar, you cannot write in any tense besides third person past, and these criteria are judged on a case-by-case basis, decided upon by the mod who looks at them. If they look at them. There is no way to dispute a rejected description, because there is no way to speak to anyone on site in any direct way. And even if there was... well. Dragon Cave moderators aren't exactly reasonable individuals. If you were lucky enough to have the single mod on duty finally find your description, only to have it rejected after half a decade of waiting, you can only submit the fucking thing again and wait another half a decade. Description approval moderators have the ability to fix typos, if you are unfortunate enough to make them and not catch it in time... but they can also reject the description outright instead of showing you mercy.

There are many cases in which the half-eaten corpse of the moderation team will be very quick to tell you that the site is visited by a lot of children. And they're right, while this site is well-visited by a lot of older people, its target demographic is young teenagers who are finally old enough to sign up for their own account online. But keeping this in mind, is it not a complete and utter waste of everyone's time to moderate user-generated content on this scale, if the content in question is generated by children? Even if the known site lore was accessible (it's not), the target demographic isn't likely to recall every ounce of it. They are more likely to make up their own stories and ideas, and they are not likely to do it with good grammar or well-written prose. That's not a dig at them, it's just part of the learning process when growing up. So why do we live like this? This benefits absolutely no one, and serves to gatekeep creativity. The barely alive moderator(s) who are on staff to do this process are overworked at best, so it's certainly not helping them out. No one wins.

Ditch this antiquated nightmare of a system, and update your idiot site already.