How to step down from an admin spot?

I just told the main admin that I was done with him being less involved than any of his admins.. and that I was tired of him saying that if he viewed a thread and didn't reply (yes I had to install a plugin to see if he viewed things) that all was okay. Too many times of him coming in weeks later finally drove me in. He was never around and so things never got done on the site that we couldn't do through vb admincp.

I put in a lot of work to this site through customizations and SEO.

Did I do the right thing?

 

I'm not sure if you did the right thing or not.

I can say that the higher up the ladder you go the less likely that there is time to read, comprehend, formulate and post a cohesive opinion/position, and commit to coming back to check for responses in a timely fashion. It is way too easy to spend time on a forum and there is a lot to do besides engaging members by exchanging posts.


You know the situation far better than I do.

 

Thanks ab, you brought up points that I did not illustrate.

At this point I think that I did the right thing.

 

I think that honesty is 95% of the time the best policy. In this case, I'd have been honest. So yes, I think you did the right thing!

 

Wait, so you stepped down or you forced the other administrator to step down?

(Sorry, I haven't even started my first cup of coffee yet.)

 

I think you did the right thing to hold the admin accountable. Their choice to then go forward on the recommendation or enable some other means to allow progress.

Imo, I don't see any excuse worthy, outside of RL issues, to inhibit such interaction on their site....they own it, ergo fostered it to begin with. Pardon me if that seems a bit too terse.

 

You did the right thing. He will now realize how much you brought to the site, it sounds like he just took it for granted. It's a hard decision to make no doubt, dropping all the hours of work you put into the site. Who knows, maybe this will wake him up and you become the main admin.

 

I have no idea if you did the right thing, I think someone would have to be there and experience everything you did, far more than a written account can convey.

If there were things that no staff other than the admin was able to do, and the admin did not do them, that is a problem. But ... I do think you have the wrong perception of roles. Senior management has other responsibilities as site owner that staff can't do. Part of the whole reason for staff is to delegate some tasks, meaning senior management isn't going to be as involved in the staff stuff. Sometimes staff is even better off without their help. Depending on how the roles are set up.

What might be the real issue is that roles are not well defined and everyone does not share the same idea of who is responsible for what, everyone does not have the same expectations of each role. It's the job of the admin, or whatever the person owns full-forum responsibility, to define roles and expectations and communicate such.

However - technical communities are notorious for weakness in management skills, and such suffering is just part of the deal, in some cases. Not just IT types but also left-brained engineers and financial people, so don't feel singled out, IT gang. Sometimes they have a senior person who understands and has the personality for the 'chief of operatioons' type of overall role, but not always. So being involved can possibly mean deciding what you can put up with.

So my real answer is that it sounds like you yourself don't have enough information from the admin to know if what you did was necessary or not. Which is probably the start of the whole problem. Just my assessment of your post, with very little information.