I know there are a lot of members of DART who are not entirely familiar with the user Airmax. Airmax has only played in a few games of mafia here, and hasn't been fully engaged on the site yet so he is definitely a new face to some of you.
But airmax has leadership experience on a Debating platform for literally 10+ years. The site that this site was inspired from (many of the current user base are veterans from it) is Debate.org. Debate.org was a fantastic website until the owners of the website (Juggle) became too inactive to remove the spam that was constantly flooding the forums, and most people moved elsewhere. For years, Airmax was the sole person deleting the spam in every forum. There were literally hundreds of spam bots posting every day. Keep in mind airmax was not being paid to do any of this, and hadn't heard from the site owners in a long time, he still kept the site alive by dumping hours of his personal time into deleting spam to keep our community alive as long as possible.
I first joined debate.org when it was still debate.com, (roughly 2009) and the site was always thriving with activity. Around 2012, when Debate.org first held a presidential election (originally the role was designed to give moderator privileges and act as a role to communicate with developers, similar to what the role is here) airmax ran for president. He became the acting mod of the website and remains in that role to this day. Debate.org had one of the most active vibrant communites, and while occasionally some moderation action was taken, airmax's laissez-faire modding style was ultimately favored by the community.
Now one thing I can personally attest to about airmax, and this is what I love about him, is that he will always respond to you intelligently, and logically explain any decision he makes. There was times when I had confronted him about taking action, or lack of action. There was never a time where airmax failed to address my concerns and properly explain an action. I never felt like airmax was doing something for the sake of doing it while he was a moderator. There was always reasons for his actions and he would explain them well. And this isn't a dig at current moderators, but there has been times when I have approached them with issues to either have them eventually stop responding, or the conclusion be "this is just the way it is".
Airmax does not roll that way. He deeply cares about the community, even people who are adverse to his decisions. I know this because I was a pain in his side for a long time. You can see this by the way he interacts with RM as well. It's not an act. It's no secret RM hates airmax and will use any method to dig at him. Even when he did it on Debate.org, airmax never responded less professionally than he did to RM in his campaign thread. This is just who airmax is at his core. He is a deeply caring person, who loves the community and everyone in it. He won't encourage ruthless bans to our moderators.
In fact all of our current moderators know him from Debate.org and have very good repor with him. There is no world I can see in which airmax is not able to help guide their actions through his wisdom and experience. Out of every political candidate here, airmax has the best ability to reach and communicate with our mod team. Whiteflame served as Chief vote mod for airmax on Debate.org, and ragnar was a long time friend of Airmax's as well on DDO. Supa also is extremely familiar with Airmax, both on DDO and in live mafia games that we used to frequently hold.
So now that we have established that Airmax has history doing this role, and doing a very good job at his role, I will explain why he is needed now more than ever.
Airmax cared about DDO so much that he was willing to purchase the website from them and start a gofundme in order to support the website and make it thrive. With airmax as president I can see many old debaters returning to the site, many who are aware of DART but do not wish to come here for various reasons, many having to do with over moderation. Airmax can bring this site to life. Hell I will help bring it to life, so will mikal if there is hope that moderation can return to the way it was on DDO. Airmax is that hope. I fully believe that he will put a lot of his free time into making this site alive. I won't say "revive" because this site has never been a pinnacle of activity. But with moderation reform I can see this site easily becoming as active as DDO was if not more active.
We have an amazing site developer in Mike, and active moderators. The site in some ways is better than DDO was functionally. We just need to reform the TOS and moderators ideas on how to enforce them. Airmax can make that happen.
Vote airmax in this election. He is the websites best hope at a lively and thriving community. He is what I base all moderation standards off of in any online community because he served in his role so well. We are priveleged to have him volunteer his time to do this for the website.
