First Impressions
First things first, I needed to write a notice.
The gallery had been turned upside down overnight. The users had no idea what had happened, and no idea how long it would last.
If I left things in that state, some of them would adapt on their own — but others would quietly wander off somewhere else.
And I wasn't about to let my livelihood walk out the door on its own two feet.
Still, there was something I had to check first.
I opened the management menu again. Earlier, I'd only glanced at the delete and ban functions and moved on, but scrolling further down, there was a section called Gallery Configuration.
[Create Sub-Gallery]
[Appoint Administrator]
"There it is."
The creation screen had fields for the gallery name and its topic. The parent gallery selector already had South Korea chosen for me.
When I poked at the description, it turned out the same setup existed under every other country's gallery, too.
That was all I needed.
The ones talking about games would get game galleries. The ones talking about novels would get novel galleries.
I'd build each of the washed-out strays a little room of their own to play in, and keep this place open so anyone could drop by and chat whenever they liked.
I didn't need to manage every minor gallery myself, either. Whoever stepped up to create one could take the armband.
I doubted anyone would actually want to — but there was always someone, in every gallery.
The kind of people who lined up to delete other folks' posts without getting paid a cent.
I opened the notice editor.
Hello. I am the administrator of the South Korea Gallery.
I apologize for any inconvenience caused by the sudden changes.
Two lines. I read them over once.
Then deleted everything.
"Yeah, no."
It read like a customer service ticket.
If I posted something like that, nobody would even read the body — the first comment would just be if you're so sorry, put it back the way it was.
And besides, I hadn't changed anything in the first place. I'd written one dumb post about wanting to slack off, blinked, and woken up as the head admin. Apologizing now would be the same as confessing that I'd done all of this on purpose.
From there, the logic was simple.
Gallery too noisy? Admin's fault.
Someone stirring up trouble? Admin's fault.
My gukbap delivery showed up cold this morning?
No idea about that one, but admin, get out here.
Apologizing wouldn't fly.
I had no intention of bowing my head first when I didn't even know what I'd done wrong.
I stared at the empty input box.
With a post like this, the first impression was everything.
The same words landed differently depending on who said them. Get pegged as a pushover from the start, and even a perfectly ordinary explanation turned into an excuse. Get a reputation as a hardass, and the one favor you grant gets you a whoa, look who's being nice today.
In a gallery, it was even worse.
A single nickname and a few lines of typing style were the entirety of who you were.
That said, I couldn't exactly open with a string of curses and a threat to ban anyone who didn't listen.
My goal wasn't to swing the armband around. It was to make people want to stay.
What I needed was an image that wasn't a pushover, but somehow made you want to poke it and see what happened.
A normal, diligent administrator?
When he did well, it was taken for granted — and the moment he slipped up once, he'd get torn to shreds.
Doing the job well was the baseline. Beyond that, there had to be something memorable, something with a corner to it. Something that made you wonder, after reading the notice, what kind of person wrote this?
It needed a bit more presence.
Come off aloof, careless with your words — and yet,
reading between the lines, the feeling that everything necessary was quietly being taken care of.
"...I remember a character like that."
In games, in novels, there was always at least one girl who grumbled her way through some trivial request and then did it anyway.
Cold lines, wildly popular.
Of course, those girls were all pretty, too.
I looked at my own nickname on the screen.
Anon.
In the sense that nobody could see my face — I could pull it off, too.
I started typing. Drafted a line about how this wasn't for their sake, then deleted it.
Too on the nose.
The trick wasn't pretending to care. It was pretending not to care. Hard to explain the difference, but readers could smell it instantly.
I trimmed the sentences. Cut out the politeness that went beyond what was needed — but I didn't write the application instructions rudely, either.
Being curt and being incompetent were two different things.
The last part took the longest to work out.
I knew what it felt like to lose a gallery you'd visited every day.
It wasn't anything special.
Similar posts went up every day, the same crowd fought over the same things.
And still, it was the place I went to every day.
Once I thought of it that way, the last sentence came out easily.
I read the whole thing back from the top.
Good enough. The point came through clearly, and at the very least, it didn't sound like a customer service rep.
I hit post.
Lots of the same questions keep coming in, so I'll write this once.
Before you post asking where you're supposed to go, read this first.
Inside each country's gallery, I'm setting up topic-based minor galleries.
Games, comics — you know how people used to gather in their own corners to talk about that stuff. I'm letting all of that settle back into place.
The South Korea Gallery stays the main gallery.
And I'm still the admin here.
Minor galleries opening up doesn't mean you should leave. Don't go packing your bags on your own.
This is a place where anyone can come and talk about anything.
Come after gaming, come after eating, come with nothing to say and just idle here — all fine.
That said, stuff that's worth collecting in one place, like game guides or info posts, goes in the minor galleries. Digging through three pages to find one question is a pain for you too, right?
I'll put up a separate notice for applications, so apply in the comments there.
Not this post. The application notice. If they get mixed together, I can't keep track of anything.
Gallery name / what the topic is / the account you're applying with.
Those three things and nothing else.
I have to hand out admin badges, so apply while logged in.
If you post from anonymous going "make me admin," how exactly am I supposed to know who you are?
When a gallery opens, the person who applied runs it.
Post management, notices — handle it yourself there, like it used to be.
Don't apply just to toss a name at me and expect me to do the managing for you.
For any given topic, check whether someone's already applied first.
If you fight over opening ten of the same gallery, I'm making none of the ten.
...Applications might take a while if they all pile up at once.
Just because yours is late doesn't mean I'm not looking, so don't keep reposting the same thing.
I'll check every single one. None will slip through.
...Anyway, I'll do my part, so until then you all play like you normally do.
Even after the minor galleries open, come chat here sometimes.
If I put in all this work and everyone just runs off somewhere else...
then I'll be holding down this place all by myself.
I put up one more notice for the applications themselves — an [Application] tag in the title and the form spelled out underneath.
By then, comments were already piling up under the first notice.
"I literally wrote 'separately' two comments above yours."
I laughed, more out of sheer disbelief than anything.
Maybe splitting the application notice off wasn't such a waste after all. If I'd taken everything in one place, that comment would have drowned in the small talk.
My fingers stopped for a second on the comment asking for the old posts to be restored.
I didn't know the answer to that one yet either. I couldn't carelessly promise it was possible. One more thing for the to-check pile.
I scrolled back down.
The corner of my mouth crept upward.
I skipped right past the gender comments. Nothing for me to verify there, and they were happily building the conversation on their own.
I hurriedly opened the application notice.
[Please leave your gallery name / topic / application account.]
"Ah."
I'd gotten sloppy, thinking the form alone would do the talking.
There was always someone who'd read even three short lines closely.
I hovered over it for a moment, then left it as it was.
A reception desk, huh. Fine.
And thanks to that, the thread was quietly filling up with properly formatted applications.
I pulled the queue of applications up to the top of my screen.
There was a lot I didn't know, and no telling what would happen down the road. But what needed doing right now — that much, I understood perfectly.
Just take it one thing at a time.
"Alright. Let's see what you've got."
I opened the first application.
This, at least, was something I could actually do.