How do you deal with being "Administrator"

[MrEyes]

Thanks for the replies

In reply to Rapscallion the site 99% of the time the site falls into the "If it brings in money and you enjoy it, you're very fortunate.". The money it brings in isn't anywhere near giving up day job levels, however as long as it pays for itself I am more than happy to put the work into the site and have no intention of making it a business.

The biggest problem the site has is "history" and this taints everything I do. The majority of the members of the site (including myself) were originally on another very similar site. Just over a year ago the site admin sold out to a "proper" business and everything changed (different forum software (was VB), loads of banners, spam offers etc etc) and the original community atmosphere disappeared. In addition to this in the closing year of the original site there was little to no moderation so the idiots started to rule the roost.

I then came along an offered an alternative that was similar to the pre-corporate original, so in the matter of a few days I went from 0 to 1000 members. Due to this history I decided to be absolutely open, honest and verbose about everything that was happening on the site, I went to great lengths to explain why paid subs & sponsors were needed, that I had no intention of selling out and have gone out of my way to make the moderation system as transparent as it possibly can be.

99% of members accept all this and love the site and are a joy to deal with but there is an extremely vocal minority that assume and preach about the worse case scenario. The thing is these people use my openness against me as it gives them more ammo in their "he isn't telling us the truth, revels in iron fisted moderation and will sell out at the drop of a hat" crusade. I know I could and should just ignore these people and in theory they will either leave or put up and shut up, the fact is that a year on these hypocrites are still using the site and all its features everyday and are showing no signs of moving on.

To give a crazy example, a few months ago I took the site down for 2 hours to perform some critical server maintenance. I announced this a week before the downtime and explained why it was necessary and how it would benefit the site etc etc. Now according to the conspiracy theorists no maintenance was needed but the downtime was necessary to take a snapshot of the site that I would then filter their "opinions" from and create a portfolio that I was putting together to present to potential site buyers!

When I made the first post I was ranting, I have now had a chance to sit back and decide what to do. So I intend to become a typical Admin, I will still moderate and work on the site however I am not going to explain anything more than is absolutely necessary. I also plan to simply ignore the conspiracy theorists and ban those that take it too far. I also plan to create a normal "secret" account that I can use to participate in the forum as a normal person without the baggage of the "admin".