Hey all, this is your Minister of Fashion Pollyx! I can be wordy, and am here, so here’s a TLDR for those who trust me and just want to know the gist of it: Seriously, for real, actually this time, cancel your Senatorships. Do not spend money on the site. Remove the site’s access to your paypal. Do not volunteer for the site or run for public office. This includes designing for the shop! Designers and prospective designers, I absolutely love you all to death, but this has got to stop.
Anyway, the longer version:
SweetasNuts, the owner of this site, is an abusive person and known cheapskate who refuses to hire new staff or adequately pay his existing staff in favor of exploiting free labor from his users. Those who DO volunteer for him, sometimes paying for the privilege of doing so, are treated abhorrently, subjected to gaslighting and emotional abuse both publicly and privately. I have personally experienced rampant mistreatment from SweetasNuts (as have many others) as recently as today!
If you want an example, check any SweetasNuts thread and read it. I don’t feel a need to drop a bunch of receipts below when it’s overwhelmingly clear, but I hope those of you who know the love I’ve put into this site will take me at my word. I have loved Ximboland and love it still. At various points I have put more than full time hours into this website and the shop in an attempt to make things better—usually completely unpaid, as I did a lot of work before I became Minister of Fashion. The saddest part, at the end of it, is that no matter how much I work and how much love I put in the site will always get worse on average or nosedive into oblivion (as we are seeing right now) due to actions of trolls, hackers, or most primarily—Chris himself.
There are numerous sources online which discuss Chris’s behavior as a business owner in-depth, both on this site and on its previous iteration, Miss Bimbo. It’s pretty clear the guy is a troll who likes when people get upset and throw a fit. In that sense, he may love this post!
If you’d like one recent example of someone bringing up issues to Chris, being subjected to abuse, and being unable to sway Chris away from terrible decisions, here’s one from a little over a year ago! And yet nothing changes—the same cycles continue. New people join, they see the community is lovely yet has a few flaws, perhaps some bad eggs (rampant trolls), or maybe someone in the Pink House seems like they’re abusing their power. They work really hard to rise up, join the government, fight the “enemies” of the day, etc. and the whole thing just causes chaos and misery for the most part and the site owner sits back with popcorn.
Oh wait, I forgot when Chris put numerous ximbos (some who disagreed with him, others unprompted to my understanding) on trial last year for having “bad fashion”! Here’s the trial for Melpomene, renowned designer, shop worker, and previous Antitheocra SM. Here’s the trial for KittyOnyx, who criticized Chris’s behavior. This one’s for Dean Winchester, who made the grievous mistake of wearing a pink thong as a himbo. Egregious, right! How dare a man dress in pink? Anyway, moving on. Anyone care to share older “Chris is consistently a huge jerk to his players and volunteers and never listens or fixes the site” examples below?
Now, when I talk about “volunteering” for the site (aka what I am trying to convince you not to do), here are the positions I mean:
Partially paid (larger treasury cut, in theory, but extremely overworked):
Prime Ximbo
Partially paid (meager treasury cut —pennies on the hour):
Minister of Fashion (gets meager treasury cut—pennies on the hour—so still a volunteer position)
Minister of Entertainment (gets meager treasury cut—pennies on the hour—so still a volunteer position)
Minister
of Foreign Affairs (gets meager treasury cut—pennies on the hour—so
still a volunteer position, plus you’re doing marketing for free. Not
super fun!)
Minister of Justice (gets meager treasury cut—pennies on
the hour—so still a volunteer position, plus you’ll be absolutely
exhausted by the effort of moderation and part of the userbase will hate
you no matter what you do)
No promise of payment/unpaid:
Fashion Police (exhausting moderation work, now with kneecapped abilities to even stop abuse thanks to SAN)
Fashion Worker (the people who upload items to the shop)
Fashion
Designer (those who design for the shop—believe me, I have tried very
hard to convince SAN to reward this position in any way but was
unsuccessful)
Not only unpaid, but PAYING to do this position:
State Minister (have to pay for Senatorship plus pay for all of the prizes out of their own pocket—when you receive prizes from an SM, it’s because they paid for them with real-world money)
Please don’t do any of this! I have been in the Pink House since October 2023 and am very close with those who have been in or around the PH even longer or in different time periods. Nothing changes. Talking to the site owner doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how you explain it, he won’t listen and he doesn’t care because he continues to make enough passive income to ignore people’s complaints. So what now?
Well, first, let’s stop giving him that passive income, especially given the recent major hacking incident has proven AGAIN that the site is not secure. Chris is a liar—do not trust him when he says your payment information is fully secure just because of Paypal, that is not necessarily true. Remove your Paypal from XL (on the Paypal end) and consider removing your bank accounts from Paypal for the time being, better safe than sorry.
When you spend money on this site, it does not go to the people running it, to those who put in love and time into moderation, the shop, contests, and even advertising the site. It goes to Chris, who does not pay his staff properly and does not improve the site. He only makes it worse based on his agenda. A small amount of Senatorship goes to the government ministers, sure, but the amount is not significant enough to matter (and there’s decent evidence that the treasury doesn’t even reflect what it should be—⅓ of the cost of all Senator subs). Besides, half of the treasury this term will go to KatieBoutique (since she and her alt Slayyyocrates are both ministers), and if any of you have been paying any attention to Katie that will likely ruffle your feathers.
It’s not worth contributing to this place financially. It does not help the site grow. It does not go to fixing bugs. It does not go to adding a mobile scroll bar. It does not pay your favorite designer. It does not fix minigame glitches. It likely won’t go to refunding people’s State Wars purchases after the hack or restoring corrupted outfits (IF restoring them is even possible). Cancel your Senatorship, never buy top-ups, don’t volunteer your time for the site, and turn on ad block! Don’t let Chris get your ad revenue either!
That’s pretty much it. I do have some last thoughts if you’re interested, but if you don’t care feel free to leave. It’s up to you to decide what to do now. You can still help the site if you want to, but I strongly believe it’s really only going to degrade, and as shown by the hacking incident, this site really isn’t secure. It’s built on popsicle sticks. You could lose all of this at any moment. Are all these users who lost their outfits ever going to get them back? It’s really hard to say.
Secondarily, if you want to make a difference in the world there are a million better places to do it than on XL. If you want to make art in a community, lots of ways to do that too. Art Fight, a yearly event, is great for this. You could make a game, write a novel, make outfits in the Sims, join another dressup game (I hear some people here are making one), generally touch grass. We should all touch grass. If it’s about making the world a better place for you, maybe you could join a local chapter of an organization that means something to you or donate what you WOULD have spent on top-ups to a good cause. Join a rally, write an op-ed, talk to people you love about what matters.
If you want to keep in touch with me, feel free to message anyone on XL you have on Discord and they can probably connect us, I’ve got a lot of people added.
Alright, and now that we get to the end I just want to shout out the users who have spent a lot of time showing love to the users and uplifting the site as a whole. None of them asked for this or even know that I’m doing this, so I won’t list them by name as much as category. I may have individual personal issues with some people on this site (not most), but I think this is kind of beyond that. We are all victims of an exploitative site owner who constantly sets the site up for interpersonal conflict because he finds it hot. He gets off on all these sexy bimbo avatars going at each other’s throats. So this is kind of an act of solidarity in that.
Thank you to all past and present government ministers, prime ximbos, state ministers, fashion police, fashion designers, fashion workers, and anyone else who has run contests or events.
Thank you to the active duelers staying up late into the night, the state generals and citizens fighting for their state, those who help others get their curious badge, those who leave comments on all the new players’ profiles, those who share gifs on weird gif wednesday, those who share support when someone says they’re struggling or upvote posts in Reputation Points Helper thread.
Thank you, even, to those I’ve fought with, those I’ve made up with, those I still dislike, those who grate at my nerves. You’re part of the site, too, an ecosystem we all exist in—this insular little community.
Though of course I will be leaving this community now, probably permanently. Not sure about emigration yet—we’ll see. But I’ve got big things coming up soon in my life and I can’t have this site’s nonsense messing with my groove.
I’ve loved growing as a person through my interactions with each of you and I’ve loved designing and adding for the shop and running events and making outfits and all of it, but I hate the way the site is run by Chris (which is: generally not run at all, and if it is it’s done maliciously). I hate receiving constant abuse from the site owner and trolls and hackers and I hate seeing other people experience that too. I hate that this site many of us feel is a second home has become so foul, is rotting from the inside because of neglect and mistreatment from the site owner. I had enough mold in my real life home last year, as many of you know, and find myself uninterested in choking on the spores here.
Anyway, so much love, care about you all (except
in those few cases where the feeling of dislike is mutual, in which case
I say one last hearty “fuck you!”). Stay slutty, babes.
