Clan:Subsistence



Subsistence: The act of staying in existence.

The definition of the above word is the premise we were founded on. We are a clan that was created from the turmoil of another and subjected to a number of difficult times, but always pulled through, more powerful then before. Though once small and stagnant, we are now a medium-sized clan of around 50 active members. One of the more notable things about our clan is that we enjoy several games besides Runescape, most prominently including Minecraft and League of Legends.



Requirements
As we were founded under the premise of being an open clan, there are no level requirements to become a member of Subsistence. There are, however, 3 simple tasks that must be fulfilled before you are accepted:

1.Complete the application process and post it on our forums.

2.Join our clan chat as a guest, and get someone there to post on your application to verify that you were there.

3.Get 4 "Yes" votes on your application.

Leaders
Note: All leaders are listed by their forum name first, then their in-game name, if it differs.

Senior Administrators
Senior Administrators are the highest ranking clan members. Among other duties, thier unique role is to directly select new Administrators and Senior Administrators.

Christian (Useph)

Administrators
Administrators have equal rank to thier senior counterpart, but do not promote new admins.

Joshua (Axis of Evil)

Fenway

Directors
Directors are elected by the entire clan and serve a specific role.

Director of Advertising (DoA): Seán (Seany O Crum)

Assistant Director of Runescape Affairs: Turds (Dog Turds)

Director of Member Management (DoMM): Horsesmad50

Director of General Events: MJDurlak

Sub-Directors
Sub-Directors are appointed by the Director they serve under, to complete a very specific role.

Citadel Overseer / Clan Emissary (Under DoGE): Dw Vonder

Additional Ranks
These ranks are listed in ascending order, from lowest to highest. Any new abilities listed stack and are added to the next rank down, unless specified otherwise.

Validating
Validating is the lowest rank, besides guests and banned members. This is the rank you hold while you wait for your application to be completed.

New Abilities: Can post and edit profile.

Clan Friend
Some people who are in a clan which doesn't allow multi-clanning choose to become a Clan Friend instead of a full member.

New Abilities: Can see all but the private forums.

Emertius
When a clan member retires from Runescape, but is still active on the forums, this is the rank they get.

New Abilities: No new abilities.

Clan Member
When you are accepted, this rank signifies that you are now a full part of our clan.

New Abilities: Can vote on polls.

Diplomat
Diplomats are those sent from other clans not to simply be friendly, but to coordinate events between our clan and another.

New Abilities: Can access a subforum devoted to events involving 2 or more clans, such as wars or skill races. (Unique to this rank)

Exclusive Member
Exclusives are noteworthy for paying for a subscription that helps cover the cost of running the forums.

New Abilities: Can access the Exclusive specific forum, which includes a Leadership Leaks and an NSFW subforum (Unique to this rank)

Helper
Helpers are assigned to complete specific jobs that wouldn't neccecarily be a Director's duty. These jobs include keeping a history record and scribing meetings.

New Abilities: Access to the Helper specific forum.

Events Team
The Events Team, handpicked by the DoE, is the main force behind generating events for the clan. Don't be misled, though; any member can make an event.

New Abilities: Can access all events subforums (Unique to this rank)

Recruitment Team
The Recruitment Team, chosen individually by the DoA, is in charge of recruiting in places like fansites. Again, recruiting can be performed by anyone, but those in the recruitment team are expected to do it regularly.

New Abilities: Can acces the Recruitment and Helper specific forums (Unique to this rank)

Senior Member
Seniors are quite a difficult rank to obtain. To gain this rank, you have to be in the clan for 6 months, have 200 posts on the forums, be extremely active, and make a noticable impact all the while.

New Abilities: Can access everything that the Events Team and Recruitment Team can, along with a Senior Lounge forum.

Legendary Members
The highest non-leader rank available, it is easily the most difficult to obtain, and the most prestigious to own. Though each is handpicked by the leaders with no specific guidelines, the traits looked for include being a supreme example of a Senior Member, contributing in a major way to the clan on a number of occasions, and having held a leadership position in the past.

New Abilities: Can access all areas of the forums (Minus the Leadership areas), have Super Moderator status, can kick guests from the Clan Chat, and get thier biography in the public forums.

Pre-Founding (2004-June 15, 2009)
Subsistence's history begins with a clan called The Runite Legion. Founded in 2004, TRL enjoyed a period of prosperity before tyrannical leaders, supportive only of older members and trampling on the newer, began to destroy the clan. Some members, including a sprinkling of lower-ranked leaders, tried to remould the clan to be more favorable, seeing the inactivity of the old timers. However, they were almost instantly banned from the forums.

Though kicked out, they did not give up. 2 of the members, Useph1 (now Christian) and GrandTheftGamer (now Faskis) began in June to build a new website, for the clanmates being discriminated against. The time was coming for the rise of a clan...

Founding (June 16, 2009-September 2009)
On June 16, 2009, Christian and GrandTheftGamer launched the new clan's website, and, with difficulty, spread the word to TRL through their IRC chat. Very quickly, a member base was established from the discriminated of TRL, such as Joshua, Winged Kitteh, Serpentotia, Poetent (now Poe), and Unknown828. In addition, early advertising attempts, such as with a clan feature on RuneHQ's homepage, attracted new members that knew nothing of the split, including MiniBandGeek, who joined on the first day without ever being in a clan before.

Though quick to build up a decent memberbase of 25+, one cannot expect to simply split from a clan and experience no problems. Even though Subsistence already had a considerable number of members, it wasn't anywhere close to getting more, with advertising in a ditch. In addition, they still shared many thing with the old Runite Legion, such as an IRC channel and, shockingly, name.

Getting a new IRC channel was a simple matter, but changing the name would be an interesting feat. In the first major display of democracy, the entire clan created and voted on name options, such as The Phoenix Legion, the Dragon Legion, and Runite Rebels. After two rounds of voting, the Christian-sponsored option, Subsistence, won out easily over the second, Phoenix Legion (Fortunate considering there was already a clan named The Phoenix Legion). From there, a new IRC channel was made.

As the clan changed names, voices forgotten to time began to debate a reunion of the two factions. They gained much support, especially from Subsistence members who continued to be a part of TRL, even participating in their leadership. However, the movement collapsed when the leaders of The Runite Legion openly opposed the merge, and cut off diplomacy.

Generally free from its past, the members of Subsistence began to enrich the clan, advertising in more areas (the Recruitment Team was actually born in September 2009, and originally led by MiniBandGeek), enjoying a stable and active leadership, deciding on our clan colors (Green and Black), and creating our motto. The motto was actually a thing of pride, as it, like the name, were decided up by the clan. After the same process, Serpentotia's entry won out:

"We are the apple that fell from the dying tree. We are the next generation. We are Subsistence and we live on!"

Things were never looking better, but as always, the most testing times were still to come.

The Leadership Metamorphosis (October 2009-March 2010)
In this time period, the leadership system underwent massive changes. Previously generic leaders were assigned roles, and those filling those roles constantly shifted. Eventually, though, it stabalized.

Runescape is Clan-Friendly (April 2010-February 2010)
On April 4th, the Clan Camp was released, revolutionizing the in-game chat and rankings. Throughout this period, weekly clan meetings began to be held and the Events Team and Exclusive rank was formed. We also began to form alliances and engage in friendly F2P warfare.

The Forum Meltdown (March 30-April 2011)
After lively debate, Subsistence decided to take on the extra burden and purchase the IPB software. While raising our costs tremendously, we now had the advantage of having the most up-to date forum software - as long as we continued paying. Not only did it make the forums better, we were recruiting more members, and the investment was paying off.

Then, on March 30th, everything simply disappeared. Our members, ranks, and even topics had been deleted, all because of a glitch in the new IPB software.

It took a while to figure out what happened. The CC and IRC were the only ways to communicate, and with no way to send everyone the same message from the Leadership, panic and misinformation spread like wildfire. Even regular leaders, at times, were confused as to exactly what happened, as the forums, our center and lifeblood, showed naught but a crash message.

Finally, on April 2nd, the forums were de-bugged, and people could again access them. Slowly, the members trickled back in, as the clan licked its wounds and counted its losses.

The memberbase was devastated; 3 days after the forums were restored, we still had only about 70 of the 150 pre-crash clanmates re-register. As people came back from vacation and joined without any knowledge of the incident, it became obvious that memberbase would not continue to be a problem.

What would be a problem, though, was the tens of thousands of posts that had been made and lost in the wipe. In one single update, the threads that once were taken for granted were lost, and their sacred meanings, highlighting our history, our changing attitudes, and our clan's vibrancy were lost. It was essentially the equal effect of an adult having their memory regressed to just out of infancy.

Even here we bounced back. By the end of April, the post counts of most members had reached well into the hundreds, and the important data lost, such as application processes, recruitment accounts, and clan rules had been recreated. Even as soon as four weeks after, reforms were implemented that made user-run programs, such as a newspaper, yearbook, and radio official parts of Subsistence, under a new leader position.

The Second Leadership Metamorphosis (May-February 2011)
Even though the clan had bounced back, some parts of the clan failed to. One part of that was the leadership.

As during the first metamorphosis, reforms were enacted. Before, sub-leaders, were chosen directly by the leader they worked for. After some issues where leaders were being too loyal to their assistant friends, the system's flaws were revealed, and on June 30, 2 weeks after the clan's second birthday, assistants would now be elected by the clan. Other reforms enacted at the same time included changing the Leader and Assistant Leader titles to Director and Sub-Director, respectively, and a rule providing that the current Admins would select new Admins themselves, to relieve the stress of the application system.

As the above reforms got put to the test, many features were added and removed from the forums. Medals for the time in clan and events attended were added, a new Member of the Month feature was created, the forum software was updated several times without minor incident, a blogging feature was installed, and 3 new ranks were added; Exclusive members in August to help pay for the forums, Legendary Members in November to emphasize the effect our most outstanding members had on the community, and Helpers in December to fill jobs that were not quite part of Leadership or the Programs. Several things, though, had to be pruned from the forums. These included a Public Pub that was filling with spam bots, a dying Radio program, and 2 features that were added earlier in this time period, a rarely-used Contact Leadership link and the Mentor program, which never took off due to lack of willing mentors and students.

Meanwhile, a new problem was festering. Many leadership positions were being filled for a week, then the person vacated the position and it was left empty for a few weeks. At the low point in this cycle of quitting, applications, and voting, there were 4 positions left unfilled - two for over a month. Something would need to be done.

After a lengthy discussion, two ideas went into effect in February. The first was an end to the clan voting on sub-directors, and a return to the appointment process for that position. Thus, stress on applications was limited. A second dose of reform went into effect soon after, requiring leaders to post 1 week before retiring, so the application process could be begun early, shortening the "lame duck" period considerably.

The effect of the regression in policy, combined with the previous Administrator reform was almost immediate. Sub-director spots were filled within a few days, Director positions were quick to follow, and leaders generally followed the new guidelines on retirement, all easing the voting process for the leadership.

The Gaming Community Experiment (July 2012 - January 2013)
In early August, the clan realised that not much was being done around the place. A few discussions were raised and many members contributed to them, a lot of them with valid input. Recently a Minecraft section had been added to the forums for those who want to join in. This had expanded rapidly and the leadership realised that they could do more out of this. We were going to branch out into more games and become a Gaming Community. Surely the result of this would cause a whole new era for the clan. Everyone had their pros and cons about this new step forward, in some cases some people thought that it was a step back. This discussion went on for over a week with ideas and reasons flying everywhere. Eventually something happened; an audit was heard.

In the leadership forum, the Admins and Directors of the clan were surveying each and every part of the clan; from events to recruitment. They studied each part carefully and came to an agreement with the vast majority of them agreeing that they had to do something, and so in August 2012 it had been announced that Subsistence was officially a gaming community. But it was far from over.

With this new addition to the way the community was run, the vast majority were excited about this change and were hungry for more. More games were set up and people started playing and enjoying them.

Impossibilities remained, however. The advertising and events departments went into disarray, not being sure how to handle work for more than one game. Recruitment sloshed to a near halt, and few members had the energy to find a solution to problems such as a completely reworked advertisement, games with seperate servers, and more.

In January, Subsistence's leadership realized that the transition was hurting a lot more than helping, and put up a vote to see if the rest of the clan felt the same way. When their views were confirmed by a vote of over 2 to 1, it was over. Though Subsistence still offers a Minecraft server and support for a few other games, it was finally decided that the clan should remain a Runescape clan.

The community is still evolving, changing and transforming into a better whole. Additions are still being made to perfect this system and they will always be, for the overall well-being of the community.