I wanted to write a quick something about being written out of the about page on LolKing that’s more coherent than 140 character tweets. (I was also removed from Wowhead which was to be expected — they only keep current staff, so I don’t want to be misconstrued as upset over that. I’m not remotely mad about WH.) Anyway, I created this website from the ground up, often spending 80 hour weeks during our original crunch time, and today I checked the site. It was then when I realized that Zam had decided to remove me from the about us page even though I put in a 30 day notice and left on good terms after accepting a new job offer from a completely different industry.

The thing is, they removed me and only me — leaving behind other employees who quit years prior. They also essentially erased the entire origin story: no one at Zam wanted to build a LoL site, but I thought we needed one for brand growth. So, while still running Wowhead, I spent extra hours outside of work to find a site to buy or create. After some research, I found two guys willing to make a site, got Zam to buy them, then built a brand new layout and added guides. It was a three person, whirlwind endeavor (with some help from general Zam), and it blew up. At one point, it was getting 11 million pageviews a day. Not bad for a random dream from a random girl, right?

Well, I guess it meant nothing because they completely removed me from it by removing me from the about us page the day I left.

Now, I would understand if maybe they removed everyone and created a generic TL;DR about us. Sure. I get it, a new bio page would have made sense actually. However, the other two employees whom I made the site with, were left on in the about us page. Oddly enough, their bios are also written as current like they still work there although the last one left in 2015. One of them even left on somewhat bad terms. It makes no sense.

So to sum up things: they removed me from the about us and history of LolKing, did not reply to a professional email, and when I reached out privately (in a very unprofessional ‘WTF’ manner, I was pissed) I was told they had no idea who removed it even though the person I reached out to oversees the whole site. Yeah, right, sure. I believe you.

The worst part? The person who did this was a person I hired. Many people at Zam are people I hired. I gave my life to that company.

It’s honestly a case of minimizing someone’s impact. I’ll always know the truth — and unless they want to delete every article, every Reddit post, or all of its history the internet will remember too. But it’s still pretty shitty and, to me, the worse part is they didn’t answer Tuesday’s email and then feigned ignorance when I privately asked them about it.

I thought about not bringing this up, but then I realized if I didn’t bring it up, no one would know. It would be like it never happened.The fact is I lost so many years of my life working on LolKing in work conditions that were very stressful at times and great at others. I went through a lot of growth pains with Zam and experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In the end, to have it all swept away and to be removed from the site’s history page is basically the biggest insult they could do with the smallest gesture.

Anyway, upward and onward. Treat your remaining employees better. Please. I just wanted to address this in a form better than 140 characters since I got a lot of DMs and messages about it.

Update: they’ve since just removed everyone. They didn’t change the about us, they just removed all our profiles which honestly is OK even if it’s not ideal. No one replied to me nor clarified why they did this, though I have heard some rumors including a fascinating one about a person who isn’t what they seem at all. I was one of the people who previously gave advice on how to handle bad optics or social situations for the network as part of my day job so here’s some for free, off the clock: simply saying sorry or giving a “hey, we’ve fixed it” makes people a thousand times more forgiving. Silence looks shady and it always will.