There may have been a post already about this, but search never showed anything.
It seems like https://www.mentorbuilt.com/ has now been closed. For those who don’t know, mentorbuilt.com was a satirical website about FIRST/FRC. Sad to see that it is now gone.
RIP Mentorbuilt. A true service to the community.
Yeah I noticed it was closed a while ago. Now how are we supposed to learn what FIRST HQ is hiding from us???
That is why we have big FRC.
Damn, what a disappointment. It was so well written and fun to read.
I hadn’t seen any posts here about it in ages so I forgot it existed. Too bad.
Does anyone have any screenshots? You know, for posterity.
Why would they just delete it without telling anyone?? Kinda suss
Wonder if they’re still selling the mentor built badges? Need to make sure all the 6328 students are properly decked out if we ever get back to real life events.
The badge ribbons are still listed for sale here:
To pull the curtain back juuust a bit, I contributed to a handful of articles for the website in 2019, including the very fun breakdown of the head referee digest. I was not an active mentor then and am not an active mentor now, so I feel more comfortable exposing that than some others.
The decision to retire the blog is not one I had control of or one I fully agreed with at the time, but I support the decision now. I think the others who contributed far more than I did some tangibly good work for the community and did so with some well needed irreverency.
I’m not going to comment on who else contributed to the blog, but I’d like to see some of them out themselves if they’re comfortable. Some of you may be able to easily guess a handful, but I can guarantee there are a few surprises.
Kinda weird that it shut down right after you/they posted something that some may see as anti-RECF and RECF partners…
Alright, alright.
I wrote many of the onion-esque articles as well as some listicles. It’s fun to write fluff. I will gladly write more when the time and platform comes.
Stopping MentorBuilt was sad but ultimately the right call. I’ve been redirecting my faux-journalism to my TBA game.
I was not really an active contributor after the 2019 season and therefore won’t comment on anything after that.
I want to know who made the glorious “should you build mecanum” quiz
I’ll miss mentorbuilt. Their mix of satire and actual reporting was something new to the FRC community, and I really hope we can get the kind of investigative reporting they did again sometime in the future.
To all the contributors, thank you for making FRC a little bit better, both through the humor of your articles and the change they brought.
Just ordered a set of ribbons before they go out. RIP Mentor Built
Hi Saikiran.
You have ample ways to contact me. We’ve already had enough of a private conversation about this. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go airing dirty laundry on a public forum. But since you did, I feel the need to elaborate & explain MY side.
For those that don’t know, I started MentorBuilt.com alongside a few friends awhile back. We intended on just having some fun, making a few people laugh, and not taking ourselves too seriously.
I’m also the one who took the site down.
Now for the why…
A few weeks ago,
One of our contributors made a post that, if read outside the context of the website (satirical comedy/sarcasm), could have been interpreted to be VERY negative towards the company that currently employs me (between my BIO and Saikiran’s post, i’ll leave that up for you to figure out). I read the article and was pretty upset. Many of my coworkers knew about my involvement in MentorBuilt.com, so I immediately became quite anxious. I really didn’t know what to do for a bit. I consulted a few close friends for advice, and came do a decision on how to proceed on my own accord a short time later. As (technically) the owner of the Blogger Account the website was made using, I had made the hard decision to remove the post.
It was also at this point that I realized the site was no longer accomplishing what I set out to do… Make People Laugh. Here I was, the creator of the site, reading an article on it that I felt like could have literally&possibly lost me my job. Not so funny, anymore. That’s the exact moment I decided that I should take the website down. It had now failed at its number one goal. While I admit it was selfish, I honestly did not expect this kind of backlash. While I thought there would be a few contributors upset, I truly thought more people would understand. I guess all I can say is that it’s a shame. All I wanted to do was make some fun content for the community. Things got out of hand. Now, here I am, “the bad guy”, who’s lost quite a few friends because of all of this. Wish it didn’t have to be that way, but it was MY decision, and I’ll own it.
To Everyone who read & enjoyed the content:
THANK YOU!
Your kind words make any past effort worth it.
I’m going to miss it too.
