Community Involved Staff

WoW Zinga!

Already know this will rub a few people the wrong way, however as one of the leaders of a community team (until I get the boot ;3) it is kind of part of my job to help bring changes that will better the site as a whole. Pretty simple concept community teams help the community, I know the community is a little more CDT than PR however if no one else will speak up I will.

It is in my humble opinion that the current staff team severely lacks community involvement. I understand that staff is incredibly busy doing their mod/admin stuff however when I picture a staff member I think of someone like @Time To Buy who is consistently working to better the community through working with both the CDT and PR teams. (Can't speak on behalf of TCORE dunno) Even simple things like being involved in planning events or bouncing new ideas off of, Yankiee and TTB are always there, all up in our buisness.

I understand that sectionals don't have perms to view the dev team threads but that doesn't excuse the complete lack of activity from Globals+. I have brought this up with a fellow Community Team leader who I will not name for anonymity reasons, this person highlighted the complete lack of community presence by the staff team as a whole. That being said there are some good apples that participate but it is not the norm.

What type of message does it send to the community if the staff simply log on, do what they need to for modscore then disappear.

To paraphrase what one person said "it only takes 5-10 mins to complete a weekly event. How many online communities have the chance to host weekly prize giveaways, almost none. Weekly events can and should become much more popular" For events, like Moo's weekly events, which are built to strengthen and expand the community there needs to be participation. No one is going to participate in an event that no one else plays, but give me the chance to wipe the floor with big rich and count me in! If the very staff that help run the site can't take 10 minutes to play a quick game how can we expect random users to play? The more people that participate the bigger and bigger events will get, which in turn will yield better prizes that would attract more users to events/the site in general.

I always believed in the philosophy lead by example. It's pretty easy to understand, if the leader is participating in a task/goal than the subordinates are more apt to follow. In relation to sythe this could be adapted to mean that when staff are actively participating in developing the community, the community is more likely to become involved.

This isn't a dig towards any person individually but instead a suggestion to all staff, you are hurting the community by not being involved. You should care about the site more than the funrank you have! To put it simply become involved and grow a community presence, because I'm the PR leader and I don't know who 1/3 of you even are or what you do.

If you can't do that then my second suggestion would be, moving forward pick more community involved staff that will pick up the slack of people who can't be bothered to participate.

 

No support.


We cant force the staff on what they do on the website.

 

I completely agree that staff should be more community involved -- and hopefully we'll take steps as a team to fix that.

We are currently in the process of writing feedback for each other (cough cough fill it out if you haven't yet), and some mods got feedback that they should be more involved on discord and the forums. Hopefully they'll act on it soon. Additionally, CDT has asked every staff member to answer three question for this month's edition of SM. Hopefully, we'll be able to do that every month since it will show that staff does care about the community and that they're here for more than just completing reports. I posted the thread asking for responses to the three questions only a few hours ago, and we already have 5 responses, so we're off to a good start!

Do you think all mods should have access to the dev section? I wouldn't be opposed to it.

 

I for one never get enough points because I'm bad, but seeing an effort from other staff would be nice if they have the time to spare. Not much we can do about it though if they don't want to or can't.

I'd say yes to all mods having access. They play an important role in the community and it wouldn't hurt to have them in on development discussion.

 

I can't agree with this more, the fact that no one even participates in these events makes it not nearly as fun. It would be great if mods/PR team or whatever were actively playing and promoting things like this. In my opinion things like this make sythe stand out from other forums, so let's keep it that way!

 

The problem is mods seldom get the boot. If they do enough mod duties and most minimally in the community, or not at all, people will dance around the subject and just say they have room for improvement. A couple talks and 6 months later would lead to a possible demotion. At the end of the day, it's a volunteer position.

 

Look at all the community threads in this forum. I could name all the non-staff community participants on one hand, and the staff community participants on the other hand. It's a dying community that is beyond the threshold for saving, and that's a fact you're going to have to live with. I'm not sure why you think staff aren't community involved when probably around 50% of the active community are staff members (which in itself is a sad state for any forum).

I also noticed that there's an inherent problem with promotions. Throughout my years here I've seen that sectionals are the most active by far, and once they are promoted, their activity declines significantly. The most obvious reason for this is that they have nothing to go for anymore. The most obvious case of this is Gracious/Astro. He was the most active community member as a sectional, then after he got promoted to global his activity declined sharply. Once he obtained admin status, I don't think he is even 1/10th as active as he was as a sectional.

I appreciate what the community teams are doing to try and revive this forum, however, I think this forum is past the point of no return. It's predominantly a market now and should be treated as such. If I post in a non-market section, and I don't receive a reply for more than 24 hours, it means the forum is dead (at least the community aspect of it).

No number of community games (which have the same five or six participants) or fake Instagram followers can restore Sythe to its former glory. The last of the active non-staff community members who are obviously striving to become moderators (I'm looking at you Tyler, Soul, Felix, Im Solo, Mootrucks and a couple others) will be just as inactive as the current upper staff when they obtain their goals.

As of now it appears as if the only reason to be an active non-staff community member is to have a chance at moderator, however, once that's achieved, all motivation is lost and the artificial activity they once created will be no more.

 

Gracious has been as active, if not more active than when he was a sectional. He handles mod apps, account recoveries, disputes, pardons, and even sometimes RaSc.

OT: You can't really force staff to participate, but you can pick the people who do participate for staff in hopes that they remain active in the community and not go dark.

 

thanks for your post. this is definitely an issue, and i agree that we should be doing more - i know i, personally, used to be a lot better about this went i ran CDT and was more involved in discussions site-wide. i'll try to improve in this regard.

one thing worth noting is that the moderation aspect of this is a little tricky. richard largely views us as an issue-resolving team, not a community-fostering team:

and while i'm not sure the two have to be exclusive, there is not much top-down emphasis on community engagement (see: Admins: Keep a log of things that are being worked on).

as inorganic as it seems, probably the best way to encourage staff involvement is to @ them or pm them until enough of them regularly participate in events/discussions/etc. that it's no longer an issue. i know i'm willing to chime in if directly asked to help out. that said, it's not ideal that we'd have to ask staff for their participation, so hopefully people see your point and take it to heart!

 

That's what the CDT is for and they do a shit job at that. Maybe the community is the problem to begin with. The glory days are over buddy.

 

From my understanding, the development team is the development team. Staff members are not part of the dev team and if they wish to be, then they apply for the dev team. I'm not sure why staff are expected to be involved in actual development events when there is a specific team for it. IMO it would undermine the team. This may be completely off, but it was my understanding and my interactions with the dev team have been limited to a single thread with a suggestion of mine.

As for events themselves, I cannot speak for other staff, but while I may browse Sythe and help handle a variety of things, I do not have the time to spend participating in game events and the likes. If they're at specific times, I need to set aside that chunk of time (not happening) and providing they're not solo, you need to agree on a time to meet for a game of pool (for example). I do not have large chunks of time to set aside and I tend to hop on Sythe multiple times a day, but in small increments in order to handle whatever I can, post, and so forth.

It is also worth noting that staff is not purely evaluated on mod score and in fact, mod score only goes towards direct reports we handle. I would prefer to see more direct community involvement by staff (including myself) via posting and while it would be nice for more staff to participate in events themselves, I am not sure it's necessary.

This right here. I'm always down to chime in or lend a hand, just @ me or PM me. When I browse the forums, I tend to stick to my off-topic sections (SFA, come visit )

 

If you want my attention alert or pm is the way to go and i bet its the same for most staff

 

I can note some staff that would help in cdt discussions, those would be anyone who has been apart of CDT. Shin...did do a lot of discussing via discord etc. Astro at times too. Dave got involved in halloween. Spent hours on searching etc. Superfluous helped out with pool discussions.

Otherwise I would not expect staff members who have not signed up to cdt to want to participate with cdt or pr things.

The best way the staff team can be involved within the community is for sectionals to focus on their sections creating discussion, getting involved in discussions, promoting discussions, maybe even sharing threads occasionally via Skype or discord in passing. For global s to actually show that they're doing something.



As far as I remember it the old cdt didn't want a heavy staff impression as Richard didn't want staff doing cdt things but more reports etc things like superflu said. Back then a lot of staff members in cdt did shit all for long periods, and ofc they never got removed cos u want staff influence. So if cdt / pr want to go down that route again. Good luck to you. Eventually you'll complain that staff do nothing in the teams, just as you are complaining staff aren't community involved. I would like staff to be community involved but it won't happen.

I say only get those involved that care to involve themselves, ttb,video always come back.

And btw if you ever find community members that don't care to become staff and only give up their time to annoy the community, thas who you need to look for. Cos any team members aiming for staff eventually become more invested in staff then community interaction, aside a few crazy people like tittybee.

 

I've always thought activity is too heavily weighted in promoting new mods. If someone uses the site most days and people generally know who they are (Gohan for example) but isn't particularly active in posting then idt they should be turned down over it.

At the end of the day promoting someone who isn't very active but is well known has the risk that they might not be as active as you'd like. The risk of promoting your most active community members is that you might kill the community. Pretty obvious which one is worse.

 

During my tenure on staff, I always emphasised, argued, and tried my best to encourage all staff to be community involved - more so towards sectionals and globals (admins also, but to lesser an extent).

I personally think being community involved and driven is a given obvious, once becoming a staff member, it should be something staff want to do, rather than forced. If it gets to a stage where said individual has to be forced; then clearly, there is an issue. That doesn't mean you spend all waking hours on the forum, it simply means you try and make an effort and take small steps in involving yourself within a particular subforum that peaks your interest, and whether that be by driving discussion, organising some events, posting threads, whatever have you. I.e, if you're an off-topic mod, and watch tv series/netflix/whatever - create discussion threads within the Media forum. I understand time takes its toll, and it's natural for one to become disinterested once most of their goals are achieved/and they've been active on the forum for many years, and that's when I encourage people to step down and take some time off - similar to myself. However, my reason for stepping down was having no time due to IRL obligations.

If we're going to be honest here, with no ill intentions, then there a members of staff who should have stepped down years ago, and or been forced to - I've also brought this up copious amount of times while I was on staff. Outcome? Change is promised time and time again - Change is not delivered. Cycle repeats.

 

PLEASE TELL ME WHY WE THE COMMUNITY MEMBERS HAVE TO TAG MODERATORS AND ADMINS TO BE ACTIVE? The whole reason your there is to MODERATE the forums, do I believe a little more activity would help the teams moral and the community as a whole fuck yeah. Should we have to WORK and TAG people to get them to be active within these things?? NO Why in the hell should I or anybody else be trying to WORK to make admins and mods more active, we shouldn't. If you don't have enough time to comment on a couple posts and take 10 minutes to join in on a community activity. Why are you even staff???? Do you care about the community or just your title as staff on a HUGE community?
Also just want to point out this is more for moderators, Admins you've probably done your part to get there and don't really need to be apart of the community anymore, just do your keep and you'll be fine, mods on the other hand....

 

I am not asking someone to tag me in order to be active; rather, tag me if they need my attention or my input. I do not lurk all of Sythe and go thread-by-thread so I won't see specific threads and posts unless they're brought to my attention. Like others, I have sections I like and tend to stick them; however, paired with this, I do reports and some other moderator activity.

This thread was about participation in community development discussions which I addressed alongside events themselves, not just posts on the forum.

I do what I can for Sythe, but if enough people think I should step down due to not being able to constantly active, I will. I enjoy Sythe and I like being able to assist people, but I have real world responsibilities and a life I enjoy living outside of Sythe.

But yeah, tagging was not meant as a "tag me and I'll be active on that thread!"; rather, need some input or help on something? @ me

 

i think there should be a new group called "community wizards" who are here to bring activity and joy to sythe.org without the burden of being a community team

 

Is that what you wanted? Instead of making staff more community involved, just promote community team members an hope they stay community active?

Looks like Tyler won't be community active as community mod cos we can't force staff.

This is something that needs to be worked on.

 

It seems that they are seeking greater community involvement as it was a common reason in the denial of some applications that we weren't active enough in the community. Still confused how you can be denied for something that multiple staff members have spoken against. Also very surprised there were no demotions with the staff changes