Return to a more section oriented staffing structure

I am posting this because I disagree with the current policy of how the staff operates and @Sythe seems to want to continue to go in that direction and I would like to make a legitimate counter point to it.

Firstly I'd like to talk a bit about the current staffing structure and what it used to be:

Right now there are essentially no sectional mods and the sectionals that we do have are moderators of multiple sections at once. Sectionals are immediately given access to the report a scammer section and can get access to a second section to moderate after one month (with admin approval). Until the recent addition of peer reviews staff activity was measured entirely by the mod log system that gave points for closing scam reports, closing ban evader reports, closing spam reports, closing disputes, closing pardons, and infracting people. Admins are rotating in and out from global and back based on activity. Maintaining stickies in sections seems to have been pushed off to the CDT team or random people (Sports/Health & Fitness Rules). The staff is generally only moderates the forums when users report and issue which makes sense since there are so few of them.

Over time the staff has slowly morphed and changed a huge amount. I'm going to go all the way back to 2009 and the Team Lead system and explain the slow morphing of the staff team from there. The Team Lead system is essentially the exact opposite of what we have now. There were no global mods but instead each section was assigned a senior staff member who had control over it. They would select the people they wanted on their team and all of the leads would vote on whether they were accepted or not. During this time there were 3-5 sectional mods for essentially every section which is a huge number. In order to keep themselves busy people would find all sorts of creative things to spend their time on to make their sections better. Since the people that were chosen by the team leaders would generally be very active in their sections already which meant a lot of the moderating people did was just based on what they saw as they were posting around the forums instead of just handling reports. In addition since these mods were very active in particular sections they knew those sections very well. They knew the people that posted in the sections, which made finding more mods for that section much easier and they knew what sorts of things people liked posting in the section. They could easily spot trends in their sections and react appropriately with new rules or a different moderating style. Activity was monitored by the individual team leads by using a count of all moderator actions (moving a thread, locking a thread, deleting a post, etc, etc).

There were pretty obvious issues with this Team Lead system since having no globals meant that having people online that could fix issues easily was difficult. Eventually two globals were promoted to try to ease this burden of work but eventually the Team Lead system was just ended. What this meant was that all of the Team Leads were promoted to global and all of the sections just remained where they were. After this, a bunch of small and slow tweaks to the staff team happened over the years. In the beginning, only globals were allowed to do scam reports. At some point the amount of scam reports had built up enough that admins started letting a few market sectionals have permissions to do scam reports as well. Further down the line this was refined so that basically any section could ask for report a scammer permissions after they had been on staff for some time. Later this distinction was removed and sectionals immediately gained report a scammer permissions on becoming staff. Originally sectionals were restricted to one section. Admins started granting individuals permissions in second sections if they were very active and they had a fairly inactive section but it was done on an adhoc basis. This was tweaked a few more times but today any sectional can request additional permissions in a second section after a month and the admins can decide whether to grant it or not.

At some point the concept of mod actions was dropped and mod logs (as described above) was brought in. I really hate the mod log system and could write page after page about it but ultimately what it did was accelerate the shift from sectional based moderating to report based moderating. As sectionals became fewer and fewer (which also happened over the years) other sectionals and globals picked up more and more of the responsibility of moderating sections. Sectionals would be moderating two or three large forums and instead of just moderating as the posted around in the sections that they were active in, much of the focus of the staff shifted to doing reports instead. The mod log system gave no points for sectional moderators doing what they used to do under the Team Lead system and it actively encouraged reactive moderating as opposed to active moderating.

This shift lead to a lot of bad effects. Suddenly we not longer had the presence of staff members in the forums that they liked. We lost the ability to easily find more staff members for sections since we had less staff members active in many of the sections of the site. We lost experience in how to moderate different sections and what each one needed for it to be active. Since mod logs would not count making or maintaining stickies or developing the forum the staff has pushed off those responsibilities and decided that they are no longer the responsibility of the staff. The push back from the staff in the direction of not having any community responsibilities has been so strong that @Roary making a third tier of staff that was dedicated to the community side of things, which is effectively what the CDT / other teams are which is what Richard is pushing for.

I hate this for so many reasons but I'm just going to quote @SellerMan for a bit here:

One of the reasons Roary did not like Sellerman's post was because he said it was too hard to find people to promote to be sectionals. This problem would be solved by having sectionals in place that are active in their sections to find and nourish new and upcoming people that can become staff. The inability of the staff to find new staff at this point is entirely the fault of the staff changing and losing their ability to find members, not due to a lack of qualified members. There are also huge numbers of ex-mods around that would love to come back and help out if the staff wasn't so different from what it was when they were on staff. There are plenty of people to fill the positions but the staff is unable to find them.

I'm quoting myself now:

and another one:

Both of my quotes have some suggestions in them. I really just quoted them to better explain my line of thinking and to reflect that line of thinking onto the current staff team. I'm not actively suggested what is posted there.

Now a Farcast quote:

Now a Dave quote:

We absolutely still need people like @Dave or @FireZ in order to handle reports and disputes and a lot of the stuff that @Sythe would call dispute mediation or whatever it is but we also need the community type staff.

Now I'm going to say that @Sythe's and likely a lot of the staff's opinion on this is that the CDT / other teams should be the ones doing this. I think that's stupid so here's a quote for why:

here's another one:

and another one from @Nick

Now in closing I want to say I made this thread and quoted a bunch of people because of one simple fact: The CDT has been around and apparently been responsible for pretty much all of the responsibilities that the staff have gotten rid of since at least when I posted that thread. I would like to point out that thread was posted TWO YEARS AGO. We've had MORE THAN TWO YEARS of the same thing and it's clearly not working at all but the staff still hasn't done anything about it. @Sythe is pushing for doing what we've already been doing for more than TWO YEARS as a solution to our problem. If it hasn't worked for the last TWO YEARS it's not going to work now.

We all accept that the team lead system was fatally flawed. Can we please accept after more than two years of failure that the complete opposite of the team lead system is fatally flawed as well and not try to push further in that direction?

 

Can I get a tl;dr @SuF

 

No.

 

tl;dr flood the sections with moderators.

 

Isn't the whole moderator applications meant to bring in multiple sectional moderators to help incorporate a section orientated staffing structure? From my understanding, no applications were for global moderator positions.

An introduction of sectional moderators by people that like those sections which they applied for addresses this issue. It's just still in the process of being implemented.

 

So yes, people are allowed to apply for Global/Admin if they're returning staff.

 

Alright so based on what Gracious just posted, only former global moderators can apply as global moderators. I am imagining a majority of applications were not former global moderators; nor do I imagine staff would really promote multiple global moderators even if that were the case.

With this in mind, moderator applications seem to be very sectional focused.

 

@SuF You quoted me but it's one of your own posts you noob

 

Not sure the whole point of the thread (being honest sorry @SuF will read after) - but if this is the point of the thread then yes we're (I saw we like I'm still yellow ) looking primarily for sectionals and new blood, that's what the main goal of applications are.

 

Interesting read. It was my understanding that the current application process was an attempt to gain more sectional moderators and start make the changes you've suggested @SuF. If that's not the case, I would definitely support a shift in that direction. You mentioned Sythe wanting to continue in a direction that would work against these plans, but I'm not seeing it. Are you referring to the addition/expansion of CDT/PR/Technology Core teams and their handling of what should be mostly moderator duties?

 

From my understanding, he's suggesting that we essentially just have more sectional moderators in general (around 4-5 for each section). He believes that these moderators will keep themselves busy by facilitating new discussion and content in said sections which I can see happening. I would support this if it meant more activity in the forums because the non market sections are pretty dead at the moment.

 

No I get that, but I'm saying I thought that these changes were already in process with the new application system. I'm not sure the plan is necessarily to have 4-5 sectionals, but I do believe the plan is to promote discussion and community activity by revamping the moderator core. I guess I just wasn't sure what he meant by Richard wanting to continue down the previous path.

 

I think the apps were just to essentially replace all the sectionals who left at once. I wasn't aware there was a new plan or anything. Maybe there is and I'm just oblivious to it at the moment. I know for sure that @SuF wants more sectionals than they're probably willing to take at the moment though even though I do support an increase in sectionals due to it possibly increasing activity in the sections.

 

Just wait for new promotions IMO. Things will fall into place

On phone atm, so wont write much more.

 

Do you get tired of making long posts that can be broken down in less than 200 characters? First off, there is no need to have an excess amount of sectionals. This is not 2009, the community is much smaller. Restricting perms for the sake of delegating specific responsibilities to sectionals compromises efficiency. You need to stop living in the past.

 

To clarify, and for transperency, the app process to become a mod was discussed prior to staff leaving. Also, the app process had no bearing on people leaving.

 

Yeah I think the issue itself is more just staff not actively participating in the forum

 

Just one small clarification, the staff action log system was revamped and ultimately discontinued because there was a ton of room for abuse with it. A few staff members were found to have been mass closing/reopening/moving threads and doing other actions to farm score.

This is a large part of why that old system was phased out.

 

Uh I had to manually copy and paste them since the thread was locked and I didn't proof read. Let me fix that lol.

Edit: I actually just forgot to close the quote tag with a `"` and it broke everything.

 

Yeah sorry I should have mentioned that but I forgot. Good example: Tengauge12 had 22,000 mod actions one month because he mass archived a bunch of stuff. It was also a pretty dumb system.