Return to a more section oriented staffing structure

[SuF]

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:

Sorry Ruairidh, but I personally think this is a bad idea, and will outline why. You know I generally always agree with your decisions and how you go about them, aside this one xd.

Having more subsects within staff is never a good thing. Speaking from personal experience here. Acquiring new moderators for innovative and community purposes is great, but treating them as 'disposable' and 'lower' down the food chain only acts as a demoralising factor. If they know they are disposable, what gives them the motivation to work and innovate. Community orientation is more of a personal ideology. It requires a more positive and committed inertia. Honestly speaking, having people tend to disputes, RASC, RASP etc is more of an easier and monotone task; where as creativity, commitment, innovation and being community orientated actually requires prowess and persistence; and thus, should actually be higher up the food chain per se.

I agree with your statement of having more committed and community vested mods. But, don't devalue that by having it hold a weaker position. You don't need a new name or anything, just promote people at current in whom you see potential to carry out said tasks, as new sectionals like it's always been done. Just make sure that both current and future staff know that there is more to being a good moderator than quantifiable facts. There is no need to make it overly-complicated.

I strongly believe you should simply promote new sectionals as and when they are needed. Just enforce the fact that quantifiable facts aren't what is only required - i.e modlogs. Try slowly introduce community involvement as a requirement; and soon enough it will come naturally.

You're really the perfect example of a staff member Roary. You're community involved, you're site involved (disputes, rasc etc), and you understand that all aspects are important.

Promote people who know with certainty, that simply being modlog king isn't going to fly.

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:

History lesson:

In ye olde days, sectionals were not allowed to do scam reports and the works. Globals "did" them (ie they rarely got done). So the sectionals concentrated on their sections.

Now we have sectionals doing pretty much everything and globals doing essentially the exact same thing except that they can moderate everywhere. I know that while I was global last year there was very little happening in the upper lounge. Nearly everything happened in the lower lounge.

And more and more sectionals have been given two or three large sections to work on. This used to be extremely rare (ie nearly never) and further shows the blurring between sectional and global. I also think it is fair to say that we had more shitty sectionals back in the days but that comes with the territory of promoting more people.

I think there should be a much more clear distinction between upper staff and lower staff and much more flexibility in how moderators are allowed to work and I think there should always be a promotion track for them. I'm not sure exactly how thing would work but I am thinking that I would not be opposed to non-globals being allowed in the upper lounge. I like the idea of sectionals because it limits people and gives them structure to work within so they can easily focus. But then again I'm starting to sound like the team lead system and no one liked that.

I think that the big takeaway is flexibility. I keep coming back to the thought of removing not the permissions, but the rank of global moderator. Instead, replace it with something like senior staff. This would be for people like FireZ who have experience and wisdom and should be consulted for the most important things. The permissions for global could then just be given to people who need or want them, even if they are not senior staff. If someone wants to just be an off topic mod even though they are senior, let them. I don't care. If the staff wants to keep Sin666 around for advice or whatnot, she doesn't even need moderator permissions. Roary could have gotten global permissions for being a powerhouse without becoming senior staff. Separate permissions from experience and shit like that. Promote people to global based on experience and qualification and not on "well he does a lot and needs global to do more".

and another one:

At the moment global is essentially just an activity game. It's been that way forever, essentially. At one point there was a rule that was something like sectionals came have another section after three months of being good. Same sort of thing could apply here. Sectionals can have global permissions or another section or what not after 3 or 6 months, granted they have been meeting expectations and want it. The senior staff would have to monitor that and adjust the permissions accordingly based on performance and shit.

Senior staff would be promoted just like globals are now but with emphasis on experience and value added to the staff team that is not simply power housing. FireZ would have gotten global perms long before he got senior staff. He was a powerhouse and really needed global perms to do that but he was inexperienced. But once it was clear that he could handle his own and not gloriously fuck up and was not a power hungry fuck head, he would be promoted to senior staff. I like this system because it separates what people are allowed to do with their rank in the staff structure. Obviously admins would be above senior staff and they get certain permissions with that job and that can not change.

The admins could also delegate some non-permission based shit to the senior staff like managing the staff or what not. If someone wants to do the performance reviews for lower staff, let them. They got promoted for being experienced not just to get global perms so we should be able to trust them more. It gives greater flexibility and stuff. It would also let long term sectionals (like me back in the days) have access to senior staff without ever doing the global stuff. That way we could have a more diverse selection of senior staff and likely a lot more of them. Now promoting globals reduces the number of sectionals and that's not always good but who cares if 75% of the staff is senior. Half of them may just have sectional permissions and be perfectly happy doing that.

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:

This was never an issue in the past. The idea of splitting staff into "activity" and "community" based groups is completely asinine.

I'll be blunt here. Stop making excuses for your staff team and lead them. There is a reason this is one of the least community involved staff teams in years, there was never this much complacency from general admins.

If a staff member is too busy IRL to fulfill their entire duties, then they should step down. It's nothing new. Community activity is paramount, the team should know that. If they don't, it's your job to remind them and not turn a blind eye. If your go to response is going to be "Oh, well I told them to do it and they didn't", then actually do something about it.

Now a Dave quote:

For me personally, I enjoy the report handling aspects more than going around on posting on threads. It's just how I am, I enjoy staffing/moderating the forums.

I find my role here to be helping out and doing what I can to improve the site. Different people enjoy doing different things, guys like Cas_M enjoy taking part in making events and hosting them and guys like me like to get on, do something productive, and then go back to what I was doing originally IRL.

Again, this is only in a scenario where I'm busy with IRL stuff. In a general case where I'm not busy and on the computer all day doing nothing, hell fucking yeah I'd go around and talk to people on Skype, post around on random funny/interesting threads on the forums, but for some of us time isn't exactly something we have much of so we manage it the way we best see fit.

I'm not staying I'm the ideal staff member, as I've previously stated, I'm probably one of the lesser active members of staff when it comes to posting around. I just really don't enjoy going around and posting as much as I do just talking and chatting with people on Skype and handling the moderation side of the forum when I have time. If I had the option I'd choose to be more community involved but that's not where my strengths or desires lie

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:

They have limited permission. They have limited voice and access. They are "people who've almost passed but there are slight issues with would then get a chance to be on staff and maybe prove themselves somewhat, that they can perform and so on." They are replaceable.

You've reduced them in value. They can't real mods. They are not good enough to be real mods. You said so yourself. Promoting them would be insulting.

here's another one:

I don't think people need to be staff for this.

I do all that and more for the LoL section. I made all the stickies, I made all the rules, I suggested the new sections, I run the competitions and so on. It doesn't require me to have any perks or perms. The only thing Staff do for me that I cant, is deleting verified posts, adding verified tags and adding the verified minirank.

Splitting the staff into two more groups is not a good idea. Most of the community have agreed that it isn't, but ultimately the decisions is yours.

All the reasoning is on previous pages.

Simply put, promote new sectionals who have the drive to be active and care for the community. Let them do what needs to be done. Don't demote anyone. Don't split the staff up. Just promote new candidates as and when you see fit.

I can see why the current Staff are for having a new, less authoritarian staff position introduced. But in all honesty, it's not a good idea. Read mine and other' explanations of why. I'm going to stop saying it's not a good idea now xd, as I've send it plenty. Decision is yours.

and another one from @Nick

Interestingly enough, if I recall correctly, I was the one to really push for (and start) the first round of modlogs. The process evolved of course, but perhaps I was wrong. In a community such as this, things have to get done, and the market aspect adds another level of complexity, but I'd much rather have mods that are focused on being regular users. I'd rather have a larger group of staff who do less work than a small number doing all the work.

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?

 

[Admires]

Can I get a tl;dr @SuF

 

[SuF]

Can I get a tl;dr @SuF

No.

 

[Admires]

No.

tl;dr flood the sections with moderators.

 

[tMoon]

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.

 

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.

• If you're a returning staff member, you may only apply up to the highest position you've held. Otherwise, you may only apply for a sectional position.
  

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

 

[tMoon]

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.

 

[Dave]

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

 

[Dave]

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.

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?

 

[Admires]

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.

 

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.

 

[Admires]

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.

 

[S]

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.

 

[S]

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.

 

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.

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

 

[n4n0]

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.

 

[SuF]

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

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.

 

[SuF]

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.

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.