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Official Suggestions Thread

Jamie

Till the roof comes off, till the lights go out...
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Matt, you were in the mod chat for several months a few years back but were never a moderator. I don't remember the necromancy incident that you refer of, but I take your word that you were added for just a few minutes.

Regarding the administrators, I don't think 3 administrators are needed, but I do think Locke is overworked, due to his involvement with other sectors of the website. The quantity of administrators is irrelevant. I'm involved only rarely with administrating the forums, but from what I've learned from my activity in the last few days, we currently have 3 administrators with Locke, Thareous, and A Link in Time. Is it it absolutely necessary to have these 3? Maybe? Do we need a 4th? Maybe? Could it be done with just 2? Maybe? There are plenty of variables.

I also do not agree at all with your statement that the latest moderator promotions have been poor choices. Furthermore, I also reject the idea that these were solely my choices. No current or recent moderator were appointed by me without staff approval and I have not made any executive decisions on moderators for several years now. It is true that I have suggested several moderators in recent history, that the moderation team avidly rejected, and thus, they were not promoted.

I think most people here are of the mindset that if locke only has enough time to fully manage areas like the wiki, he should be replaced by someone who can be fully dedicated to the forums.
 

Kybyrian

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Location
Amherst, MA
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Didn't I already answer this one?
Matt, you were in the mod chat for several months a few years back but were never a moderator. I don't remember the necromancy incident that you refer of, but I take your word that you were added for just a few minutes.

Regarding the administrators, I don't think 3 administrators are needed, but I do think Locke is overworked, due to his involvement with other sectors of the website. The quantity of administrators is irrelevant. I'm involved only rarely with administrating the forums, but from what I've learned from my activity in the last few days, we currently have 3 administrators with Locke, Thareous, and A Link in Time. Is it it absolutely necessary to have these 3? Maybe? Do we need a 4th? Maybe? Could it be done with just 2? Maybe? There are plenty of variables.

Like my previous post said (which was made only a little bit before yours, so you probably didn't see it), one thing we are in dire need of is a proper technical administrator. Locke knows his way around things and is relatively tech-savvy, but he doesn't have the skill or time to make a lot of suggestions reality because of limited coding capability. Someone with proper experience in coding (especially PHP) who had a little time alone to figure out creating vBulletin plugins (or better, someone who already has experience in it) would be a tremendous addition to the team to handle things that Locke can't, because the other two "administrators" (Thareous and A Link In Time) have absolutely no experience in doing that and can't be expected to. Justin was the perfect administrator in that respect because he had many years of experience and was very capable of adding things to the forum that required extensive coding. We need someone like that.

My earlier post mentioned Repentance, who I believe has already tried to talk to you before and has several years of experience as well as a full-time job in the field. I can't think of anyone on these forums more qualified.
 

Emma

The Cassandra
Site Staff
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Nov 29, 2008
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I think most people here are of the mindset that if locke only has enough time to fully manage areas like the wiki, he should be replaced by someone who can be fully dedicated to the forums.
The wiki has four administrators that are active on it. Mases, Locke, Fused, and myself. And the wiki is much much smaller. It also has a handful of patrollers, which are basically like moderators, that seems to be a healthy number for its size. It works well and no one seems to feel pressured or overworked there. If the wiki were as large and as active as the forum, the current wiki staff would not even be anywhere close to enough, and there'd be a much higher staff turnover. I saw this at Zelda Wiki because it had too few people actually working on the wiki, it had a lot of "staff" but for those who actually were responsible for the wiki, it was badly understaffed, it also had issues that made it stressful and almost everyone left it. The ZD wiki has no such problems.

It shows that The wiki isn't so huge a burden that a wiki admin couldn't also be a forum admin or mod. And it also shows that a heathlier number of management staff makes the work environment far, far less stressful and makes it extremely unlikely that someone will just up and quit because it's too stressful or too much work. If someone can't handle something, there are others who can. The forum staff has no such choice because they are all there is and it's not enough. The number we have now of moderators, and adminstrators actually responsible for moderation (and a proper tech admin) is just not even close to enough and it's a big reason why we have a high mod turnover rate. All of the forum drama would be a lot less than it was now if we just had more people to share the burden so things didn't get out of hand so much like they do now.
 
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Jamie

Till the roof comes off, till the lights go out...
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Thanks for the mention, Kybyrian. It is true I currently have a full time job developing a website with PHP. I have brought up my 7 years of experience to Mases but was ignored and belittled. Personally I would like at the very least someone who can dedicate their time to the forums as admin as I have been saying for weeks.
 

Mases

Lord of the Flies
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Thanks for the mention, Kybyrian. It is true I currently have a full time job developing a website with PHP. I have brought up my 7 years of experience to Mases but was ignored and belittled. Personally I would like at the very least someone who can dedicate their time to the forums as admin as I have been saying for weeks.

I don't like being told that I'm belittling somebody when I did no such thing. On the flipside, I don't like when people start flinging false accusations towards me.

It is true that you first sent me a message on Skype on July 20th, asking to gain access to the website so you can add features to the forum. It is true that at the time I did not respond at that time at all, which I probably should have. That said, it was 1 single time you contacted me at this point.

All of that week, I was preparing for the Zelda Dungeon marathon. When you contacted me for the 2nd/3rd times, it was Saturday July 26th, and the next day, July 27th, it was right in the middle of the actual Zelda Dungeon marathon. I was not accessing Skype at all and did not see any of those messages at all. It was at this point that I saw your name in the Twitch ZD chat, mentioning some exaggerated number of times that you tried contacting me and that I was repeatedly ignoring you. It was at this point that I addressed you directly, stating that it was in the midst of the marathon. I mentioned that I saw your message. I don't even remember exactly what I said, but it is documented in the Twitch archive if you'd like to pull it up. I do recall basically saying that I don't just grant people access to my website unless I know them well, and that I wasn't about to promote somebody in the midst of the marathon.

If you took this as belittling, I'm sorry you felt this way. From what Locke told me, you were quite upset after I responded to you, and it caused you to just leave one of the ZD Skype chats you were involved in. That was a bit of a head scratcher to me, as I didn't think anything I said was out of line, and I was fully planning on considering you at a later time period, as it was something Locke had brought up to me during the marathon itself.

After the marathon was over, I did talk over some of your work with Locke in person. We concluded at the time, that it wasn't right to promote a regular member who had only been at the forum for a few short months all the way up the ranks to an administrator, especially after there were signs of instability.
 

Jamie

Till the roof comes off, till the lights go out...
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The belittling was when you said "Repentance, you have asked to be part of the team 17 times now, and it hasn't worked. Maybe the 18th will work better." This wouldn't be in the archives as it was said aloud.
I was extremely upset by this because it could have been handled way better. I also never really asked to be an admin or anything, just to help in the back end. A rank is not required.

My exaggeration with how many times I contacted you was simply a joke, by the way. Perhaps it would be better to discuss this in a private forum over Skype, but I do have an extremely large amount of experience with Web Development. I don't believe an Administrator rank is necessary. I've heard terms like Tech Admin be thrown around and I'm not even sure that is necessary. Of course I would want some sort of recognition but the idea that I was asking for a rank is simply untrue. I can completely understand the mindset of not wanting to give someone a rank when you don't even know them, I never really wanted a rank. I just wanted to help out.

How leaving the Article Editors for 2 days is unstable is beyond me. I don't think that's a sign of instability given the situation.
 

Clank

Hmm
Joined
Jan 26, 2013
Location
Veldin
The belittling was when you said "Repentance, you have asked to be part of the team 17 times now, and it hasn't worked. Maybe the 18th will work better." This wouldn't be in the archives as it was said aloud.
I was extremely upset by this because it could have been handled way better. I also never really asked to be an admin or anything, just to help in the back end. A rank is not required.

My exaggeration with how many times I contacted you was simply a joke, by the way. Perhaps it would be better to discuss this in a private forum over Skype, but I do have an extremely large amount of experience with Web Development. I don't believe an Administrator rank is necessary. I've heard terms like Tech Admin be thrown around and I'm not even sure that is necessary. Of course I would want some sort of recognition but the idea that I was asking for a rank is simply untrue. I can completely understand the mindset of not wanting to give someone a rank when you don't even know them, I never really wanted a rank. I just wanted to help out.

How leaving the Article Editors for 2 days is unstable is beyond me. I don't think that's a sign of instability given the situation.

Wait a moment, how would it not be in the archives if he said it on the stream?
 

Clank

Hmm
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Jan 26, 2013
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Veldin
Mases meant the chat archives, and Repentance used the same term in response.

Really? Twitch doesn't host chat archives, they only archive the streams. Now ZD does keep the chat on the stream most of the time (but it appears they didn't for this marathon), so they do have a chat "archive" of sorts, but still, such an archive would contain the audio from the stream, which would contain Mases verbally saying something.

When it comes down to it, Mases clearly said the Twitch archives, which only exist in video form. For those that didn't get the chance to watch it live, it's http://www.twitch.tv/zeldadungeon/c/4790380 about three hours and thirteen minutes in. I have a personal copy of the chat log, but I'd rather not release it without approval from a higher up.

I understand the reasons that some people are annoyed with Mases and some of them may be justified, but as far as I am concerned, most of them simply are not. This is one of them where I am going to stand by Mases.
 

Big Octo

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I understand the reasons that some people are annoyed with Mases and some of them may be justified, but as far as I am concerned, most of them simply are not. This is one of them where I am going to stand by Mases.

I'm not sure how it could get anymore justified than Rep's case. His evidence is crystal clear.
 

Jamie

Till the roof comes off, till the lights go out...
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I don't go on twitch. I don't know how they archive stuff. But to be quite frank, Clank, I don't exactly care whether or not you think it is justified. I worked it out with Mases over Skype and if you have some more comments you'd like to say you can PM me, but I really don't care that much.
 
I propose this be the new article writer badge:
ff7bbc1a17.png


PUMPKIN
 

Justac00lguy

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Can we have something along the lines of "thread of the week", "thread of the month" etc? If so I feel Krazy4Krash deserves huge recognition due to the sheer effort he has put into his Super Smash Bros. thread.
 

Kybyrian

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Didn't I already answer this one?
Can we have something along the lines of "thread of the week", "thread of the month" etc? If so I feel Krazy4Krash deserves huge recognition due to the sheer effort he has put into his Super Smash Bros. thread.

This could perhaps be an extension of Firice da Vinci's suggestion to have a weekly newsletter sort of thing for the forums. I recommended bringing it up with the rest of the event staff in Skype, so that's probably something you could throw in as part of the suggestion as well.

Jimmy.F27 said:
This isn't overly important as scrolling down is a thing you can do but perhaps the mods in this page should be moved above the HN and HK groups for aesthetic reasons?

The Forum Leaders page is automated and organized alphabetically. It could be changed manually, but then it would also cause the option in the usergroup settings in the ACP to be useless, which would be much harder (and not recommendable) to remove. We could create a separate vBulletin options profile to manage usergroup displays and organize them, but I don't know anyone who would be up to the task of tackling the coding involved.
 
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