!UPDATED! Forum changes and discussions!

If you have already read this topic when it was proposed, go on and skip to the third post!

Hello everyone. With recent events, we decided to start giving you more updates now and filling you guys in on what we are doing. So stay tuned and read ahead!

All that follows are the 'proposals' we have that we are trying to get a more organised thought on right now. We plan to make an official topic for open public discussion for opinions and feedback with all the rest of the memberbase when we get ourselves more organised.

New Position/roles: Public Relations (Pony Relations?)

Right now we are brainstorming a position or dedicated admin that would focus entirely on public relations. That is, keeping in touch with the members and seeing to any kinds of problems or drama that occurs. They would specialize in this and be expected to be capable of patience and care. Still needs more thought as there is a lot to consider how this role would differ from being just another admin.

Procedure for disciplinary action on staff members

As we all know, if a member does something bad, its a relatively simple process when a member does something bad and you tell a staff member about it. What about when a staff member does? Its a tough spot to be in and is often alienating. We aim to make a procedure or way to report this so that incidents of direct confrontation are not necessary with so negative results. The position/role of Public Relations may come into this spot too. Again, lots to discuss and consider to get more structure to this idea as well as a topic to openly discuss it when we have more to work with.



Please feel free to give some feedback, but remember, these ideas are not totally formed yet and may need some time. When we do have a more solid working plan, we will post it up for you guys to take a look and and check it out.

Hey guys! Just letting you know that this thing is still ongoing. Its kinda hard sometimes to get all the admins in one place to actively discuss all this stuff, but its going to be in workable condition soon enough. When it is, I will post what we got and you guys can give us feedback on it. Stay tuned, but more importantly, have some fun.

Hello again everyone! So we totally had our meeting and we talked about a lot of stuff. It went waaay better than expected and we even had time after to ask the chat room for anything we could go over for them. Allow me to share what we conclusions we came to and then you can get onto commenting/discussing them!

Public Relations role/position

The main reason this was proposed in the first place was because, in light of recent events, it was necessary for us to find a means to prevent such situations from happening again. But in a full on analysis and consideration, we realized that this position would be not only a bit awkward relative to the other positions, but that it by itself is only necessary because of a severe weakness in our already established staffing system.

What happen previously when our members needed to confront our staff on an issue was to directly go to the admins whom are not necessarily fully integrated with all the members. This created a gap and disconnect between normal members and the top brass so to say. There is already a role that links these two together, and lately it has been suffering with little being done about it.

Moderators already interact with members a lot in chat and get pretty involved in approving their character sheets. At the time of our incident the other week, we failed to really consider that we have 1 daily active moderator. On top of that, moderator roles and expectations are not ever provided or even drafted.

So in light of this, we will be doing three things. One, we will be making a clear and defined list of responsibilities for not just only Moderators, but Admins and Chat box Mods as well. Two, the 'public relations' role/idea will merge into the moderator position. This isn't really much of a merging because the role itself kind of assumes this once it gains structure with the other roles. Three, we are gonna need moar mods.

Having a solid and active moderator base with clear roles should give good middle ground to bridge the gap between admins that may not be as well aware of the member situation with the members themselves.

Consequences for staff

For the moment, this idea has not been developed as much because doing so before we have solidly figured out our staffing would probably be premature and require rewritting a bunch and stuff. I hate writing lots of rules stuff. Thats 1nc job.

Once we have a clear defined list of duties and such for the staff members we will have a much better idea on what each role operates as and thus write out consequences for abusing them.

Bonus! Chat box moderator and promotion pyramid!

Thanks to Sunny for asking, we thought of a pretty cool and more independant promotional system. We always can use more staff, and while we have been very picky in the past for picking Moderators, admins cant be in charge of promoting everything. So here is the scoop.

Chat box moderators can be picked by Moderators independently of the admins if they wish. From there, they can become a Moderator themselves if the majority of them(moderators) approve with a nod from the admins (cause only admins can add mods to the group). From there, admins can pick a moderator to be an admins if they want with majority vote.

It seems to work in theory, but I think we can flex it around if necessary to make it work.





So that's what we have come to so far. Please leave us some feedback and tell us what you think.

I give it twenty thumbs up! Wouldn't change a thing.

And I'm glad I brought up the question now >.<

*Salutes* Ey, Ey Korenav! I'll do my best as a cb mod!
~Psst 400th post alert :P~

I have another proposal:

If we the normal ponies, as the majority of the members, could vote on candidates for the spots, that might also be a good idea.

I wouldn't be against that but the problem would be establishing when we have a majority. There are constantly changes in who is active and not that establishing a majority would be hard and variable. Perhaps if enough suggest a member we can put them into consideration.

KORENAV!!!! IM BACK!!!!!!!!!!