Seeing how the staff positions have been like a revolving door during the last couple months, I think there should be some concerns raised and given some thought. This is a suggestion condensed from the discussions from Discord, feel free to add your comments here if you have some other ideas regarding the problem at hand, but I'd ask you to keep it civil and avoid pointing fingers. ---- 1. Inactive staff and some reprimands to avoid that. - There should be some reprimands and/or demotes done due to inactivity. We all know it is a volunteer position, we all get something irl going sometimes and all that, so I'd leave the definition of "inactivity" and following the activity of other staff members for staff themselves. We as common players should trust that staff can handle and fix problems within their ranks. 2. Trainee-role - One of the suggestions which really caught my interest was the Trainee-role. It should be a few weeks lasting role for the brand new staff members with low permissions to get used to being a staff member and also to prove their worthiness to be given some more responsibility. This could be implemented by modifying the current Helper-role to be more of a stepping board up to Moderator with banning permissions or making a whole new Trainee-role and give current Helpers permissions up to 1 or 3 day bans. 3. New staff members - People want the process of applying to be accepted/denied to be much faster. There are some applications which are over a month old right now. Fixing this is bit hard, seeing there is only one (busy) person doing interviews right now. Seeing this is a voluntary role too, do we need to reform how people are accepted to staff with staff voting, letting other people do the interviews (maybe help that point with some standardized questions?) or what? 4. Staff promotions (Trainee -> Helper -> Moderator) - Like in real life, clear chance of a promotion sure is a great motivator to work harder. I think there should be clear ways to get promotions (depending how the Trainee-role would be implemented) and these should be decided within staff. No more "moderator applications" on the forums, let Helpers voice their intention and willingness to be promoted in staff chats and let them show why they deserve it by working, helping, being active, catching hackers etc. This, again, should be up to the staff themselves to decide who should be the one making that decision and/or if it should be handled as a vote within the staff. As long as there is a clear and relatively fast way to make progress up to the Moderator-position with all that ban hammer power. I certainly hope something would be done to help things sooner rather than later. We have lost many great future Moderators due to above reasons already, and seeing how the amount of people online is growing, staff positions need to be filled with active people to manage things on the server. The value of great customer service should not be underestimated, be it real life or just Minecraft.
I do agree with the points you are making. People do have reasons to be inactive and I think that should staff be inactive for an unreasonable amount of time then they should be told this and if no response is given then their position should be revoked. I also thank you for realising the issue with application and the reason behind why so many are piling up. As for promotions, staff should always be working their hardest and shouldn't be motivated towards a higher position, but this is just my opinion. Thank you for your suggestion.
i agree with most your statements only the trainee position seems uslees since helpers allready dont have any real perms helpers are bassicly traine's for mod
On the server I staffed on previously, Trainees were able to /tempmute up to 1 day and /kick. We were paired up with a Helper who would mentor us and teach us procedures and commands on the job. After three weeks, I was promoted to Helper where I was able to permanently mute, /warn and /tempban up to 3 days. This enabled me to punish anyone who I caught xraying, cheating or griefing and when a moderator or Admin was available they would extend the ban to the length specified in the guidebook.
I mean, temp banning up to a limited time would help us a lot as it can take a few weeks before moderators get round to banning people.
I guess the problem itself is that even staff members themselves feel like people breaking the rules are not banned quickly enough. So to fix there's few things: - More moderators (would probably need faster promotions for those who really show their "talent" in the job compared to the current pace) - More active moderators (this is pretty hard to do, seeing staff are on voluntary basis and I dont see how forcing someone play more helps with this) - Give perms for short bans for lower tier players (thus the trainee-role so you dont get these big boy perms right away) Or something else, ideas? -------- Also, something I forgot to say in the opening post: These are only my point of view and how I saw the discussion going on in Discord. If you agree or disagree I encourage you to tell here why and hopefully come up with some other ideas which could work especially if you disagree with some points. It helps driving the conversation forward. Also I hope more of the staff members would read and if not participate in the conversation here, take it to staff chat and discuss it there hopefully with Jordan himself and voice your opinions. We need you too to chime in, be it about this or those couple unban application which were deleted yesterday. Be brave and voice your opinions.
helpers not being able to ban was never an issue before the fact that they cant ban isnt the problem its the inactivity and low amount of mods we have ( i understand that mods have lifes to we simply need more)
Mods typically don't take a few weeks to ban people if you mean perm bans/ip bans that's true enough as only 2 people can.
I meant that a few weeks as a maximum. It doesn't generally take that long, but it can reach up to that.
