Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-33668185-20181229231243/@comment-5007040-20190106111918

Just jumping in to clarify some questions raised in the latest messages. Endercat TM wrote: Another thing I have seen, which can worry me, is if another user with rights (VSTF, councilor, Helper, etc), uses caps or cusses in chat, the active mod (who, in some cases, was very active during chat) doesn’t warn or remind said user with other rights. That could be dangerous too, for other users can set good examples for other newer users.

Also, the “mod chooses friends” thing is strange. As much as mods trust their friends more, I have seen users mod on other wikis, and are even better then current CC mods. Those users are active in chat, yet because they aren’t in said “social cercle”, mods are not likely to choose them as potential candidates. This is a bit bias, as even if a good mod has friends, those friends might not be as good as the mod themself. Which is why I am glad to see that might be changed. I haven't often seen a user with rights not being part of the community central team doing any harm in chat as per you bringing up using all caps for instance. So that's a very rare thing and I don't think it's what we should focus on, however we do as a team share a channel with any other volunteers and we have also had instances we've advised via that channel responding or dealing in a certain way. That's not always about them doing something bad of course, it can be used in many ways.

Also I've seen a couple of messages noting staff and the community central team only promotes 'their friends'. I personally believe it's a very complicated thing to look at as community central is a real network of users. For instance that helps if we come across a user having a specific problem and we can direct him or her to someone with extensive knowledge on the matter. Another example, if you're a lot in chat you might know the mod team better, but you know also more about the chat and it's culture. So it could look like only friends are being promoted, but it really is about the perspective you take and how you look at the whole situation. Of course staff and we as team try to have as open conversations as possible about who to promote and we try to look at everybody who's probably suited for the job.

Endercat TM wrote: As much admods we have, most of them are inactive. I could name a few who join chat, yet spend their time AFK or simply not participating. I also don't see a lot of admin edits. So, I would argue that we don't have enough admods, as most are quite inactive, and/or not fit for their job. Simply changing a chat mod to discussion mod won't do much. Most of the admods are active on their own wikis. The fact an admin or mod isn't typing doesn't mean he's inactive. As argued earlier they could be multitasking at that moment, but it could also very well be possible (s)he's just watching and nothing wrong is happening without having to say anything on the topic that's perhaps discussed or talked about at the moment. For edits you can explain it the same way. It's not in the job description of admins to make the most edits here. Sure it helps if they jump into help threads and all as they're often users with extensive knowledge, but being an admin mostly is about keeping the wiki 'clean and nice'.

Enchanted Iris wrote: If the staff really want a fresh start they need to pick all new people to be VSTF, Admin, Discussions mods, and chat mods that way they can test if these people are qualified for those rights instead of just giving them rights and just walking away. Before responding on this I want to clarify I'm not saying this 'to save my rights' or anything, I try to look at it from my personal perspective and the ideas I have of possible consequences. So let's say literally anybody with rights on community central plus all groups like vstf are being demoted. Apart from possibly a bunch of them getting less motivated to be on wikia this brings several problems, also if you not demote all but a good amount of them at once. It can create drama on the whole network of wikis as users might not know or understand why this is done. Then you need to have a good amount of users in scope you want to promote and test as you said. But that means they don't have any understanding of the tools being used now or how to deal in certain situations, and because of the amount of new users with rights few experiences of the past are available how to use the tools or how to deal with the situation. You see it's now already getting a long list of drawbacks so I'll just leave it here incomplete to not mess this thread up, but you get what I mean I hope.

Also as a final note from me, we do try to improve chat and the whole of community central always (therefore also the chat experiment linked earlier in the thread) as this is a place we all like to be, also as admins and mods.