Nexa wrote:
I see that you are the Senior Forum Administrator. Is this mostly due to you being the only Forum Administrator, or are there now Junior Forum Administrators?
Also, someone else has to put together the next Asylum get together, I'm not doing it. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. I might go though, if it's on the East Coast and we bring the kids. I think we should have a kid friendly get-together and we can work in the "kids room" in shifts or something. I have no problem yelling at other people's children for short periods of time.
Nexa
Our table of Organization here is somewhat convoluted. Basically you have upper management, then Darqflame in between them, then you have the Senior level content managers and a single Senior level forum administrator (there is also a senior level wikibase administrator) . Basically the senior level portion gets us the ability to directly submit change order tickets for system bugs and feature requests. There is also some authoritiy that goes with the title. Essentially a Senior level content manager will be the one in charge of a particular section of the site, usually a game page. They are responsable for decisions, conflict resolution, disputes, dealing with angry peoples, etc. For example, take Fleven, the Senior Everquest Content Manager. If I were to go and make additions or changes or requests for the EQ side of the house, I would run them through him. In other respects aside from that (ignoring the forums for a minute , which I will get to) we are co workers and colleagues. Though I have a senior level position, I am not in his staff's chain of command on anything except for forum matters.
Where it gets complicated is with the forums themselves. Effectivly everyone who is an admin is also a forum moderator to some degree, mainly based on their level of interest and time. When we were a smaller organization this didn't cause many problems, since pretty much everyone was of a like mind on how to proceed. As things grew, we found that given a set of general instructions, there are many different paths to take. We ended up with some moderators who took actions that were not perhaps in line with policies of the time (bans before they should have occured, yelleing at people for minor infractions, ignoring major infractions due to one reason or another, etc.) So we decided to implement the first draft of the forum rules to help solidify the framework which people were operating under, both admins and users. We also implemented a level of oversight to give people recourse to appeal decisions, hence the Senior Level Forum Administrator Essentially, on all things forum related, and limited only to the forum system, I have veto rights on decisions, which I deliberatly very rarely ever invoke. Darqflame is the check on my own power in the event someonw wished to make a complaint about me. The main reasons I have ever had to step in are those instances where a user goes out of their way to make something into a personal fight with a given admin and the Admin in question is too close to the issue to make a collected decision. Usually if someone has pissed off an admin to that point they are an idiot anyways, but occasionally someone with a legitimate gripe against the handling of a decision will get rightfully vocal about it, and we step in.
I also am the interpereter of forum rules and implementations. If an Admin has a question on how to handle a forum issue, they usually bring it to me. Or in instances where a particular decision may be unpopular with the community of a given game forum segment, I get to be "bad cop". You would be suprised how often yelling at someone in public once can prevent the need from banning them further down the line.
The final difference between the Senior forum administrator and the rest of the administrators is that Myself, Darqflame, and the various Devs are the only ones who can full on ban an account over 30 or so posts anymore. This was changed after a certain admin decided to ban a pile of people all in one day (which we later unbanned, etc) All admins can still Mute and Permamute, and a request for a ban by another administrator is treated as almost an automatic issueance, but thats the differences.
We have at various times had "volunteer" moderators, but we have never been able to give them actual forum powers short of makeing them administrators, which is something that management has been reluctant to do. Aside from that, I'm the only dedicated forum person.
Vataro wrote:
Who came up with Nexa's 10k title?
Nexa
Nexa
(Actually, it was either Danalog, Darqflame, or Myself. Nexa always signs her posts with "Nexa" so we thought it would be hilarious to make that the title as well. If I remember right "Saurus" was also in the running.