Hello Everyone!
This month has been an interesting time for us here in the forum Moderation Team. On the 25th of April I put in a two weeks notice to my team's leadership and server Administration that I would be stepping down from the Forum Moderating Team. It has been a great pleasure to be allowed to direct this team for such a long time, and I am thankful that I had the the best team one could hope for to aid in the projects and changes I wanted to undertake. In my five or so months leading the team, there has been ups and downs but overall we have managed to take the Forum Moderation team forward into a better state than when we found it.
This Month
The month of April was a rather slow one for us here in the Forum Moderation Team. We did not hire any new applicants, but rather lost a few. @Crinky and @ChongoDragonski. We finished and released the new Forum Warning Appeals system, written and produced by @devvy, which you can read about HERE. We also made some changes to the various Forms available on the Lord of the Craft Community Forums, and sections that have Forms available will now require you to use that Form and not allow you to make a thread otherwise.
Roster:
dogbew (Director)
devvy (Manager)
TheBulter (Manager)
A_Keefy
AerialKebeb
Chorale_
JakeFSF
Riftblade
violino
This Year
Normally we spend the time in each monthly update to show what we have done this month, but since this is my last update as Director of this team; I'm going to take some time to see whats been done so far. I took over leadership of this team on December 11th, 2017.
In that time we have had a lot of major changes, we have completely changed how it is we deal with Forum Moderation here on the LoTC Community Forums. For far too long, our system was predicated on the idea that users would incur several small points for menial violations that would eventually culminate into a Forum Ban, or a Content Moderation. This system was far too taxing on the community, and emphasized quantity over quality in terms of moderation. The new system that is used here emphasizes whats important to the moderation of a community, removing toxic, hurtful or otherwise nasty comments and punishing those who are repeat offenders.
We have changed the Forum Warning appeals system, and added in benefits that allow those members of the community who have been warned for innocuous things in the past to have a fresh start. We have rewritten the Forum Rules here as well, changing them from more broad and nit-picky rules to be focused on whats really important in a community; encouraging discussion, ending harassment and serving the Community. In addition to that, we also introduced Forms as a means for applications to become more streamlined and uniform; helping both community members and staff members in dealing with applications.
There are some things that never got done, we were never able to figure out what to do with the Clubs Feature, we were never able to realize my idea of having a database developed in the likeness of Persona applications to handle player records; and we never got around to working on revitalizing Forum Roleplay like I had set out to do.
Overall I think the team has been succecful these few months; while not everything has gone as planned I'm confident that the Team is in a better place than when we began and I'm eager to see what new heights the next chapter of the Forum Team manages to reach. I'm grateful to have had the oppritunity to lead the team, and don't forget to like, comment and subscribe! Click that little bell button to join our notification squad, and stay tuned to the twitter for updates on when new videos come out!