schererererer

Hi everyone, please look over this revised draft and let us know about any lingering concerns. We've also added descriptions of responsibilities - if anything is dubious or missing from these, please reply as well. ===Second Draft=== With this Staff Inactivity Policy, we aim to address the activity issues experienced across staff for years by having a clear process documented for updating permissions of people deemed inactive. Members of staff are active if they are fulfilling their responsibilities and investing an appropriate amount of time in doing so (on the same order of magnitude as their compatriots). While some may go above and beyond, taking the time to assist in areas not expected of them, we primarily expect each person on staff to tend to the tasks underlined in their current role. We will implement quarterly staff cleanups (every three months), in which moderators who have not met the standard of activity across the preceding quarter will be moved to the inactive category on our website, and those who have been categorized as inactive across the preceding quarter will be moved to the past moderators category. People whose status is changed will be notified via forum message at minimum. Staff members who experience planned or unplanned inactivity should inform us of it as early as possible to avoid being unduly caught in a staff cleanup. Since admins often have more time-sensitive responsibilities and are integral to the operation of their spheres of interest, we will keep in close contact with each admin team to make sure that inactivity does not become an issue. Much of admin activity is invisible to the public (e.g. new revision planning, or plugin development) and as such, the best window on their holistic activity is through the admin teams themselves. We expect members of each admin team to come to us if they have concerns about activity, and we will also reach out to them if we perceive any issues with a member of their team, conferring with them before making a decision. Those staff who are active in the community but are not engaging with their responsibilities to a level similar to their counterparts will be contacted privately to discuss options such as their stepping down to take a break or determining ways in which we can support them. ===Staff Responsibilities=== Head Admins: Guide the overarching direction of NerdNu Approve expenditures and all other financial matters Facilitate communication between staff members, such as coordinating server resets and events, or moderating disagreements between staff Approve or veto rule changes, both broad and server-specific Lead the creation and refinement of policy Conduct staff management and address “human resources” concerns Facilitate moderator nominations and provide final approval on new moderators and admins Conduct periodic staff cleanups, and remove staff members as necessary Provide assistance with admin tasks on any server to reduce the workload of the server admins, as needed and when comfortable Interact with the community at large to have an ear to the pulse of the times, through media such as our hosted games and servers, forums, subreddit, mumble, and irc Tech Admins Maintain the operation of the servers Are responsible for server integrity - as such, techs have the final word on matters of server security and stability Keep the servers running Ensure plugins are up to date Implement new features via plugin creation, etc. as desired Advise other staff on technical matters such as server hardware, plugin selection, etc Interview and approve candidates for additional tech admins Address technical issues brought to their attention through avenues such as modreq, forums, or irc reporting Server Admins Guide the fundamental direction and logistics of their respective servers, taking precedence in internal server-specific matters Propose and lead discussion on rule changes for their respective servers Make server-specific decisions ideally as a server admin consensus, otherwise as a supermajority (⅔) vote Address admin-requests on their servers Plan and develop new revisions/maps as desired and necessary Select and approve candidates for respective server admins Interact with the community at large on their respective servers, and additional media such as our other hosted games and servers, forums, subreddit, mumble and irc Moderators Moderate chat content on our servers, forums, subreddit, mumble, and irc Attend to modreqs as needed Assist players in general Help out with the production of special events or projects as needed by admin teams Nominate and vote on candidates for additional moderators as needed

I think we were delving into specifics and definitions of "activity" and "responsibilities" which need to be clarified sooner or later. We're waiting for the policy to be wrapped up before doing the next staff cleanup, so getting something in place soon is better than debating all the finer details. We'll try to have another draft incorporating your feedback by the admin meeting tonight.

I've played civ with community members more than a few times (including a couple of games in FNG), and the only reason I didn't join in the most recent civ game was because I didn't hear about it until after it was over. I hang out and share music in plug.dj channels sometimes. I don't own CS:GO, but will be grabbing it to play as soon as it goes on sale (my videogame budget is pretty low). I only really knew that it's played by nerd.nu people together because I've seen the mumble channel for it. Which brings up the other issue with using mumble as representative of "the community" when it is in reality a tiny subset of the nerd.nu playerbase even at its peak - at times it's very cliquish. This is something we could work on improving, but it's how things are and have been for a long time. If by 'community' you mean a particular subset of powerusers, then okay, but right now being ingame in minecraft makes us very visible to 90% of the whole community. Interacting personably in mumble, ingame, etc, is great, but it has to take a backseat to getting policy out the door, addressing complaints and concerns, and other such responsibilities. Same goes for tech admins writing plugins, adjusting permissions, or fixing it; or server admins prepping a new revision on a dev server - these are tasks that are prioritized over an public ingame presence. Being in mumble frequently is definitely something to encourage, but I would not kick someone to the curb if they couldn't do so. Regarding keeping consistency among the admins, the written policy is the same for all - fulfilling their responsibilities. The subjectivity resting in the hands of the heads will exist in any case (since staff management is one of the clearest responsibilities of the head admins). And once again, we could use clear descriptions of every staff member's duties, but that is best brought to a new thread (which I have a mind to get to work on asap).

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to idle in mumble - the 10% or less of my time spent on nerd.nu that lets me play in game is mostly multitasking for me and even then I often cannot be in mumble (unless I'm muted and deafened). If I were to sit and chat in mumble, it would either be a paltry showing or come at the expense of administration stuff that takes up the other 90% of my nerd.nu time. If this becomes a requirement, I'd probably just have to step down because I can't do it. Regarding other games, sure I'd love to try them out, but keeping up a high level of activity on every game and server we will have seems excessive. That's a recipe for burnout.

From what I understand, this is just trying to formalize the convention that has been in place on E (and in event building before E was a 'real server') which allows for some nonstaff players with particular skills and involvement with an event to be whitelisted and given permissions needed to help develop said event. Honestly I'd rather just see a "temporary event developer" permission level that we'd add nonstaff players who are helping build an event. I can't say I like having a separate listing on nerd.nu/staff - at that stage we're effectively starting to fragment off E as its own entity, with a separate staff list from the rest of the servers (players listed on the staff page who have not gone through the moderation nomination process).

January Admin Meeting Notes: February Admin Meeting was cancelled. March Admin Meeting Notes: April Admin Meeting Notes:

SirTacoface has joined the head admin team. For future reference, the current head admins are: cyotie911, Mrloud15, schererererer, Barlimore, and SirTacoface.

These are some good critical points being made here - I'm definitely re-examining the proposed policy with them in mind. I think the biggest weakness of this is that the "exceptions clause" is understated - the only case I really see the inactive staff policy muscle being fully flexed is if a staff member has vanished without a trace or any communication for (n) weeks. In my mind, as long as they've given a heads up, they can just hold in stasis until they return (as long as their fellows can hold up the fort while they're out, of course). We could add something about communication (or attempting to communicate) with the person in question before making any changes, but this would just provide us with more information to make a decision. With regards to the threshold, yes, arbitrary time limits have the weakness of not reflecting real activity needs, but the current situation is pretty subjective - the only guideline is "absent 1-2 months or so", which has allowed some mods to show up briefly every month or two and retain their powers, leaving the mod list plumped relative to the actual situation (broadly causing underestimation of the need for new staff). If we can keep on top of accurately tracking the demand for additional mods (by time zone, etc. is even more beneficial), this actually shouldn't be that much of an issue. On the subject of head admins, I think we're keeping on top of that pretty well, especially compared to nearly the entirety of nerd.nu's past. Recently, jchance stepped down precisely because he felt like he was becoming too absentee, and we are / have been bringing aboard new active people like Barlimore. The last time I was online (two days ago) there were three of us ingame doing things, in addition to the daily (or more often) policy discussions all of us are involved in. I absolutely agree that admin activity can't be measured by ingame/forum stuff only - which requires at the very least checking in with admin teams before making any changes. Redwall's thought on admin teams being the best judge of each others' activity is a good one - I wouldn't be averse to codifying it a joint decision between heads and the respective sub-admin-team (at the very minimum trying to check in with the vanished admin and talking it over with the rest of their sub-admin-team). Regarding inactive techs, I personally don't have any problem with them on the roster to help out and provide advice when they can, but we need to be able to realize when we need new techs and act on that. Inactive techs typically aren't able to help as much in picking out new candidates for tech since they aren't really engaged with the community enough to know who is trustworthy and knowledgeable enough for the job. Finding new techs is already difficult enough. We've historically had 5-6 techs on board at any given time, but the plausible situation of having 10 techs on the roster and still being unable to get everything done that we need is unappetizing to me. The responsibilities of different staff types were delineated by WickedCoolSteve in a forum post some time back - this isn't anything official, but we've returned to it as a guide of sorts for a while. Something more official could form the core of a "constitution" (along with codifying the ethos of our community, financial setup, etc.), but that's for another post. Overall, redwall's proposal is effectively what we have now, but with allowances for inactive techs. I think there are a few too many issues with the current operation, but I think we could modify the (original) proposal to lengthen the threshold times some, involve server/tech admins more in the decision, and be more clear about the "exceptions" really being more frequent than the rule.

At the previous meetings (that I was at) that I led, I feel our pace has approached something fairly optimal - last month's one was about an hour iirc, compared to the 4 hour monster of a meeting one time. Having someone with a mic to keep the meeting moving and to summarize discussions for the benefit of a notetaker is essential. I think that 3 meetings a month is excessive and will result in lackluster attendance. Imo we should be aiming for monthly admin meetings, quarterly or per-trimester public townhall meetings, and full staff meetings of one of the above frequencies.

I'll piggyback on this to mention that I'm currently out of the country and will be for another couple of weeks, with only a phone.

Every admin meeting for months we have brought up the necessity of a tech master tasklist, mentioning various solutions from full ticketing systems to a simple google doc, but it has never gotten made. Any tech admin: please go ahead and make such a list so we can all keep track of what has been reported/requested/completed. Anything is better than the nothing we have now.

I had planned on having a general public meeting a bit after the donation drive, but I'm out of the country right now and for a while, and doing everything on my phone (i.e. no mumble). Now I'm thinking early July for a meeting date - choose/announce a date and publically request topics of discussion within the week. Having a staff meeting immediately before the general meeting would be nice for scheduling, but would add up to a long time in meeting.

I actually started with the 1600 figure for the end of january, then subtracted 238 four times to get to the end of may (which brings us to 648). Subtract the 524 to reimburse Deaygo and we have 124; add the 3667 from the donation drive and we have 3791.

We raised 3667.84 in the drive. Compare to $2224.88 in 2014's drive, $2098.92 in 2013's drive, and $4033.34 in 2012's drive (including pixelcort's monumental $1000 outlier donation). I'd consider that a resounding success, and would attribute the increase partially to the visibilty of checkpoints/goals and the public knowledge that funds were dropping fairly low, but also to the combination of new players making large donations along the more established major donors. After paying Deaygo back for the second server he's been covering (noted below), we should have approximately $3790 USD. On the side of expenses: $238 USD monthly for the primary server; $63.28 CAD monthly for the secondary server (currently $51 USD) (the setup cost was divided among previous months in CAD: 80.66 for a month, 79.10 for 4 months, 76.29 for a month, and the last three have been 63.28 - this was paid for by Deaygo up until the donation drive, after which 662.19 CAD / 524 USD was transferred to him); Note: The secondary server hosts the wiki, website, world downloads, and very soon our first wave of expansion into other games. $25 USD every 6 months for forum license renewal (this is actually for support and anti-spam measures, if we really want to try to save $4.17 a month we could drop that - and pick it up again without penalty at any time afterward if need be); Advertising (variable): I've determined that $150 per month will allow current funds to cover ~8.5 months of operation; this budget will allow us to experiment some with advertising methods and retain 8 months of operation, at which point we should be upon our second post-ctf fundraiser (this budget can be reconsidered after the first fundraiser in 4 months). For reference, $50 per month, which we originally targeted, would run for ~11 months. Not factored into the above are LLC costs (given we proceed with that): $500 USD single fee and $275 USD annual fees, equivalent to $23 monthly.

The Ban Appeal Policy has been modified to include the following: "If the banning moderator has not responded to your appeal after 48 hours you may make a post (bump) in your appeal to bring attention to it. At this point (48 hours of no response), any staff member may attempt to contact the banning moderator and if no response is received in 24 hours, said staff member may take over to expedite the appeal."

The issue that was brought up was one of mods injecting themselves into a contentious ban while information is being gathered or collated, but I believe this is a satisfactory solution to that problem: "If the banning moderator has not responded to your appeal after 48 hours you may make a post (bump) in your appeal to bring attention to it. At this point (48 hours of no response), any staff member may attempt to contact the banning moderator and if no response is received in 24 hours, said staff member may take over to expedite the appeal." I have edited the ban appeal policy to reflect this and am making a head admin changelog post about it now.

Skrapssparks has been remodded and retrained.

Just as a note, YouCaring is just a platform that uses paypal, stripe, and wepay - all of which charge the same base fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. I'm not sure of the customer service reputations of these other payment services (have only heard of stripe in passing before, and have never heard of wepay). The biggest problem we've had with paypal in the past is with them freezing our account, I believe due to suspicious activity from sudden large donations after long periods of nothing (i.e. donation drives), but afaik this hasn't happened for quite a while. We should be able to pretty easily set up alternative services for those who dislike paypal - Google Wallet was mentioned as a possibility too.

Rules have been fully updated and streamlined to convey the same information with less text. Nested bullet points increase readability, allow players to skim 'top-level' bullet points for the essence of the rules.

Forgot to reply earlier, but I already updated the Ban Appeal Policy. Regarding your ban appeals suggestion, Barlimore, heads haven't yet come to an agreement on that.

Just to bump this, we (and by 'we' I prod Switch and/or anyone desiring to) need to add a blurb about the CTF event / donation drive, and then it will be ready for posting a day or so before the drive starts on /r/mcservers for optimal timing. After that, I'll repost it per the rules of that subreddit every two weeks, editing the content of the event server stuff as appropriate.

Whoops, forgot to do this until now - implemented on the wiki rules page! Thanks Barlimore for the wiki markup! And it's a lovely (-6,879) bytes, or 37% off the previous entry!

I'd dig a minimalist shirt with only the nu glasses logo. Also, I think that we can put all the videos on one youtube channel - it's not like we're swamped with them now.

Apologies for the delay. Since it's been well over 6 months without any recurrence, I've removed the note. Note #38598 for AvadaKedavra03 on c.nerd.nu: warned for lwc abuse on survival by Mumberthrax on 2014-11-08T15:44:17

I've gone ahead and removed the set of all the older notes you had. Apologies for the delay on wrapping this up.