Draft Nomination Process

[Sir_Didymus]

Hey all,

 

We've been recently discussing changes to the moderator nomination process. We've identified what we consider to be the major goals:

1. The ability to fill gaps in moderation more efficiently.
2. A regular process that is cyclical, but can account for periods of lesser need.
3. More transparency and reliability for players.

We've taken into account the following requests from the community meeting:

• "A more detailed explanation of the process should be publicly available."
• "Perhaps some server alerts or signs at spawn for 'applyformod'".

And the following comments from the community survey (along with all the positives):

• "The mods are picked via a buddy system."
• "The staff is largely American and the server favors Americans."
• "A few more staff [are needed] during the mornings for Europeans."
• "[improve] the rift between staff and players..."
• “I was harassed recently by a player when there were no mods/admins on Creative and PvE, so there was nothing I could do other than take it, or leave.”

We have also noted each of the indications from the community survey of time-zones that are lacking moderation.

 

With these things in mind, we'd like to suggest this draft process. (see final version here).

 

This process is not too dissimilar to the current process, but we've tried to lay out a plan that will cover each of our goals without becoming too bureaucratic to maintain.

 

If you would like to comment or suggest amendments to this process, we will leave this thread open for one week from today.

[Mumberthrax]

In this draft it is ambiguous whether the current practice of moderators or other staff creating nomination threads without the name being in the applyformod file is still possible.

 

In this draft it should be clarified how long an interval must pass before a player can be nominated if their previous nomination has been denied due to no comments, majority neutral/negative comments, or "specific reasons for not being made moderator"

 

It is desirable to have clarification on what the "specific reasons" may be and who puts those forth. If it is head admin discretion, then that should be clarified.

[Silversunset01]

In this draft it is ambiguous whether the current practice of moderators or other staff creating nomination threads without the name being in the applyformod file is still possible.

 

In this draft it should be clarified how long an interval must pass before a player can be nominated if their previous nomination has been denied due to no comments, majority neutral/negative comments, or "specific reasons for not being made moderator"

 

It is desirable to have clarification on what the "specific reasons" may be and who puts those forth. If it is head admin discretion, then that should be clarified.

The PDF didy created states "Staff create nomination threads as usual"

As for the length of time needed to pass between a nomination being denied and a new nomination will depend on the reason for denial.

"Specific reasons" could be anything - A few things that come to mind would be severe or recent misconduct. Often times people will have reasons for saying no to a candidate there is no way to specify all of them.

[Guest Former Staff]

We've been recently discussing changes to the moderator nomination process. We've identified what we consider to be the major goals:

1. More transparency and reliability for players.

 

One of the concerns we've been raising internally ties into the process currently being trialed as having moderator voting completely out of the public eye which goes against being more transparent.

 

Just for a point of clarity, has some form of making the voting, public included in this process?

 

One suggestion we had was to keep the poll separate to the discussion topic, or another suggestion was to have public announcements periodically that submissions as of X date have been considered and processed accordingly.

 

This does seem to tie into the public notifications within the draft process but it appears to be a little unclear at the moment if you wouldn't mind clarifying, please.

 

Reading further into the draft, I see that is addressed!

Edited October 26, 2016 by Barlimore

[Sir_Didymus]

In this draft it is ambiguous whether the current practice of moderators or other staff creating nomination threads without the name being in the applyformod file is still possible.

 

It is clearly mentioned in the graphic, but not so clear in the notes below, so I will amend that in the final version.

 

In this draft it should be clarified how long an interval must pass before a player can be nominated if their previous nomination has been denied due to no comments, majority neutral/negative comments, or "specific reasons for not being made moderator"

 

I would suggest an interval of no less than 3 months, but open to interpretation depending on the reason for denial in the initial nomination. For example, if the reason was "a good player, but needs some time to mature" then 3 months would likely be too short a time. If there are no objections to this basic limit, I can include it in the final document.

 

It is desirable to have clarification on what the "specific reasons" may be and who puts those forth. If it is head admin discretion, then that should be clarified.

 

As silver says, there isn't really a way to cover every possible permutation for why someone might be denied. An example might be that someone is banned from our servers during the course of a nomination process where comments had, up until that time, been positive.

 

Final decisions to appoint new moderators do rest with Head Admins (I will try to re-write this section to make it a little clearer for you), and as indicated within the document we will close each denied nomination with our specific reasons for doing so.

 

~Didy

[Sir_Didymus]

This topic will be closed in 24 hours. Please feel free to add any further comments before our nomination process is finalised.

[Sir_Didymus]

Thanks to all who have given input during this discussion. Finalised version of the moderator process document can be found here. Moderators will also find it linked alongside other staff information on the forums.

 

This process will begin properly during the next staff meeting on November 19th, but in the meantime any player looking to make a genuine nomination should do so at nerd.nu/applyformod. Nominating players before that date will ensure they are included in the next list of potential candidates.