Talk:Staff Policies
- Another thing I expect Owl will post wholesale about. I do feel we should define circumstances when a staffer should recuse themselves from considering a petition or character. I'm not sure if we should make that a transparent process or not.
- I like the idea of having at least two staffers sign off on a charapp and at least two themestaffers (if not all of them) signing off on any theme addition or change requests.
- I'm unsure if we should designate a person as the enforcer of staff rules or not, or if we should simply make a staff bit that is the voice of any staff decisions to avoid them being attached to a specific staffer so much as the collective decision - seems like it might be good?
- I don't want people bitching that Blondie was highhandedly making decisions without input from others or some bullshit like that; it's definitely (and sometimes correctly) the view on other mushes and I want to cut that off at the knees here.
--Metahistory (talk) 20:34, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
Here are my suggestions:
- All +jobs must be signed off on by at least two staffers before completing. This includes character applications. It also includes Code jobs-- someone beside the coder assigned the job must stress-test the fix.
- No staffer may handle their own +jobs, nor may they handle the +jobs of any of their IC relationship partners. They may weigh in with notes or additional information, but they cannot make decisions.
- Staff is bound to the same rules and policies as all players, including idle and vacation policies and alt policies.
- Staff is expected to step back from jobs or situations that they cannot handle maturely. It is all right to be frustrated by a player or a situation. It is not all right to take that out on the player or the job, or their fellow staffers.
- If there is an issue that cannot be resolved by a staff debate, headstaff gets the final vote and say on it.
- Jobs in the Apps (and other buckets similar, will list once we finalize the list) bucket will be resolved within three business days. Yes, the staff gets weekends to relax and play, too.
- Jobs in the Build (and similar) buckets will be resolved within five business days.
- Code bucket jobs do not have a timeframe other than ‘as soon as possible’, as code bugs can vary in difficulty to resolve.
- If any +job requires a player response; or it is not approvable in its current format, staff will update the +job querying for additional information or changes (in the case of CGs or concept apps). Waiting on player response may lengthen the time frame it takes to complete a +job. Staff is not responsible for the length of time it takes for a player to reply.
- If a denial is required, the staffer issuing the denial will give the player requesting the job the courtesy of an explanation as to why the job was denied.
- Staff must disclose at least one of their player alts. However, they may have no more than one of their alts set as a secret alt, should they desire, so they can RP without being poked by players. Staff deserves a break as well sometimes.
- Staff is not required to answer staff-related questions on their alts, and may refer the player to their staff bit or +staff if they are off-duty.
- Though staff may have access to group channels by necessity as they are administrators, staff bits should not pipe in or chat on them unless doing to so for a staff-related reason (usually to disarm an argument that's gone too far). Otherwise, they will use player bits like any other player to converse.
- No special treatment is given to any Staff Alt. If you need an update, you +job it from the alt needing the update. Even if a staffer gave an overview of what they were planning to update while in the staff room, that information will still need to be on the +job.
- Las Vegas rules apply: what happened in the staff room stays in the staff room. Staff should feel comfortable and safe being able to give honest feedback and opinions of a situation without worrying about it getting back to the playerbase, where it is often misinterpreted and held against the staffer if the opinion or ruling isn’t to the player’s desire. Repeated violations of this will be grounds for a staffer to be removed from their position and possibly the game itself.
- Staff will never sit dark and idle in any room on the grid. There aren’t any legitimate reasons we can think of to use the dark function, and if there is one it must be approved by headstaff and a +job for the record noted as to when, why, and who used it and for how long.
-- OwlCity (talk) 20:40, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
I feel like we should assign specific staffers to watch over sphere channels too, just because having all of the group channels on at once would be madness. People can just leave their bit logged in, in case we need to see the backscroll later. Unless there is a simple logging function we could use, maybe that stores 24 hours of it? Then we can just nuke unnecessary logs of chan spam over time. --Metahistory (talk) 22:50, 7 July 2020 (UTC)-
Ares automatically logs all channels.
Penn channels usually have the ability to do recall.
--OwlCity (talk) 22:52, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
Hmm. Well, in that case I'd say that should be enough and that if staff bits are on they can be monitoring or not, depending what they're doing. I don't think it's unfair to say a staffer can mute if they're building or coding or doing something where channel spam interferes, but having specific people who watch different groups at least limits spam. --Metahistory (talk) 23:14, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
I think the first thing we should do is to set staff positions also. I know New Order wants to be Buildwiz, which is fine with me. But we originally had a trinity setup, but only Blondie is left of that since Pentonix and old Jean left. I think we need to pick two other headwizes alongside Blondie so we have the original tiebreaker setup to ensure we're never deadlocked on decisions.--Metahistory (talk) 05:54, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
I would add to this that for player-related staff (Apps/Theme/Headwiz) we should not be going dark, only Off-Duty or On-Duty.
Even if we are Off Duty we should be visible to the player base as a presence. 'Yes, we're here. Just taking a break, back in a few'. Rather than a 'Dark' and 'non-existant' staff.
I've been on a MU* where half the staff sat Dark on a consistent basis, it wasn't good.
All of Owl's points are sound. No problems here with anything said above. DeadWeather (talk) 12:28, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Agreed. Staff should never be set Dark without an extremely compelling reason.--Metahistory (talk) 21:32, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
