Board Politics

[Lurker]

Hey, everyone.

With conflict between members and staff having occurred about decisions made, I think it's important that the lines of communication be kept open in order to satisfy everyone's concerns in a peaceful and productive manner. Thus, this thread here is for the discussion of board politics. It's my hope that while our community gains insight into our decision-making processes, and gets a say in improving those processes, our staff team gains insight into the way our community desires to be treated, and how, and can learn to make better decisions in general because of it.

Now, this thread isn't for posting staff actions, like banning someone, or deleting a thread, or something. That's for other threads. This thread is specifically for improving staff/community relations and keeping everyone content and agreeable through compromise and teamwork for the sake of things running as smoothly as possible while people enjoy their time here.

That said, anmudkip suggested this thread, and I'll let him make the first business post.

[anmudkip]

Hey everyone, in this post I would just like to state that the staff has been made aware of several recent issues pertaining to individual posters or potentially offensive or inflammatory posts. It has come to our attention that there are several issues with staff response that need to be sorted out. Now normally I would say this is a bad thing, but given the relatively new age of the board coupled with the lack of drama, the staff hasn't had to deal with any conflicts until the last few days. I see that as a good thing in that the community has been able to either self police or avoid drama in general.

That said, there are times when drama is inevitable. That is when a member should be able to talk to a mod or admin and receive a competent response. Unfortunately there have been issues with the response to recent complaints or moderation requests. Some are technical, for which I am partially responsible for and have been working on. Some deal with experience and judgment issues. To this I would like state that a large portion of the staff are veteran MLW staff, but some are new and are still learning how to perform their jobs to the best of their abilities.

To avoid future issues I first ask that users avoid posting content that is almost certainly going anger other users or likely to be misinterpreted. Secondly, I ask that users try to refrain from talking about issues with other users in threads and instead try to solve it between one another or involve a staff member. If a staff member is at issue, bring it up with another staff member via a PM. Third: The report post button exists for a reason, use it if you have an issue with a post's content that you do not feel is appropriate and violates any rules. Additionally, while threads naturally diverge in topic at times, and debate is not bad, do not continue to derail a topic when it has been put back on track. Doing so will result in some type of warning or administrative action.

Since this is a thread for board politics, feel free to let us know how were doing and what we can do to improve. No personal attacks will be tolerated, against anyone; please only contribute with constructive criticism.

[Lurker]

Just a bumping reminder that this thread is here, guys. If you've got a problem with the way things are run, or would simply like to leave a suggestion, please drop it here. If you'd rather PM one of the staff about it, that's okay too.