Zandronum

I'm definitely not as blunt as say Metal or Cyber were, I'll admit

Decay wrote: TTA does more than most of the other mods combined. I don't really agree with his posting of "I'm going to hand out warnings" which may be better served as individual pms to particular users, but that's more of a personal policy preference and doesn't really matter. I think he does a good job now all things considered. In fact he carries most staff and has carried for a while, considering staff stripped another staff member of any actual power and other mods went limp when their ban-happy leader vanished.

The Toxic Avenger wrote: I'm definitely not as blunt as say Metal or Cyber were, I'll admit

Well, Metal couldn't find the warn button only ban buttons, Cyber did nothing important except start the occasional pub game, so I'd say you're already way better than them.

I know Im one of the irrelevants, but I wanted to say it anyway. TTA, I recall you taking on a large share of the work load as soon as you joined; both on the boards and on the master server. I am glad to see you are still doing well. I knew I wasn't needed anymore a long time ago when I noticed how well you and Watakid were running things, thus my absence. In short, keep it up fellas.

mifu wrote: Hello fellow Zandronumers!

So its almost a year. Alot of stuff has changed around here from staff to new additions on the forums. I feel the general mood of the community is also better :)

That being said, im sure we have fucked up a fair bit too. This is the purpose of this thread. I would like to know how you guys find us, like are we doing our jobs properly? Are we kind? Are we good? Anything we can improve on? all of that good stuff.

I might make this a yearly thing as well where I will make a thread about this. I would like some feedback on what you guys think about the staff.

@Staff, feel free to post in here letting me know how well im doing my job too :P

Just remember though guys, keep it civil and we can have a friendly chat.

Cheers.

Hi, good to see you guys are still alive! If it's alright, I'd like to offer my observations.

I noticed two things immediately about this place, it's very similar to its earlier days and there's a lot less activity. At least, on the forums. For all I know the servers may be booming. The similarities make me want to stay away from the community, mostly the immaturity. Threads like "doom restaurant" or "magic coke machine" ooze middle school behavior. Not to mention, the mentality from the community that fosters sub-quality mapping. These are why I left. But I'm old and burnt out, so maybe having a community of teens with optimism has its benefits in the long run. Just not for me.

Also, before I continue let me emphasize that this is from what I observed, so I apologize if there's more to the story. One other negative I'd like to put out there is the relationship between staff and certain community members with a stigma. Look guys, I know how it is. There's a guy that annoys the staff and isn't quite bad enough to reprimand, so the staff watches him like a hawk (or voltanian >:V) and waits and waits. This isn't the staff's fault, or the user's fault. But there needs to be a resolution. Stop picking fights with the staff, or get the fuck out. And staff; either ban them or accept them.

I'd like to end on a positive note though, I admire the dedication of you guys to stick by during hard times; there's a lot of familiar names I see. There's also some really good looking projects (you know who you are) so don't stop.

I hope this helped and I wish you all the best of luck.

@Decay
I wouldn't be surprised if you thought I was doing nothing but playing as an admin.
To be fair, I did do a lot of behind the scenes work. To keep it short, things like diffuse the tension between simk / theta's crew vs the past staff crew, when Skulltag's forums were prone to hacking("surfshacktito"). Likewise I had to consistently work with Carn to keep the forums updated when they needed to be. Probably the most important thing was when Toka and myself worked with the development of the skullhack detector, which was crucial in checking the servers during the Skullhack era. There was almost a hacker spotted daily, so the banlist would be huge and the whitelist would be just as big.

To the relief of the staff today, they don't have to deal with watching for 1-3 hackers a day. Nowadays they prolly only need to look for one a month. Right now it's actually very lax, so I'm grateful that we've at least moved to the point where they don't have to work as hard. They also have every section split up into groups so they don't have to deal with a single person handling everything.

That being said, the current staff has things handled their duties quite fair, and I hope that they can keep it up.

better than Whoo i guess

but I liked Whoo :(

Who split my posts? I'll find you and I will cook you like a KFC chicken breast and feed you to my squirrel.

Liking the PRO comeback here tonight.

NiZ wrote: Who split my posts? I'll find you and I will cook you like a KFC chicken breast and feed you to my squirrel.

Dude bro, please roll it back a bit

Oooo more stuff. Alrighty then.

I think the main thing I'll talk about is the post liking system/rep.

I am a bit iffy about this, well more like 50/50. I do believe that it would be useful to give praise to useful/good posts which would in turn encourage community members. It's always good to get feedback from other community members.

The problem here though is, some people have shown that they cant handle any criticisms so potentially issues may occur. I like to think we are past this now however so I'll look into getting some sort of system in place.

Don't worry, Bob, I'll start banning more people. Pinky promise.

It's good to hear feedback from people, thank you very much.
I'm still trying to figure out what the lines of "too far" is and what the appropriate measures are, though watching our more friendly inhabitants dance back and forth has been a wonderful learning experience.

Please feel free to yell at me and call me a dumbass if I cock things up.

It's probably best to not even bother implementing any type of rating system. It only works in specific types of communities and in other cases it usually gets removed over time. Many years ago I was part of a community, that in addition to tossing the rating system, did away with post counts. It worked well despite initial crying. Consider doing that instead. 8)

I didn't ask suggest a rating system. Just a way to "like" posts. Nothing more, nothing less.

Ru5tK1ng wrote: It's probably best to not even bother implementing any type of rating system. It only works in specific types of communities and in other cases it usually gets removed over time.

Funny you should mention that, as we did that with ours by 2013

Catastrophe wrote: I didn't ask for a rating system. Just a way to "like" posts. Nothing more, nothing less.

You do realize that simply liking a post is still rating it right? You are asking for a rating system.

The Toxic Avenger wrote:

Ru5tK1ng wrote: It's probably best to not even bother implementing any type of rating system. It only works in specific types of communities and in other cases it usually gets removed over time.

Funny you should mention that, as we did that with ours by 2013

Interesting, so there's even less of a reason to legitimately consider a 'like', rating, karma, whatever system.

A rating is something that is actually kept track of. Ie ELO rating, Win/Loss rate, etc. It's just a simple like system.

Edit: No, I'm not saying that "likes" should be a recorded value on an account..... Haven't you guys ever visited other forums with like systems?

You do realize that Facebook has a rating system? It's called a 'Like'. A rating system can be applied to more than games and ELO. Ever heard of ratings for movies and places?


Anyway, rather than waste time trying to argue definitions, how about presenting some reasons why a 'Like' system should be implemented. So far there is a strong case for no implementation.


Also, no one said anything about tracking values for accounts.

If there was one thing I wouldn't mind seeing, it's a rating system for mods although I am very unsure of that because a lot of people could abuse the feature, it would require quite a bit of heavy moderation but as for the facebook like thing, I honestly see no point in it, that sort of thing is for when people want to communicate with others over social media, it's not like we are creating some status that our whole family can see on Zandronum.

Ru5tK1ng wrote: You do realize that Facebook has a rating system? It's called a 'Like'. A rating system can be applied to more than games and ELO. Ever heard of ratings for movies and places?


Anyway, rather than waste time trying to argue definitions, how about presenting some reasons why a 'Like' system should be implemented. So far there is a strong case for no implementation.


Also, no one said anything about tracking values for accounts.

Unlike facebook, most "liked" posts on forums aren't pushed all the way to the top of the thread though. Discussions like this can keep going on normally without it boiling down to who made the funniest joke. There really is no problem as long as likes get wiped if someone is blatantly posting crap to get attention.

As for why - there are a lot of things on this forum that we don't "need" but we have anyways. See: emoticons, signatures, avatars, etc. It's just a QoL change really.

Other than that, I'd love it if we got a plugin to automatically hyperlink acs and decorate functions. Ie typing in a_firecustommissile would automatically huperlink it to the Zdoom wiki article. It'd make explaining things on the help/tutorial sections a lot easier.