T
TehHater
Guest
very well done novel you got der when will it be published o.oAlright, you were wanting feedback on this, so here goes. I'm just going to write in reply to the points raised in the first two posts by HalfSquirrel first, and get to some of the other comments at a later date when my fingers have stopped bleeding.
First off, the reason that the age limit was lowered from 15 to 14 was NOT because of the fact that staff have been resigning lately. I would like to point out that MCSG has been running for a year now, and we can't hope to keep the same staff throughout. There will always be a flow of staff through MCSG- new mods coming in, and old staff resigning. So no, I wouldn't call it "lots of staff" resigning lately- we have had roughly the same amount of staff resign this month as we did to say, last month. But, back to the point. The reason the age limit was lowered was because we do agree with you fellow forumers, and the Senior Staff had been discussing this for a long while anyway. We knew that in the scheme of things, 14 year olds are still considered as "teenagers", and are nothing but 15 year olds that are a year younger. (ie. should still have the same maturity as 15 year olds, etc.-more on this later.)
As for having no age limit causing more mod apps- the honest answer to this is no, I don't believe that making no age limit would significantly raise the amount of mod apps submitted very much at all. At the moment, we probably get (on average) 20-30 different mod apps every single day. I would say that probably around 3/4 of the people on MCSG that want to apply for mod (as in prepared to write a mod app, etc) are over the age of 14, so in any case there wouldn't be that much of an influx. In any case, we would welcome more mod apps, as it would allow us to select more people, and/or allow us to only choose the better applicants if there was enough.
OK, this is probably going to be quite a controversial topic. While we would love to make extremely helpful, insightful members of our community moderators (ignoring any ages at this point) there will be issues with this. One that immediately sprung to mind is people being active on the forums just to get the mod position, and once they get it, abuse it. While I KNOW that 99% of you would NOT do that, there is the chance of it happening. And you may say that that could happen with moderator applications, and I agree. So I'll move to my next point: where do we draw the line? Some forumers may be selected over other forumers, and it could be looked upon as favouritism, bias, etc. It would force us to essentially choose between lots of great people, and leaving many great people behind simply because we can't accept them all.
Inactive staff members: Yes, we are probably more aware of these inactive staff members than you know, we update a google doc with all the staff members details and activity at very regular dates. The majority of staff who wish to leave the community tell us, but yes, some just leave without any messages, etc. You can understand that we don't want to derank any mods rashly- there may be circumstances preventing them from coming on, etc. But we do try to deal with inactivity. Aside from just immediately stripping them of their ranks, we do want to talk to make contact first- to see if they have intentions of coming back, why they haven't been on, etc. All of the staff mentioned have been questioned-we are waiting for replies.
Just a quick thing overview~
Col_Star is a new admin, he hasn't started yet due to being in holiday. He's a friend on Chad's, so hopefully we'll meet him soon.
IronFerret- One of the most beloved mods on the MCSG forums, lol. Everyone seems to wonder who he is xD He is one of Chad's personal friends who was given mod rank- and because Chad gave him mod, we can't remove it. It's a pet peeve of the Sr Staff, trust me. xD And that being said, it's like he heard us talking about him o.o :
Crazydude and Brilliantos, yes we are aware of their inactivity and are going to do something about it if they don't contact us soon.
Calebrox is no longer staff at MCSG, he just hasn't had the mod tag removed yet.
Wedtm- devs are only hired and relieved by Chad, so you'd have to bug him about it. However, if Chad ever wants his help or something again, that might be why his account still has the dev rank.
And now, in response to the second part of the message (I'm going to not answer parts that I have already answered, for fear of this being the length of a G33ke post x10)
I'm just going to go straight to the crux: we are not going to lower the age limit, or take any exceptions. This has been explained many times across many different posts by many staff. The first reason is, even if the senior staff wanted to change it, we can't. A decision like that requires full support from the majority of the senior staff, which it does not have. Personally, I think some exceptions should be made- but that is not a view shared by the rest of the senior staff, and I respect and agree with their reasoning. The second reason: we have to draw the line somewhere. If we lower the age another year, there will always be a group just missing out. I know this seems unfair, but we have thoroughly thought this through. The third reason is yes, maturity. I don't particularly mean maturity in a sense of saying a 12 year old would kick an annoying bacca for killing them when a 16 year old wouldn't, I mean more of a maturity of how to handle certain situations. Some situations require extreme care, while others, excuse the language, are in which you are abused the crap out of as a mod. And I'm fairly certain, that me at a younger age would not have the maturity (in the sense of level-headedness and experience) to deal with it at a younger age.
So please, remember There are reasons for these things. We don't just stick an age restriction on for the sake of it, or because we don't like younger people. And the main reason we don't take exceptions, as stated above, is that it can be unfair on others. If we were to do that, it would just basically be like picking our favourite people. And then there are those people who may not be as active on the forums or in the community, or post an application as excellent or long as another's, but who's to say they are any less qualified than someone else?
Also, another point raised about having people who have mod apps accepted having a minimum number of posts on the forums in order to be accepted- we actually just discussed this among the senior staff, and came to the conclusion that no, we won't do this. Some points raised were that some members may just spam/talk about useless stuff/be annoying just to get the quota. Another was that this would severely cut the amount of eligible applicants, as a lot of our applicants to not have many posts, whether that's because they are server based or they are new to the community, we don't check. And, it may seem strange, but a lot of our current, active staff actually had zero or very few posts when they applied for mod.
Thanks for reading this, if you have. It's now 1am and I have a huge headache, so there is a high chance I have missed something out, or something.... so yeah. Ask away, I'm always happy to answer your questions.
nah I kid very nicely written!
