Hey all. I've been doing my best to keep up with this thread, but I've just finally had the time to sit down and fully read it and totally formulate my thoughts into a digestible form. I'm going to do my best to go through all the points raised here and reply to them. If I miss anything out, please feel free to reply with questions or additional responses.
1) Anonymous Survey: One of the reasons that we do not engage with anonymous reports is because it is a system that skirts accountability and is too easy to abuse. We have public facing suggestions and appeals as a matter of transparency.
We want a written record of things that are suggested on site because it is important to be able to say "here is what was suggested/pointed out and here is what was done about it." If there is no public-facing way of showing off these recommendations, there is no way for you as site members to hold us accountable to following through on these anonymous reports. If you submit something anonymously, how are you guaranteed that it went through and we received it? How are you guaranteed that we are looking at it? How do you ask for updates or a follow-up? You cannot do any of these things with a suggestion that has gone through anonymously.
There is also the matter of transparency on the member side. If people are able to make anonymous reports, they are able to say whatever they want. People can submit multiple repeat reports pretending to be other people. I do not want to hold this suspicion towards site members, because most of you do not engage in this behavior, but I have had it done to me by some members even without the allowance of anonymous submission. I have had people come to me and say that "so-and-so was being bothered by another so-and-so," then I reach out to the parties in conflict to get the full story and learn that the report was a total lie/misrepresentation/etc. These things are a concern, this is an easily abused feature of having anonymous reporting.
I appreciate the concerns people have, but we want a site that has open communication. There is nothing that can be solved by anonymous surveys that we cannot resolve through open and honest communication. I understand the concerns people have with talking openly, but we are a social community and remaining accountable to our fellow members, to ourselves, and to our moderation team is an important part of being a functioning community.
However people may feel or how it may seem, we do NOT judge people for bringing forward their issues and we always do our best to try to resolve them. If you are having issues with members attacking one another, gaslighting one another, or abusing one another, please bring these forward to the attention of staff. We are not omniscient and cannot be watching channel at all hours or moderating things that occur in DMs. We have to be told this is happening to do anything. Don't sit silently and deal with people being rude. Screenshot, get corroborative evidence, bring it to us. We can handle it much more readily in open conversation than we can through an anonymous survey where we have NO way to follow up.
If you have an issue with a specific staff member, go to admin. Or if you don't want to post a suggestion publicly, go to a trusted or favorite staff member and ask them to return it to the group. This is a much better method of ensuring an open line of communication if public conversation is absolutely off the table.
2) Site roles/Competitive nature/Positions: This one is an incredibly complicated and obviously very sensitive subject. I'm going to try to break this down carefully.
As many people in this thread have said, we are a casual site. We expect very minimum posting because we want to encourage people to maintain their plots and their threads even if they cannot do so at a fast pace.
This has been referenced as "favoritism," or creating a "competitive environment," but I want to ask - can we not say the same thing of the opposite stance? If we only favor people who demonstrate activity for certain positions, we create an environment where the Most active players feel the most right towards special roles. We create an even more competitive environment, with individuals feeling that others are More or Less deserving of specific roles. If there is any lapse in activity for any reason, it will be something that can be jumped on, warred over.
We don't WANT that. We as a staff believe that everyone has value to site, all players deserve a right to try to play out the plots they're engaging in, even if they cannot maintain the breakneck pace that some other members can.
I know that sometimes this is disappointing, that sometimes this means that you cannot make the character you want or engage in the plot you want, but if you feel that way you also have to look at and empathize with the other side. How would you feel if every time someone who thought they had a Better Idea for your plot came along, they could uproot you from your position and archive your character? We making removing and losing characters a relatively difficult thing for this reason. We do not want to take people's characters away if we do not have to!
Mechanisms for this exist and will remain, because sometimes it is unavoidable that it is the right thing to do for the site to clear these positions. But they come with specifications for a reason. In order to remove a member, we want evidence that a hand has been extended, that plots have been offered, and that no effort is being made on the part of the individual holding the position.
It remains my firm belief that the best way to combat inactivity is to attempt to plot with slow site members. It is very easy to say "this member never posts," but how many people actually reach out to that member with ideas? If you have an idea for a role, a site concept, an arc, why not find a way to engage with it from another angle, bring it to a site member who might be struggling? We can say that someone doesn't have legitimate reasons all we want, but there are many personal and private things an individual might be going through that can cause them not to post on site with frequency. Making the assumption that they are just holding a slot for no reason, out of malice or selfishness, without any interest in continuing their character's plot, is not something we want to do, or a site environment we want to cultivate.
We do not want to establish rules that could create a site environment where when someone wants a specific role, they freeze the current holder out and ignore the chance at interesting threads with them on the hopes they'll eventually slip and fall into the window where they can be removed. We want our site members to be collaborative, considerate, and to attempt to move each other's plots forward as well as their own.
That's why so many site mechanics are built around this idea. The fact that working on missions and trainings together is easier, the fact that you require lesson threads to graduate the academy, the fact that you can get sensei exp for trainings - the core ethos of our site is one of teamwork and cooperation. There are probably things we can do to better promote this, sure. But my point is that it is very against the spirit of the site to emphasize rules which rotate people out of their positions.
We can attempt to clarify the rules, naturally, and we are in talks to do just this, but I do not believe that the rules are written differently from staff intention in this instance.
3) Staff: This is a very brief point, but it is one that I wanted to acknowledge and discuss. I saw commentary in here that we only bring on members of the site who we are buddy-buddy with. This is not true. There are people on site who I would like to see promoted that we have passed over. There are people who others have recommended who I have voted against. Staff is not a monolith. We try to the best of our ability to make objective decisions about who we feel will be the best fit for site. This is why the staff addition is such a slow and infrequent process. We want people who understand the core values of the site and have a very strong understanding of the mechanics, but also people who can challenge our current views and mechanics in very specific ways. A lot of deliberation and conversation goes into deciding on new staff members and the additions are RARELY unanimous. I can't think of a staff addition that has been unanimous even before I came on. I think my addition at the time of my promotion wasn't unanimous.
On the matter of being afraid of being temp-banned, etc., by us - I want to know where this perception has come from? When have we ever temp-banned someone just for pointing out a problem or disagreeing with us? The most recent instance of temp-banning I can think of is a public argument between two site members in the discord. We are very, very lenient with our discipline. We utilize a three-strike system and have only ever timed people have when they were becoming incredibly heated or engaging in verbally abusive behavior in a public forum, such as the ask-a-staff. We do not temp-ban people for suggestions. You can recommend things all day long and we're not going to do anything to you or your account. I have had people say some truly abysmal things to me in the heat of the moment on the site and shrugged it off. Most of staff, regardless of temperament, has thick skin, as it is necessary to engage in reviewing material with a userbase that can be very passionate about their vision and their goals. If you genuinely feel you may get in trouble for sharing your perspectives, this may be a view you want to reassess on the basis of most of staff's actual behavior.
4) Community, Discord: This goes back to a bit of what I touched on in part 1, but I wanted to give this its own dedicated section because this is a very big issue I'm seeing referenced. There is a lot of animosity between site members, a lot of argument, people being driven to tears in the VC... I do not use the VC, I am not always in the general chat. I do feel very badly that this is happening, and I want it to stop. I think we could do more to be harsher about member behavior, I do think we can crack down on this, but there is also very little we can do if we are not told. I appreciate you all communicating your experiences here, but I've never had these things brought to me, or sent out as a PM to all staff members. We do want to help, but if people are rude and you just choke it down and then move on until the pot boils over and you can't take it anymore, we cannot help. Chat is very fast moving. We cannot possibly keep track of every duo of user's exact dynamic (are they having a genuine argument? Are they joking? Do they just talk like that to each other? Was there greater context?) when there are over a hundred users. Document! Tell us! Let us help you! I am willing to advocate and be strict, but I need the information first in order to do anything with it.
). I thank you all and, again, congratulations to those who took the stand in spite to that awkward feeling of retaliation and waste of time for doing so - that even now I yet feel to my bones.
