Staff Meeting - 03JUL2016 - Minutes/Public Discussion

Staff Meeting

Administration & Moderation Staff

03JUL2016

 

Preface:

If you have any questions about the contents of this thread, please leave a reply or send an attending member a PM via the forums, discord, or what have you.

Attendance

All staff recorded below attended at least half of the meeting:

• Skull132 Head Administrator
• Garnascus Administrator
  
• Serveris6 Administrator
  
• TishinaStalker Administrator
  
• IncognitoJesus Administrator
  
• Tablespoon Administrator
  
• Alberyk Moderator
  
• NursieKitty Moderator
  
• Hunnewle Moderator
  
• Killerhurtz Moderator
  
• Natwhite Moderator
  
• DatBerry Moderator
  
• Loow Moderator

 

All staff recorded below reported themselves as unable to attend the meeting for various reasons:

• Jennalele Administrator
• SoapyCup Moderator

 

Purpose of the Meeting

Establish a general set of goals for the next 3 months.

Analyze the status quo, review and discuss potential issues, figure out solutions and establish a plan of action as necessary.

Discuss issues which will become relevant in the near future. (See next paragraph for further details.)

Present Situation/Opening Word

Skull has about 2 months of consistent and confirmed activity left. What comes after that is a little unknown. As such, a few plans need to be established and a few things done.

A second Head Administrator will be picked at the end of this month. The selection process will be primarily conducted by the Administrators themselves, as it always has been. Unlike last year, however, Skull will be ticking around as much as he still can, and not simply dropping a new Head Admin into the waters for a witch’s trial. Things will go smoother this time around.

Tangentially related to this shift is a funding related discussion. At the present, Skull is the individual responsible for all of that. However, he no longer wishes to carry the sole burden and wants to give everyone who wants to contribute a chance to do so. Our present server hosting company (NFO) offers a method of setting up a PayPal donations link directly to them. We will be utilizing this system: none of the donated money will go to any member of staff, and will instead go to the hosting company under our name. With both Head Admins at minimum having access to the account in question, the chance of the donations being misused is as low as is humanly possible. Current details about the server funding are as follows:

• The server costs ~300 USD per year to rent
• Server’s billing is done in two cycles of 6 months
  
• Fundraiser is planned for once a year, with a goal of gathering enough funds for the entire next 12 months (in order to make this shit as less stressful for everyone involved as possible)

Exact details will be discussed mid-September, as the first fundraiser should be started at the end of that month. And note that we are almost certainly not looking to offer “benefits” for donors, so no special ingame chats, magical items, or what have you. Rewards and notification will be discussed at a later date.

Important Resolutions

Funding and shift of management resolved as discussed above.

Large issues (such as RP quality and the perception thereof) still need specifics to be hunted down in any measure. Moderators and Administrators also need to note more things. Note all the things.

New ruleset awaiting new Head Administrator in order to be picked into the public review stage. No minutes or publicity about these meetings was posted, as this stage was meant to be a stand-in for those.

Events and such (driven by Administrators) will not be making a return in force until enough Administrators are promoted. Currently, on average, only one Administrator is on the server at any one time. This number needs to be a relatively cool 2, with perhaps deadhour excluded, in order for such things to not strain the Administrators. However, some of the workload for this can and will be off-loaded to the Duty Officers (CCIA). Namely, they can be encouraged to do things, like issue round specific directives, work with the lore team for VIP visits, what have you, in order to assist in that manner.

To further elaborate on the last paragraph, new Administrators cannot be promoted at the time as the majority of the Moderators who should be looking at a promotion are not around anymore, primarily due to the unfortunate mismanagement of the transition between myself, Doomberg, and then back to myself. While Moderator and Administrator retention is high, recruitment is a steady low, which makes hard hits to staff count hard to recover from.

The rest of the meeting is detailed in the minutes below.

Minutes

• Opening briefing
• Donations/server funding
  
  • Fundraiser once per year, target goal of ~300 USD per year.
  • Funds go directly to the hosting company, no one from staff will get to touch them.

[*]New Head Admin

[*]Events

• Offload some work to the DOs and have them help out with providing crew objectives and goals for the round.
• Not touching event schedules or things like that until we get more admins, which will take a bit of time. Otherwise, this would get straining for them.

[*]Roleplay quality?

• EOR Grief - Need to have justification for actions. Can’t just, no actions into mass murder on the shuttle.
• Species roleplay standard - Report people who break species lore to their species managers.

[*]Recruitment

• Talk to people more about moderator applications, find applicants and get invested in them and their application process.
• Try to tidy up the apps subforum.

[*]New rule for AI/borgs: Do not rules-lawyer your laws as an AI (to a dumb degree). It’s a form of validhunting/powergaming.

[*]Bring back admin minutes - people complaining about transparency.

• Regarding minutes: you’re reading them
• Regarding transparency: minus the rules meetings, there have not been any major meetings since the January time that would require minutes be recorded. The minutes for the rules meeting will be posted whenever the new rules will be discussed.

[*]More admin communication with team leaders? (Particularly DOs and the lore team.)

• Mod and Admin meetings very rarely concern DOs, and focus very concretely on issues which fall under the purview of the mods and admins (and not of the two other teams).
• If any issue concerns either team, then their leaders are contacted as necessary. Trickledown info is in full effect.

[*]Rules change - Waiting new Head Admin. Because I really cannot manage that at the moment.

[*]IPC Shells / Mechanics? End of the month, Polaris port.

[*]New-Map-Status? Waiting on code now. (And, hey, we have coders now!)

[*]Possibly giving the default Synth Laws a do-over?

• Get Hunnewle for a proper proposal.
• Note that fact that when TG tried to tackle synth laws, the removed the AI role temporarily because people kept being people.

[*]Server direction. Also, the clash between the HRP standard and what the players might want/seem to apply sometimes.

Three pillars: remain IC, remain believable (vs realistic), antagonists.

[*]Also what we want the server experience to go towards

See above. Maintain heading, expand possibilities.

[*]Admins are a good question - establishing a promotion protocol?

Protocol is present. Very few eligible recruits, however.

[*]Shitters on OOC

Target mute people. (As opposed to global mutes.) Leave notes, escalate to warnings, then talks and then bans if absoloutely necessary.

[*]Would anyone object to certain people (Loow) trying a hand at events? There’s some demand for more. Should these events be “fun”, “canon”, or “both”?

Find an admin, talk to an admin, plan with that admin. Respect the fact that we don’t have a lot of admins at this moment, though this will change with time.

 

Alibis

None recorded.

Would anyone object to certain people (Loow) trying a hand at events? There’s some demand for more. Should these events be “fun”, “canon”, or “both”?

 

I have to point to the Tesla event, which was done by more than just Loow, and say that the enthusiasm, effort, and dedication he put into the event to try and be as inclusive as possible, to take as many notes as he could to write lore based on it, and just all in all the work he put into it was beyond admirable. If Loow could try his hand at making canonical events to spice things up and leave us with memories we can have in our character stories, I would love it, and I think he's the type of guy who can do it while also being open and receptive to constructive criticism if there's any issues.