The local moderators for this board were literally never active at all. None. I knew at least one of them was mildly active, but never showed up. If I'm going to be doing my job alone, I'd like to have the board show this, rather than making it seemed much more staffed than it is.

The majority of lmods are inactive except for mostly the newly hired ones. Some are active, but just refuse to ever do anything and still somehow get to be lmod still.

I would love to have peer evaluations. Majority of the time a regular user reports a staff member for inactivity or etc. they get hit with "you don't know what goes on behind the scenes" so it'd be nice to have other staff members be able to evaluate other under-performing staff guys.

Imagine you have a job, let's say, as an in-person customer service representative. You have peers, who have the same duties as you, just different shifts or windows. And you have a manager, your supervisor. Think about how peer reviews would effect the environment as opposed to standard evaluations from supervisor and occasional reviews from clients.

I never understood why people want to hate each other so much. We are a community, and staff are supposed to be it's best members. Yet, there is already so much hatred within staff that peer reviews can only bring it to the next level. We should all be friends, respect each other, help each other if any issues arise.

Leave reviews to usergroup leaders, they probably know more than your peers how usergroup should work, and what is considered healthy workflow. Even if they stick to a conservative policy of dealing with inactive or otherwise underperforming group members, that is fine. Most staff members are chosen carefully, and everyone has their ups and downs, so there are only a few cases that require immediate actions, which are obvious without peer reviews. As part of the usergroup, you need to support your peers by offering them help, cheer them up, and be respectful to their irl issues. Instead, some people running to higher-ups with their tongues out saying this guy did this that guys did that and the third guy disappeared. And peer reviews essentially encourage the latter behaviour.

@Shev
The job isn't being done properly by the supervisors - That's the whole problem here. Additionally, what happens when it's the supervisor that's inactive? You know how hard it is getting shit done with an inactive supervisor? As a MS, you should know about that more than anybody. There's a reason the usergroup is now a shell of its former self.

If you think this whole thing is being pushed for because people just 'want to hate each other', then you're missing the point of this entirely. It's about making sure everyone's doing their part. If people aren't doing their part, they don't deserve to be in the position of power that they're in. This isn't anything crazy. If you don't show up to your workplace for a month without giving a reason you would be fired. In Toribash people can do no shit for months and months and still retain their position (doubly more likely when the staffer is friends with uppers).

To reiterate, it's not about 'hating' your work peers. It's about holding them to the most basic of standards. If you and I worked in a bakery and you never showed up to help me bake, or you contaminated the dough with semen, you would be fired. It wouldn't be because 'I hate you', it would be because you were an inactive/shit baker.
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To be even more clear, staff providing reasons for their inactivity beforehand is absolutely acceptable. These peer evaluations aren't aiming to 'catch' those people.

Isn't there a list that admins can view which shows edits done by the staff on the forum such as closing threads, adding forum boards, sections, profile changes, editing posts etc?

Perhaps admins can look at this list and see who is doing what and who is doing nothing at all?

Also I do support periodic evaluations.

Ensure that everone's doing their part and is judged fairly?


Exactly the opposite. 'Hatred' and heated responses are born when the system is not working. You can help your peers and respect them but it very often goes only one way. You work, they don't. You can only work so far 'alone' without it affecting your motivation for the job. Without peer evaluation, without discussion about the current issues within the team and leaving it all to supervisor, whose activity is another issue, any action you take to address the issues makes you the public enemy and object of negative emotions. This guy snitched. This guy is bothering me about doing my job. This guy wants to introduce changes. Why won't he leave everything the way it is?
Fair, defined, periodic evalutions with discussions afterwards would certainly help clear the air.


Now, do they? What if they are inactive? Haven't had a chance to interact with the team or solve any cases for a longer period of time. Don't really know current team members? Can you really say with absolute honesty that you'd trust that kind of review, just from the lead? I would say that active members of the team have better understanding of the contemporary issues. Supervisor/leader should have experience and knowledge to be able to judge fairly their input. Ignoring/not bothering to ask for input from the members of his team is what creates the mess.
How would you call 6-8 months of inactivity, even with initial good reason behind it? That is what you can face in the certain teams right now. It certainly does not create a healthy workflow. A peer should have a chance to voice his opinion in a way that will be heard, addressed and certainly not ignored (and this is what happens to queries or PMs from time to time). Peer evaluation would give him or her that chance. Not to keep it 'emotional'. To keep it professional.


Except, as I said, your support is often one-sided. There is also nothing wrong with discussing your peers behaviour or reporting it to the supervisor if you think it is wrong - it is the role of the supervisor to address those claims and see if they are accurate. Not addressing the elephant in the room won't make it disappear.

In all staff circles I've been in I've felt comfortable talking to my superiors and the groups as a whole if I thought there were competency, activity, or other issues. And in my time as msquad lead I think I did a pretty good job of addressing the concerns of my group.

I don't think mandated peer reviews are really necessary because it's a process that goes on all the time - the information is already there and there's no need for a formal mechanism to capture it. I think the issue is with there just needing to be more action taken in some cases.

It's useful here to look into why sometimes there seems to be little done even when there could or should be.
This is what I think largely contributes to it (in no particular order):
1. Some staff positions are hard to fill. Whether that's because they require special skills (item forgers for example) or because the work is tedious and a lot of the time downright depressing (msquad) or simply because there aren't many other users in the community that could be trusted in the role or have the skills and attitude appropriate for the spot.
This can lead into staffers who are doing a sub par job being kept on because 40% work/effort from that staff member is better than the 0% you'd get if you booted them out.

2. No one wants to seem overbearing and have to have the slightly awkward talk with someone telling them that they're not doing a good enough job. It's weird because it's a volunteer position on a little forum for a tiny indie game but the staff positions are run like project groups in an office with a manager and workers. Add to that that work is all done through a screen on the internet and you get this kind of weird disconnect. Hard to explain - but that's a feeling I got.

3. Cliques. I don't think this happens much (at least I hope it doesn't) but I can recall cases where people's personal friendships and connections have come in the way of what's best and fairest for the group and community by extension. Most people are pretty good at marking that division though and not letting personal relationships get in the way of stuff. On the flip side most people are also emotionally intelligent enough to not let discussions about their work cross into and affect their emotions and relationships.


I don't really know what the best way to get more action happening would be but hopefully that's shed some light on the reasons why it can happen that way. So yea I'm opposed to this idea as an information gathering system because it's unnecessary but it might not be a bad idea to rig it into some sort of system that forces staff leads to do a small monthly report for the other staff/leads/sAdmins and hold themselves accountable for and explain their group's performance. Not sure what side of the fence I'm on as to if it's even necessary but those are my thoughts on it.

Bump.

What's the plan?