Staff Forum - Is it active/do you talk beyond the forum?

I would say about 6. In the Admin forum at the moment we are talking about removing a moderator. Him reading tht thread might prove... disastrous.

Apart from that there is just the usual threads about our plan for world domination. Nothing major or to worry about it did get released in to view.

 

I would say 1. My staff forum is really unnecessary right now and I'm thinking of deleting it...my staff and I usually prefer communicating via email, or MSN, so the forum isn't put to good use. So far all I've done is post a few updates to a new section of the forum that I'm coding...nothing else.

 

Safe Haven - 11292 Posts 510 Topics
- Original staff forum - lower level moderators have access here. Has a chitchat thread for offtopic stuffs with ~3200 posts.

Member Issues - 3999 Posts 167 Topics
- If a member is an issue they get a sekret thread in this forum.

Elysium - 755 Posts 69 Topics
- For upper level staff. Split off to separate more sensitive discussions.

IRC Operators - 41 Posts 10 Topics
- New : ) Obviously, IRC is not that big of an operation for us - we rarely breach 40 members in channel at a time.

 

It sounds like you have an active moderator section yourself.

 

Understand, there's a lot going on. Since it's a gated community, we need to process half a dozen people a day on average - and that number keeps increasing. That involves coordinating mentoring activities, pointing out suspicious new members, etc.

We haven't reached the point yet, but there'll be a day when we really can't go any faster... I sometimes worry about that.

 

The staff section on my largest forum is very active. It has recently been re-worked a bit with the addition of someone non-traditional staff members, but the general flow is there are four main forums, a staff lounge (which only mods/super mods, admins have access to), a junior staff forum (which the other staff also have access to), a senior staff forum (which only super mods/admins have access to), and an admin forum.

Within the staff lounge is a reported posts forum, where we receive reports from members, and we also report posts ourselves to discuss them. Infraction reports go there too. There is also a forum for the reports related to a muliple alias mod I installed. Finally, there's a forum for when we create contests, we can discuss the details behind them in that forum.

We talk about forum related and non-forum related stuff in there. We certainly have become a lot closer over the months/years. Whenever a staff member leaves, it's like there's something missing in the staff area.

 

I couldn't agree more. I find this particularly true when a staff member takes a week or so off to go on vacation - while they aren't leaving permanently, they will be offline and inactive for that specific period of time.

When a staff member decides to leave the team, that's tough, as well.

 

I never thought to have a private off topic forum like that.

It does happen though. Big Dan likes to use Report a Post to start private discussions.

-Raymond

 

Eh, sometimes we gossip/gripe about certain members, but most of the time it's down to business.

 

Ah, so you've never held any off-topic/humorous discussions to "set the mood", so to speak?

 

If not, I can't imagine how tense it is back there! It'd be like a day at the office without having non-work-related chat with your co-workers.

 

Yes, I do have a staff section on the forums. I also have a subforum for brainstorming different idea's for the site.

 

I like to start a weekly topic and beg all staff to use it alot, double posting is allowed and it's basically just a spam board for us to get stuff done.

 

Actually I keep asking them to start discussions on the ideas they bring me privately for improving the forum, but so far they're generally reluctant to do so.

 

Staff forum is only posted in if someone is leaving for a certain period of time, member problems, forum activity or announcements. So, it's pretty much a dead zone sometimes.

 

I have just the one staff board at the moment as we are still a small website the board is mainly used to bounce ideas and suggestions of my fellow staff, all reported posts go there, as well as discussion about the forum and website in general.

 

I do this, as well. It makes for some interesting discussion, to say the least.