Chat, as you said, is meant to be more off-the-cuff. Fast, interactive, rapid iterations, urgent matters. Segmenting everything into threads would not necessarily kill that aspect, but certainly slow it down. Conversations couldn't naturally flow from one another since each would need a thread to not break the whole purpose, quickfire questions would probably take up a whole thread making it impossible to tell what's an important topic with 200 messages and what's a 3 message "ok thanks" interaction…

I think the real solution is fairly straightforward - if you have something big to bring up in chat, from an important 05 post to an urgency to discuss, make it a thread. Anything that's not a thread can be assumed to be not that serious/no need to backlog.

This is an oversimplification, but I hope it makes sense.

I think it's clear from the consensus here that this proposal is not supported. I don't think it's productive to try and push through this particular implementation when it was intended as one in a series of reforms, so instead I will respond to a number of common sentiments in the thread, as well as discuss what I think we need to do going forward to fix our staff chat situation.

A lot of responses here have focused on the need for putting things on O5. And while I agree that more information should be logged or discussed here, there are important fundamental differences between chat and O5 as mediums of communication:

• O5 is a forum, which has structural benefits such as being able to see all conversations in one place, being able to reply to a specific comment, and naturally grouping related topics together. It encourages more thought-out responses, and provides the ability to add links, reference resources, etc. It is durable and public. And finally, it systemically slows discussion, making it (hopefully) more deliberate and thorough.

• Chat is a fast interactive space. It enables live conversations and immediate notifications. Chat is very useful for quick questions and rapid iteration (such as conversations with quick back-and-forths), whereas while O5 is good for long-term announcements, it is less so for urgent, immediate matters. (This is, for instance, why I think our use of the "Emergencies" forum categories has been fairly minimal)

• There is also the issue of privacy and security. While most conversations within staffchat can be released via Recaps, there is some information which is sensitive (e.g. issues with particular users, abuse, etc). This obviously plays a factor in determining the appropriate venue, but this is not largely relevant to the discussion being had in this thread.

Understanding that these two platforms have different strengths should be core to our discussion of when and where certain kinds of conversations should be held, they are not equivalents. So while moving conversations from staffcord to O5 may be one aspect of making #staff-discussion more readable, it cannot be the only one, and I'm concerned that there is too much of a focus on it, as if O5 purely supersedes chat as a means of staff communication.

For instance, policy discussion, votes, and records are on O5 because its durability and public state is very important for both the general public and future staff. Conversations in chat will become lost, either due to searchability, or loss of access (for instance, consider our ability to consistently find conversations in IRC or pre-staffcord). The requirement that O5 be the final destination was first created a long time ago, and I think most everyone would agree with it; the structure of O5 lends itself to being ideal in this way. On the other end, coordinating clean-up for an active vandalizing user is a staff chat matter (provided that the disciplinary records make their way onto O5 as they are supposed to), and attempting to coordinate it wholly through O5 would be extremely slow, or effectively require one person to perform all the work themselves.

So let's move onto more of the meat of the issue here, which is policy discussion. The main thing that we care about here is where discussions should be located, and my answer is that it depends on what state it's in.

What do I mean by this? Well first, one important thing to remember is that our staff structure is still recovering from the adcap era. During this time, a strict hierarchy formed, where adcap (and sometimes starting higher at the admin-only level) produced policy, got buy-in from other members there, passed it down to staff as a whole, and then it only went on O5 when its passage was assured, effectively being a formality. This is bad for many reasons, one of which is that it makes O5 less materially transparent and more symbolic, something alluded to by other commenters here.

How was policy intended to work? One counter-argument I've heard from people who supported the adcap model is that allowing "regular" staffers to drive policy is bad because they could do harmful things, or could lack knowledge or resources necessary for their ideas. Now this is a rather cynical argument seeing that the adcap structure was designed to hide away and restrict access to knowledge and relevant staff resources depending on your location on the totem pole, but it touches on an important point: staff need resources to make effective policy.

I'm sure you've heard Moose talk about admins needing to primarily do policy, but I'll take a bit to explain my understanding of this. Rather than thinking "administrator" in our modern sense of "high-ranking staff member with executive power", think of it as "policy expert". Staffers who wished to develop policy were required to consult with admin contacts to ensure any relevant contingencies, issues or harms were identified and accounted for.

In the adcap era, those in power gatekept policies, providing a chain of approvals that had to be met (allowing a high-positioned staffer who personally didn't like a certain idea to effectively veto it, even if the policy would've passed a full staff vote just fine). This is very different from policy consultation. Policy consultation is a requirement that the staff member has done their homework, nothing more. I may personally dislike a policy proposal, but if a staff member needs to consult with me as part of doing their due diligence, it is my duty to help them regardless, I do not exercise a veto.

To me, this is the bar that needs to be met before policy discussions go on O5. Not that they're perfect, shiny, finished products awaiting a rubber stamp, but that basic due-diligence has been performed.

Now addressing the idea that we should allow people to post "bad" policy. Why shouldn't we allow off-the-cuff, quickdraw policy threads on O5? Again, I am not endorsing a ban on making mistakes, or requiring that all policies be essentially perfect before going up, but we need to remember that harm can come if basic due diligence has not been applied. This may be a controversial example, but I'm going to discuss the "Celebrating Diversity" thread. This thread floated the idea of being able to manually block translations from the interwiki based on content (notably the inclusion of non-diegetic pride elements). Now while nobody on EN staff, whether arguing for or against the policy, believed that this should apply against branches primarily located in countries where LGBT imagery is criminalized, this was never actually stated in the thread itself, and when it was clarified, it was in SCPD, which is not visible from O5. This caused a number of INT members in those countries to be very distressed and worried for their material safety, which is something that was completely avoidable with proper diligence during posting. The same policy could have been proposed without causing any members of our community to be panicked or worried like this. (This is an example, I fully understand that the policy consultation infrastructure is not in place like it was a decade ago; this is something that clearly needs to be fixed as part of our charter rework project).

To clarify, I am not opposed to early-stage policy drafts on O5, or posting proposals which get panned, and I am certainly not expecting that no mistakes will be made. But I think that throughout the conversation in this thread, there has been debate over exactly where the line should be drawn between chat and O5 and this is it. Nobody is arguing for an extreme of 100% chat 0% O5 or 0% chat 100% O5, but this means we need to understand where exactly this dividing line is. This site came up with a solution to this a long time ago, and while there are no doubts that we can and should make improvements on past ideas (and carefully discarding bad ones after analyzing what exactly makes them not work), I feel that this basic differentiation is crucial.

To come back to this thread, what are our next steps? I think we are largely in agreement that aspects of how we use staff chat needs to change. Discarding this particular proposal, what problems do people have with how staffcord works and conducts itself? For those identified problems, what seem to be common factors or underlying causes that we can address? I've laid out what I think is a clear indicator line between "can be on O5" / "should not be on O5 yet", but I would also like to hear others discuss this boundary and what harms I've missed, or modifications to our understanding of this line to best make use of these two platforms here.

There was some discussion of a loose Discord moderation team once upon a time. Not in a strict Staff Team sense, but a loose handful of people that would be mutually-agreed upon to step in and say "hey, this has progressed far enough, it's time to stop/move to 05". I think that would probably be more preferable.

Just a note this was a mechanism that I originally was a vocal supporter of, but was shot down by the same folks who are currently arguing against this method. I have more thoughts and things to point out but I'm running on 4.5 hours of sleep, and don't want to make a fool out of myself on 05 which is visible to everyone in public, which I will be discussing later and how this has lead to a derivation in our approach to policy discussion/staff culture in discussions.

1. What is currently stopping people from posting discussions to O5 in the matter that you want here? It is mentioned as a cultural thing, but if people start actually posting in this matter that shifts the culture, does it not? … So again I ask, what is stopping you from using O5 in that matter?

Momentum, I guess? I should take a moment to acknowledge and thank you that this conversation is on O5. That's much appreciated, especially given that I spent a couple minutes rambling about this in discord the other day rather than post here, initially! :)

A lot of the people making the claim above are some of the biggest contributors to the #staff-discussion channel by volume. Which is a bit of a weird juxtaposition of being self-aware of a problem and having a plan to fix it that currently has no real blockade to doing so, but then not pulling the trigger.

Some of the people here are certainly Big Discussers, but it's a two way street, and a bunch of the other Big Discussers haven't been able to post on this thread yet! In either case, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma. Both parties need to agree to move to 05, else one person exits the conversation prematurely and the other "wins".

2. A few people have thrown about requests to enforce discussion being on O5. My question here is a) who would be the one to enforce this, and b) what would that enforcement look like?

There was some discussion of a loose Discord moderation team once upon a time. Not in a strict Staff Team sense, but a loose handful of people that would be mutually-agreed upon to step in and say "hey, this has progressed far enough, it's time to stop/move to 05". I think that would probably be more preferable.

2. A few people have thrown about requests to enforce discussion being on O5. My question here is a) who would be the one to enforce this, and b) what would that enforcement look like?

Wait I just did this one… In either case, I'm going to turn this around on you, if that's ok. What if we start meandering randomly, taking tangents, and otherwise continuing our current problematic Discord behaviour in a thread after the passage of this proposal? How do we enforce moving to a new thread, or staying on topic, or moving to 05?

What is currently stopping people from posting discussions to O5 in the matter that you want here?

I’m going to go about this two ways. Why don’t I create every issue as an 05 thread personally? Because, as a staff body (myself included!), we are impressively bad at interacting on this site with anything except finished policy. Threads meander and Peter out like the vice captaincy or diversity one, with conversation dragged back to staff discussions or kept to massive walls of text. I don’t personally bring my discussions here because they will not be engaged as effectively as a result of how we currently act on this site (everything has to be perfect and final, see Alexander below or my earlier responses for elaboration).

On the other hand - I still discuss a lot in staff-discussions because that’s where others start conversations. This can’t just be a ‘well let’s just start doing it because this isn’t something that needs policy’ thing, otherwise it’ll never catch on while some staffers try and fail to bring discussion here due to how people are used to interacting with this site. A shift to 05 has to be a concentrated, staffwide effort to succeed, not just a few staff trailblazers leading the way and hoping people will follow.

The point from both of these is that this isn’t just something a staffer can just start doing without torpedoing their own topic. 05 is a much cleaner solution to the issue of staff-discussion, but it also requires far more work and active improvement from members of staff than just changing some thread permissions. Staffchat changes wouldn’t be that actively harmful, but, like many above have said, why solve 25% of an issue when we could solve it all?

1. What is currently stopping people from posting discussions to O5 in the matter that you want here? It is mentioned as a cultural thing, but if people start actually posting in this matter that shifts the culture, does it not?

Technically - nothing. Hell, many of the people who commented on moving discussions to O5 are the ones posting stuff to 05command when relevant.

The "roadblock" to just putting everything on 05 comes from other staffers who act as if anything posted to 05 has to be a fully thought out, bulletproof, can-have-no-wrongs final statement, leading to less people doing so and discussion becoming less meaningful. Hell, sometimes people warn others before posting stuff on 05, leading to the discussion happening in staffchat and never on 05 proper.

My question here is a) who would be the one to enforce this, and b) what would that enforcement look like?

Honestly, my idea was just staffers calling out other staffers if they try to start a massive conversation that isn't sensitive in staffchat.

Like, we need to stop viewing 05 as being this "only final things go here" location, and letting people post bad things in 05. People should be allowed to fuck up, be wrong, make mistakes, and get called out on it. Atleast this way we can actually have a long list of grievances and actual discussion when something is proposed rather than just a series of lukewarm "support"s.

Proposal: delete the #staff-discussion channel entirely, forcing any policy discussion to happen here on 05 /j

Now, I put the /j at the end there because I'm not seriously suggesting this, but in staffcord throwing out a crazy suggestion as a "joke" feels somehow more… acceptable? than doing so here on 05. I don't really know how to articulate this, but spitballing and floating absurd ideas on 05 seems like it carries some kind of unspoken judgement in a way that isn't as present as staffcord.

Right, so there does seem to be a trend here among the responses that are various flavors of the cry "Do more on O5"

This brings me to the following questions:

1. What is currently stopping people from posting discussions to O5 in the matter that you want here? It is mentioned as a cultural thing, but if people start actually posting in this matter that shifts the culture, does it not? A lot of the people making the claim above are some of the biggest contributors to the #staff-discussion channel by volume. Which is a bit of a weird juxtaposition of being self-aware of a problem and having a plan to fix it that currently has no real blockade to doing so, but then not pulling the trigger. So again I ask, what is stopping you from using O5 in that matter?

2. A few people have thrown about requests to enforce discussion being on O5. My question here is a) who would be the one to enforce this, and b) what would that enforcement look like?

I'm not trying to gotcha anyone with these, I'm legit trying to pick your brains here.

A relatively minor question or clarification?

That would go in #staff-questions, no?

I suppose I'm seeing this as making Staff-Discussion into a hub for discussions, like an elevator that brings you to that floor for that topic, rather than a Roman Senate floor where people can speak up if needed.

So, 05Command. Like we're doing right now. You want staff-discussion to become 05command.

The main usefulness of staffchat is how fast paced and easy to use it is. The fact that we're misusing the chat doesn't mean we need to redesign it from top to bottom, it means we need to stop misusing it. As Reimann said, and as the majority of people in this thread are saying - this just ends up replacing 05 without actually solving the issue of massive, unreadable conversations in chat.

To quote Rounder: "I just think it would solve like 25% of the issue very well and then we would sit on our hands believing we solved all of it, and/or that it would make subsequent efforts to solve the rest harder."

In the current #staff-discussion setup, most of the time these big sagas have one or two people begging for a thread or an 05. They are roundly ignored, and this is genuinely a problem. What tools does this proposal offer to stop the exact same behaviour (long, confusing and off-topic sagas that are not moved to 05/thread) from happening in a thread?

My instinct is that the conversations can be read more cohesively with one topic per thread. You can have multiple threads up at a time - As it is, someone who disappears for three days due to travel or work or illness or something can come back, take a look at the new Discussion Threads[tm], and skim through the ones they're not directly relevant to while doing a deeper read on the ones they are.

As opposed to coming onto the server and seeing 200-400 new posts, and having to skim through discussions to see if something they should know about is in there.

If we can't convince people to use threads as it is, so how will this proposal be implemented in order to ensure that threads stay on-topic?

My thinking is that if there is not a real option to have a long discussion in the main discussion chat (as it'd be converted to slowmode//threads) it would help spur a transition to more focus on threads. And if a thread is dedicated to Recap review April 2022 or Accounts For People's Pets Proposal or Insert Arcane Tech Topic, it's much more likely to actually stay on rails as the option to meander is restricted.

If a thread gets XBOX HUEG due to a heated argument, that's fine. The argument and discussion are still valid, just specifically isolated to that thread. Arguments themselves aren't a *bad* thing - they're inevitable as we are each disparate consciousnesses and we don't always agree. The primary issue I have (and I'm fairly sure the sentiment is shared across staff) is that Staff-Discussion specifically becomes bogged down, and still needs to handle *everyones* topics to some extent.

I suppose I'm seeing this as making Staff-Discussion into a hub for discussions, like an elevator that brings you to that floor for that topic, rather than a Roman Senate floor where people can speak up if needed.

This means lower staff don't need to get permission to announce a new O5 discussions in #staff-announcements, while also encouraging staff to shift conversations to O5 Command.

I guess, in effect, does this replace the concept of a general staff discussion area with the mandate to make threads for each individual topic?

I've deleted and rewritten this more times than I'll ever be willing to admit. This is why I prefer chats over forums.

This is an example of our unhealthy and unintended relationship with 05. There’s this idea that anything you post here has to be final, ‘correct’ and a wall of text which utterly impedes any sort of actual policy discussion beyond ‘support’ or a 10000 word essay against that goes back and forth in exhausting walls of arguing that dissuades everyone but those directly involved from taking part. This is what’s led to staffchat being such a mess, and resolving the cultural and 05 expectations side of things would do wonders for it without a restrictive slowmode

The issue that the "nay" camp has (or at least the issue I have, I will let other naysayers speak for themselves!) is feeling that this proposal doesn't really… fix the problem. It mandates threads by locking the main discussion channel.

In the current #staff-discussion setup, most of the time these big sagas have one or two people begging for a thread or an 05. They are roundly ignored, and this is genuinely a problem. What tools does this proposal offer to stop the exact same behaviour (long, confusing and off-topic sagas that are not moved to 05/thread) from happening in a thread?

I worry that this will simply move the big arguments off the main discussion and into the thread, which will become as difficult and confusing to read as main chat. Especially if people get off topic in the thread! We have real issues with getting off topic in the main discussion. This could be alleviated by making threads, but it isn't right now. If we can't convince people to use threads as it is, so how will this proposal be implemented in order to ensure that threads stay on-topic?

The main problem I can see with this is discussion inside a thread evolving to a different discussion, which should then be moved to a different thread, but isn't, because people are currently talking in one thread. From what I've seen moving the discussion from one channel (or thread in this case) to another happens almost as little as moving discussion to O5 (where the hurdle is a bit bigger).

By relegating every working topic in its own thread, people who are relevant to that topic can opt in and read a clear segment of discussion relevant to that topic, rather than have to jump through literal hours of backlog if they happened to come in late. I have difficulty keeping up with anything, and I'm 1. unemployed so I don't have a ton of IRL responsibilities getting in my way to actually read backlog.

I do not understand why can empathize with why compartmentalized and organized conversation is seeing so much push back. On page 1 Limeyy said "instead we’ll just be compartmentalizing the next 75k". *This is a fair critique, but I disagree with it.*

This is a good thing. Instead of a big pile of discussion every day we put everything in its own box. You can at the very least still take a quick look in a thread//have one unarchived to easily get back to what was previously discussed. It stays there forever, and can be brought back out again by people with the right perms. As it is right now you need to searchbar variants of specific phrases and terms to find A post from a discussion, and even then there's an enormous risk of missing earlier and later context separated by hours or even days.

I fully and completely support.

EDIT: Edited for a bit more patience, sorry for the edge in my text.

We did it, Patrick! We saved #staff-discussion!
[O5 burning in background]

So we want to change the main staff-discussion channel to… a listing of threads people can drop their thoughts in as needed or desired? Man, I wish we had something like that already…

This is just an effort to emulate the functions of O5 on Discord, because people aren't willing to actually take the issues to O5 because Reasons. It's better to encourage or put in place measures to make people do that instead of these kind of half-measures that address the symptoms of the underlying cause without actually treating the underlying cause. That cause being that our treatment and, in my opinion, misuse of the relative-blackbox of Staffcord has made one of the core functions of O5 (open discussion with a permanent record) utterly obsolete. Doing this would be the final nail in that coffin; the only things getting posted to O5 would be already-agreed-upon policy and their voting threads.

That said, I'm not gonna pretend that changing staff-discussion to a thread listing would be universally bad, or was made from incompetence or malice; I just think it would solve like 25% of the issue very well and then we would sit on our hands believing we solved all of it, and/or that it would make subsequent efforts to solve the rest harder. The proposal just doesn't solve the issues that it wants to solve; it just organizes the issues much more neatly. Agreeing with Riemann and Limeyy; you can't policy out of a cultural issue. There's really no solution to do other than pushing for stuff to be on O5 and to actually listen when people make that push.

I would not be opposed to a slowmode, but not as it's currently described. A short slowmode, like 30 seconds, 1 minute… during discussions (so people would take the time to read things and not typing responses in the heat of the moment, provoking misunderstandings) could be a more interesting solution. There's some Discords I saw with a slowmode on certain chans, "forcing" people to take more time to read what is written and type more constructive responses. My sentences look a bit clumsy, but I think you get my point.

Don't have a strong opinion on anything that concerns O5, because I'm not as passionate/knowledgeable on the subject as others are, but someone (I think it's Limeyy) proposed a discussion in order to re-evaluate the nature of O5 Command and it can be an interesting thing that I would strongly support, even if it's just as a discussion.

I am… ambivalent, I think. Organising stuff in threads does make it easier to follow certain topics, so we should use them more (I am one of the few people who say not everything should be on 05 - sometimes the fast-paced nature of a chat can make some discussions progress faster than having them on a forum, where repeated replies can get really annoying, even with better visibility than on discord - but we really should use threads more often). Forcing everything to be in a thread is counterproductive, though. People will either just move to #staff-questions, cluttering that one up, and let #staff-discussion die, or they'll make a thread for every minor thing, which will make specific things more difficult to find and cause an upscroll of threads. Or have to catch up with multiple threads that are just as long as the discussions we've had so far, which isn't much better.

A middle ground would be better imo. Heavily encourage putting more complex discussions in their own threads and on 05, but don't have an absurd slowmode that forces small discussions to another channel or in a mostly pointless thread. Also what greebo said about off-topic/casual stuff. I'll personally move all my casual remarks to the appropriate channel, and pull others with me if the main discussion is getting too off-topic.

Please do not do this. This further blurs the line between what belongs on 05command and what belongs within a staff blackbox that gets opened up (ostensibly) once a month. If conversations are to be enacted in a slow, methodical manner, constantly on-topic and without recourse for small issues that really don’t deserve an entire thread, they should occur on 05command. Should these discussions take place in #staff-discussion, they will become public at the end of the month – at the expense of additional effort on Recap Team’s behalf.

I see no benefit in enforcing a slower discussion speed on the side of staff communication that is best suited for fast-paced, issue-specific discussion. The problems you identify are:

#staff-discussion is a dense monolith

How does turning the chat into a log of a wide span of topics, where individual messages are tucked away even further for someone wishing to update themselves on a specific issue, solve this purported density issue?

#staff-discussion is difficult to keep up with for the individual staff member

This is somewhat true: if an individual staff member wishes to keep up with everything going on, their only hope is to read through all discussion that occurs within the chat. I do not see division of discussion into threads as solving this issue. I see the resolution of this issue in encouraging the use of 05command for a wider range of discussions, encouraging an atmosphere where staffers feel comfortable asking for a quick catch-up (dare I say, a recap?) in a separate channel, and encouraging conversation to stay on-topic.

topics blend into one another in #staff-discussion

I do not see this as an issue. Sure, if you want to frame chat as a monolith where everything must be understood, I can appreciate why this blending might feel inopportune. However, given that we are a staff body that performs a number of different roles in the SCP community, I don’t particularly see how individuals can be made entirely separate from one another. What happens in one discussion will be related to what happens in the next, whether the two issues are directly related or not. The creation of multiple threads only serves to bolster the difficulty of identifying the links that are naturally present between issues that crop up for the same community on the same platform, with the same central focus.

the most random of discussion ends up in #staff-discussion

Again, I would stress that this would be better solved by cracking down a little on off-topic chatter. I’m not against it existing – people are human and it can sometimes be hard to draw a direct line between what is and what isn’t relevant – but I’m certainly in favour of people being more aware of when they should move to #casual-chatter, or perhaps any of the other social spaces that exist in- and outside of the SCP Community.

In summary, I feel this proposed solution to a cluttered staffchat will only serve to exacerbate the worst problems plaguing communication in the discord server. I recommend other solutions, such as strongly encouraging the use of 05command, encouraging a staff atmosphere where asking for a recap (away from the ongoing discussion) is more standard, and cracking down on off-topic chatter.

To solve this issue, we should instead re-examine our relationship with 05command. Right now the vibe is that 05command needs to have finished proposals on it, and any attempts to do otherwise (See: what is a vice captain? And the celebrating diversity discussion) have petered out as the conversation stalls and moves elsewhere as staff aren’t used to having a more back and forth discussion on the forums. We need more discussion to happen here before the drafting phase, somewhere that is easy to sort, archive and easy for all members of staff to find to solve the issue of policy moving too fast or being too difficult to dive into, not arbitrary restrictions in a chat that won’t change content, just presentation following this change.

I see this being a drastic, if reasonable change, since we do go off-topic for a while before having to backscroll a not-insignificant amount just to catch back up. My only concern is how Recap interacts with this change.

EDIT: I do think we should use threads more, e.g. it being acceptable practice for anyone to make a thread for a specific discussion and the discussion being expected to move there, but with this proposal I'm picturing staff-discussion being full of 1-2 post threads with unhelpful titles that make it even more difficult to navigate. Maybe I'm being too pessimistic and we should just try it out though.

I'm against. This feels like it won't actually solve the issue proposed and will just change how it looks.

I can't say I'm a fan of this proposal. Obviously no one is going to deny that there's an information volume issue and we should be doing more things on 05, etc etc.

Lucio's first point seems like the most important - if threads cannot inherit separate permissions from the parent, then this is dead in the water. I am learning so much today!

But moreover, this is a cultural issue, not a policy one. I feel this goal would be better achieved by attempting to be more consistent in our movements to 05 - I'm here after all because I was (rightfully!) yelled at to stop rambling in discord and start posting on 05. The process works! Kinda. I think some amount of normalising 05 forums would go much further than artificially shutting down discussion. I admit this is easier said than done, obviously. I feel like we're always waiting for someone higher up to make the post, so no individual person ever does, and we keep going on in Discord.

As a minor aside, I'm uncomfortable with the usage of slow-mode or mutes in our current discord setup. The Discord Admin role circumvents slowmode, and that's really easy to forget. This is a problem when someone with that role is an active participant and might understandably forget that they can talk unrestricted (which would lead to other participants being stunlocked by slowmode! O: ). It's happened in the past, and I worry it might happen more frequently with the passage of this.

As part of this Policy Overhaul process, a major issue with staffcord that has come to our attention is the state of staff-discussion. To be blunt, this channel has become a dense monolith and nearly impossible to keep up with without great expense of time and energy on the part of an individual staff member. Additionally, topics blend into one another and the most random of discussion ends up there to exacerbate the problem. As such, the following proposal is being made:

• #staff-discussion is set to a highly-throttled slow mode. The only posts allowed in the channel are the start of new threads.
• Allother discussions must be inside a thread, even simple affirmatives (e.g. “sure”, “go ahead”). This way the channel is an easy-to-navigate hub of discussion topics, rather than a stream of continuous thought. Discussion is thus compartmentalized into individual threads allowing for easy separation of topic, as well as staff to sort ongoing discussion by relevance.

Mainsite Mirror: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-14564021/discussion-staffcord-staff-discussion-overhaul