Since this is a proposed change to the full function of the site, it's being opened to all members of staff for open discussion. If there are significant objections to any part of this proposed change, none of the changes will be implemented, and I'll go back to the drawing board for a while.
Junior Staff
Junior Staff will no longer go through the process of voting, selection, and vetting that they currently do. Junior Staff will instead be appointed at-will by Team Captains when they feel they need new members of the team. The team captain assumes responsibility to that user, and can remove them from their team (and staff) at will.
While a member of this team (or teams, if the user wants to try and become part of more than one), the Junior Staff member will be focused on the duties and responsibilities of that team. Therefore, Junior Staff will not have the normal operational staff abilities to call stops or vote on deletion votes. Instead, they'll be entirely centered on meeting the goals of their team.
Every four months, anyone who has been Junior Staff for at least two months will have the option of being put up for promotion. During this time, the Team Captain will be asked to provide evidence of the user's activity and answer one to two questions about the user. This information will be included in a staff-wide vote to promote them. All this information will be collected by whichever staff member is working on promotions and put into a thread with the normal voting form.
Some notes: Disciplinary and Harassment will only be promoting internally. Someone can't come in and become part of those teams automatically, as both of them wield a certain amount of power over users. People wishing to become part of those teams have to stick it out with someone else first. Reserve, as usual, is a restricted team for people who are still active and want to help, but don't necessarily have the time to devote to a specific team.
Junior Staff would be given O5 access for the purpose of team discussions, and while they could weigh in on staff discussion, they will have no voting power until becoming Operational Staff.
Junior staff are not being invited to Staff Chat until they've proven themselves capable and are promoted to Operational Staff. This is part of a long term initiative to change the way Staff Chat functions. (People who are currently Junior Staff and active on a team are welcome to stay.) This is one of the reasons that the teams have been required to create and man a legitimate chatroom.
Deletions
Because we'll be losing a few handy staff we normally gain, we're going to be changing and streamlining the deletions procedure. From this point forward, only three votes will be required to delete something as part of the normal procedure.
Additionally, all pages on the site will receive a 24-hour stay of execution when the deletion vote starts. This is being done to encourage rewrites and salvage older material that might still have some value. As it currently stands, older pages can easily vanish over the course of minutes. This would give them a new window in which they might be kept around in some form.
Currently, for the sake of simplifying the process, there are several options for how to handle pages that drop fast within their first 24 hours. These are as follows:
- Continue to offer the normal, 24 hour safety period until at -25 and allow early deletion votes as normal. (Current system).
- Continue to offer the normal, 24 hour safety period until at -25 and allow early deletion votes as normal, but also give the 24 grace period from the time of the deletion vote. (Current system + new system)
- Remove the 24 hour safety period, change the threshold to -10 for all pages, and grant the new 24 grace period which all pages get. (Just our new system.)
I prefer the third option, since the pages will actually have more time to be on the site than our current method without making them stick around unnecessarily long. It would also go a long way toward standardizing our treatment of all pages on the site.
Additionally, plagiarized (direct copy/paste, not 'this feels a lot like….') work, trolls, failed self-deletions, deletions via author request, and all other deletion issues would require only one witness and a moderator/admin to perform the deletion. Evidence of wrong doing should, as normal, be posted to O5. We have a very nice collection of ASCII art, and I'd like to see it preserved.
Other Changes
Admin and Mod positions would continue to be appointed as they currently are, though admin and mod promotion votes can be performed outside of the normal structure of the junior staff promotion.
Team members are required to be active in their team chats. If someone concerns your team and not staff overall, discuss it internally and work out what you want before bringing it to Staff Chat or O5.
This conversation is staying open for 72 hours to get feedback from people about the upcoming changes.
Edit: Typos and clarifications.
Admin edit: Removed timer.
"WELL FOUNDATION. YOU MADE IT SO EASY. SO VERY VERY EASY." - dimensionpotato
(account deleted)