With the help of Sophos, we've reclaimed this chat, and established it as a "place for users to ask staff questions / discuss things with staff / bring up issues". This is, to steal a description from Troy, "an open staff chat that is just for staff issues."
This is open on an experimental basis, and all rules & structure may potentially change as we figure this out.
RULES
- Only questions / discussion with staff are allowed; general chat is kicked to 19.
- This is somewhat ambiguous, so we might find a better way of stating things. Currently the topic just says that excess general chat will be booted on staff discretion.
- Beyond that, #site19 rules apply.
- +R is not on, because, well, the only point of this chatroom is to talk to staff, and all staff have the power to kickban people in this room. If some moron or two comes in and starts blabbing when no staff are around, they're not disrupting chat because there's no chat to disrupt. Staff can temporarily put +R on later if necessary. (Or even permanently, if that's what we want to do.)
- We may also use this for more formal Q&A sessions in the future.
STRUCTURE
- I am founder, which means nothing except that I'm currently taking primary responsibility for this.
- All admins who are active on chat are co-owners/admins (&). This currently includes: DrMann, Bright, Clef, Drewbear, Photo, Troy, Waxx, and myself.
- All mods who are active on chat are operators (@). This currently includes: Pig_Catapult, Dexanote, Roget, Scantron, Light, and Zyn.
- All other senior staff, all inactive senior staff & mods (who are on chat), and all #site19 chat operators are half-operators (%). This currently includes: Dmatix, Echo, Burns, Eric_H, Jekeled, Soulless, Vezaz, Aelanna, Wogglebug, Kens, Xiao, Tox, Tuomey, Heiden, murphy_slaw, Bouncl, Nusquam, and FlameShirt.
- Sophos has +v as a thank you for helping this get set up (& approaching me with the offer of handing the old room over in the first place). (For those of you who are unfamiliar with IRC, +v doesn't bring with it any power; it just means you can say something if the channel is moderated.)
(Gotta be careful about hitting CTRL+S on everything. This posted too early.)
The Chat Guide summary is as follows:
#site17 - Chatroom just for chatting with, and asking questions of, and bringing up issues to the staff of the SCP Foundation. Does not allow excess general chitchat; otherwise, rules are the same as #site19. Owned by Foundation admins and run by all Foundation staff (including mods, senior staff, & 19 chat ops). Open on an experimental basis.
And finally… we already had a Mibbit thing set up with #site17 on a page called 'chat'. I've added that to the sidebar on the left under "Welcome Page", labeled "Chat With Staff", and added text to the page itself.
Admins have final say on this chat (and the current setup was the result of an agreement between a few admins — although I made a couple minor decisions like adding the previously existing Mibbit page to the sidebar), but anyone on O5 with an opinion can weigh in on the details or on how you think it should be run, so please feel free to do so.
Basically we just want to create more avenues for accessing staff, and this seems like one way of doing so. It won't cover everyone — it's been pointed out to me that IRC itself is a barrier for access — but it's a start, especially given that many of us are more active on IRC than elsewhere. And it's at least another way of having issues brought to our attention!