Staff From Other Wikis In Staff Discussions

[Agnaa]

@IdiosyncraticLawyer wanted me to bring this to a thread.

The text describing our Staff Discussion forum says:

Board activity is allowed for VS Battles wiki staff and highly trusted members only, unless stated otherwise. Derailing is heavily discouraged.

And our Discussion Rules say:

Only staff members and regular members staff have deemed highly trustworthy may participate in Staff Discussion threads unless an explicit exception is noted.

• Only staff members with evaluation rights can authorize regular members to participate in Staff Discussion threads. Thread Moderators are able to grant permission for a single post at a time, whereas administrators can give permission for up to three. Bureaucrats are the only staff members that are allowed to give indefinite posting rights for a particular staff thread. If a staff member with evaluation rights determines that a regular member has misused their granted privileges, these can be removed.
• It is important to note that only voluntarily retired staff members and members who've been accepted for a staff position in the past but dismissed the offer by choice, fall into the category of highly trustworthy. The majority of regular members who do not fall into the groups mentioned above are still in need of permission from staff members with evaluation rights.

I think the rules already indicate that such users are not automatically allowed to participate in staff discussions. I do not think we should change this since we do not vet the staff members of FCOC and JBW, and we cannot demote them. They could be completely unreasonable and derail our staff threads; we have no controls over that.

Idiosyncratic says the idea that they can is based on this post, made before we fleshed out the latter rule, where Phoenks asked if they could comment in staff-only threads, and Ant said:

I personally think that it seems fine, as you are still helping out community with important work.

I think there's no way to read this as precedent for all staff from FCOC/JBW being allowed, it was specifically targeted towards Phoenks' track record.

And with the later elaboration on what a "trustworthy member" is, an ad-hoc enshrining from Ant two years ago would no longer be valid.

I don't think there's anything that needs to be changed, but I think Lawyer wanted staff votes on this, so here ya go.

 

[IdiosyncraticLawyer]

I have no hard stance on this and will be okay with whatever other staff come to a consensus over.

 

[LephyrTheRevanchist]

And with the later elaboration on what a "trustworthy member" is, an ad-hoc enshrining from Ant two years ago would no longer be valid.

I don't think there's anything that needs to be changed

Yeah pretty much

 

[FinePoint]

I think that in general whether or not someone is staff in some other community should have zero bearing on how we treat them here.
That is to say, they should be treated like any other normal members and I don't see why this would be an exception.

Realistically, I think if someone is so generally reasonable and helpful that we don't foresee their input ever being entirely unwanted on a staff discussion that they should've probably already been offered a position, which would give them permission whether they rejected it or not.

 

[Phoenks]

Permission to comment here granted by Agnaa.

Currently, FCOC's standard is to just copy whatever VSBW decides for their wiki policies, standards, tiering system, etc to our wiki. We do this to maintain consistency between the sites for a couple of reasons: So that users who come here from VSBW are already well adjusted to the system; so that we don't have to try and completely outline our own standards from scratch (we don't have enough manpower for that); and because it's just frankly a lot easier and makes sense given we are "sister" sites that exist on the same forum board.

I bring this up to say that I feel like FCOC moderators should at least have the ability to speak on threads that have the potential to alter our site by extension depending on what's accepted.

I'm not saying we have to be counted as staff votes, but I do think being able to say something on those threads should be a granted permission given that factor.

I also don't think we'd every intentionally interrupt the flow of anything. I know when I comment on a thread I try to bring up something of genuine substance and actually go into depth on why I think what I do; as though I was evaluating it as a VSBW staff member. I'm pretty confident in my ability in that regard, especially given there are times where people outright seek me out to comment on their staff threads.

I'm also confident in our own staff members to put an equal amount of thought into posts on staff threads if they ever feel like sharing an opinion on something for the same reason.

I feel like VSBW should at least trust us to do that much, given we are already sharing a forum lol.

I can't exactly speak for Joke Battles though, given I'm pretty sure most of their standards are completely made up and they don't exactly follow any kind of format a lot of the time. Given they're meant to be making jokes and whatnot VSBW standards mean a lot less to JBW than it does to FCOC.

 

[Agnaa]

I kinda disagree with the foundation of Phoenks' post.

Our standards affect FCOC if they decide to keep in line with them. There are changes to our standards which FCOC decides not to adopt (i.e. requiring web-based series to have 1 million views).

On the other hand, our standards affect every single non-staff user of VSBW regardless.

While some FCOC staff members would have both of those effects compound, by using VSBW themselves, but I think the fact that they can easily ignore these things means they don't really need to weigh in at this point. As in, their site would continue functioning just fine, and it would be less of an inconvenience for them, than it would be for our ordinary users who have to revise verses in-line with our changes.

Ultimately, I don't see a good enough reason to switch from our ordinary protocol on this.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

I agree that simply being staff on our sister wikis shouldn't really justify them being allowed to partake in VSBW discussions without staff permission. I don't really moderate any of the sister platforms and various sister platform staff really do many things that would be considered actual moderating. And between our wikis, there are plenty of policies that are "Similar but different" but also standards that are vastly different. And just because someone is a good FC/OC staff or Joke Battles staff, does not necessary make them good VSBW staff candidates and vice versa. It does actually tend to happen quite often that someone who is considered valuable staff on our sister platforms to have basically the same levels of unreasonable habits or basically just as infamously unwilling to follow staff member prerequisites as various infamous VSBW staff who were basically demoted for good reason. It's also similar to how users getting banned from vsbw/forum doesn't necessarily mean they need to be banned from the sister platforms if they tend to behave just fine on those places but VSBW forums are where they tend to be rude to community and/or staff.

 

[Antvasima]

My comment was specifically targeted at Phoenks, yes.

Anyway, I agree with this.