Hire Un-Paid Staff (Helpers/Mods)

[Cleora]

A lot of staff (Scam resolver,admins) have been resigning for whatever reason. It went from 1 person resigning a couple months (3-7) to 2 people resigning less then every couple of months (4-9) at least that's what it seems like.

My suggestion is to hire long-term, trusted members of the community to help admins, scam resolver, etc. LITERALLY anything that can help scam reports, support tickets and post resources faster/finished faster tickets and reports faster with the same quality. Staff roles like: Helpers, Moderators, Chat Mods.

Should allow lower staff to do the following:
-See which support tickets/scam reports need support the most (Such as ones months in progress, dox/harassment/stalking reports, etc) and allow such staff to categorize it better
-Warn/mute/kick people from the public chat/salt box when: being toxic, double-post advertising (or posts within 20mins) things like this can be done by any staff member
-Allowing mods/helpers to disable/lock threads that are in the wrong category, or are not allowed/offensive and wait for a higher-up staff member to either confirm the lock, or delete the thread

I'm sure there are people on the MCM community that are trusted, well liked, and are on here daily that would be willing to part-time staff on here for a small price, or do volunteer work for a special badge, achievement, rank, special name color, or something.

 

[Kram]

The staff team is looking for new members on a regular basis, epecially members who have been deemed trustworthy and have a long standing positive reputation on the site. Where they find some of these old 2015 users that are still active yet unknown, to me and, to most people is beyond me though.

The current role used for entry is what I have to disagree with. Not everyone wants to moderate chat - this is the entry role - including myself. I have declined a position in the past as I don't use the chat box much and personally don't see a purpose to it outside of people causing a ruckus by being toxic (this is primarily what I see when looking at it and I check the site very frequently) and advertising. That in combination of being too busy with classes to the extent that moderating chat would become a chore; not something I was interested in doing for long periods of time. If the entry position was just about anything else, primarily something I would be more interested in such as resource moderation, I might have been a bit more interested. An entry role is needed but chat mod isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Chat Moderator is just the name of the role but that doesn’t mean they only moderate chat. Chat mods also have to do tickets, a fairly big part of their role. Chat ends up being, in my opinion, the perfect place to start as a staff member. You have to answer people’s questions, issue various different punishments for a variety of rules, and of course understand how to communicate with others and deal with appeals. Chat is also a very low risk part of the site, new staff members who we don’t know their capabilities yet are unable to do that much wrong, and if they do, it’s very easily remedied. Chat mods are indeed the only staff members that are required to moderate chat, but you end up learning a lot more about how to be a staff member/moderator by being one. Resource moderator is one of the highest staff roles and with it, comes access to the whole resource system. Doing something wrong when moderating resources causes more serious problems to generally more people.

 

[Masons Monarch]

incredibly active member that was active.

A lot of staff (Scam resolver,admins) have been resigning for whatever reason. It went from 1 person resigning a couple months (3-7) to 2 people resigning less then every couple of months (4-9) at least that's what it seems like.

My suggestion is to hire long-term, trusted members of the community to help admins, scam resolver, etc. LITERALLY anything that can help scam reports, support tickets and post resources faster/finished faster tickets and reports faster with the same quality. Staff roles like: Helpers, Moderators, Chat Mods.

Should allow lower staff to do the following:
-See which support tickets/scam reports need support the most (Such as ones months in progress, dox/harassment/stalking reports, etc) and allow such staff to categorize it better
-Warn/mute/kick people from the public chat/salt box when: being toxic, double-post advertising (or posts within 20mins) things like this can be done by any staff member
-Allowing mods/helpers to disable/lock threads that are in the wrong category, or are not allowed/offensive and wait for a higher-up staff member to either confirm the lock, or delete the thread

I'm sure there are people on the MCM community that are trusted, well liked, and are on here daily that would be willing to part-time staff on here for a small price, or do volunteer work for a special badge, achievement, rank, special name color, or something.

I was once told that chat moderators on this site are frequently, well, have less backlog than other positions and thus have more time to do the things you describe in here as "odd jobs". Infact, from my understanding, what you are saying describes what a chatmod does for the most part.

What I have noticed is that for the most part, tasks that can be performed by a chat mod are done within 24 hours from making a ticket or any other request (atleast for me) due to the above reasons, hiring more people to do what is already done for the most part efficiently is not going to help.

Moderators are the ones that seem to have the largest backlog and I believe that they are "responsible" for the wait times that you describe in here. Unfortunately, I dont think moderators are fit to be hired in the way you are suggesting in this thread so I'm not sure that'd be very helpful.

Overall, I do not consider what you are suggesting to be a productive way to decrease the wait times that you speak of.

 

[Landon]

As Doge mentioned, the staff pay is almost negligible. People don’t accept promotions to make money, they do it to help the community. I don’t think pay is a factor that we should account for.

It’s obvious that MC-Market needs more moderating. Late 2018, early 2019, Scam Reports were months behind and reports took weeks to be resolved. Staff resigned, and Mick decided to implement Staff Applications, for the first time in MC-Market’s history.

A wave of new staff came, and a lot resigned. Process repeats: New staff, a lot resign.

I don’t think the issue is that they aren’t dedicated to the community. Or that they aren’t paid enough. I think the issue is the work flow of Staff currently.

I have no idea what it’s like behind the scenes, but if staff are continuously being promoted and resigning, there has to be a reason, more than “Personal issues in life.”

The community constantly gives the Staff crap (Albeit, some well-deserved?) But for the most part, the community is the reason the staff are resigning. No one wants to deal with constant criticism for doing their job (Hypocritical of me to say, I know, I’ve given my fair share of crap to some Staff members).

Overall, I think the best way to maintain a Staff team is to improve the work flow on the backend (Such as the new Ticket system), and stop giving the team such a hard time.

 

[Mick]

I don't want to repeat what everyone else has said on this thread, but everyone has had some really good points.

Essentially what's being suggested here is promoting more chat mods, which we're always trying to do. It is surprisingly difficult to find new staff members and have an internal vote that leads to a promotion, but we're almost always on the lookout for new staff and holding applications if necessary.

Denied, thanks for the suggestion