Elo really should (needs to) bring back the volunteer program (at least for forums)
2 years ago
Illinois, USA
MasterOfMike
He/Him, They/Them
2 years ago

(Note: This is not a thread to bash on Elo or anyone involved with Elo or src personally, I do not personally condone such behavior) (Note 2: No, I am not using the support hub for this, that feels like a void to use)

Context: So for anyone who is not aware, prior to May of 2021, there was a volunteer program in place. This volunteer program, along other things, basically were the site moderators of src. This was sunset in May 2021 due to them hiring two paid site mods at the time, and not wanting to create "uneven compensation of site support".

The reason I choose to bring this up is simple - there is a very visible lack of moderation currently present in certain areas of src - especially with regards to forum moderation.

There has been many instances where the following is present on the forums, yet is not taken care of for an extreme period of time, despite the repeatedness of such actions:

  • Supporting an anti-vaccine stance
  • Spamming about some dumb shit while also using misinformation to justify said dumb shit
  • Spam creating accounts about other dumb shit (just see above) ...and more that would be utterly pointless to delve into.

The idea is this: If the volunteer program returned in some capacity, it would allow for more/better/quicker moderation (which would solve the majority of the issues mentioned above), it could allow for other moderation as well (depending on what Elo allowed), and would also allow site staff to focus on stuff involving more "direct" or "internal" site issues. (imo it would also give the site more "visible staff" if you will, but I digress)

Edited by the author 2 years ago
YUMmy_Bacon5, Amaz and 8 others like this
New South Wales, Australia

I also think we need more mods in different time zones because there are a ton of different bots appearing at different times

YUMmy_Bacon5, MinecraftGaming and 2 others like this

@Meta actually said that Support Hub is the only way to be 100% sure that the request is going to be seen, even though they don't answer, they do write that down

YUMmy_Bacon5 and Merl_ like this
Madrid, Spain

Idk if they closed the volunteer program do to possible problems since maybe there are laws that prevent them from having volunteers working or something like that. Still, there should be a way to improve the forum moderation like giving some people the ability to flag threads, which is something so simple that it shouldnt give problems

YUMmy_Bacon5 likes this

@Kkntucara People keep saying that there could be laws against it, but I don't see how that could be true. There's never been a shortage of large, for-profit websites with volunteer forum mods, such as Steam—which seems to have both paid & unpaid forum mods.

YUMmy_Bacon5, discranola and 2 others like this
French Southern Territories

Forum mods… what a dream

YUMmy_Bacon5, MinecraftGaming and 3 others like this