Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-26928286-20180715055812

This has been talked about for a long time, but we've never made a formal decision to end this. The voting system is incredibly flawed. I'd appreciate it if you read this entire thread, but I'm probably about to write an entire novel so it's fine to skim if you're short on time. Don't just write support, oppose, or neutral, it pretty much defeats the whole purpose of what I'm about to say. I want input on these ideas, I wanna have a good discussion about how we can fix this.

The voting system just isn't working anymore.

For one, this wiki has gone through some major changes in the last year. Staff used to be very corrupt. The staff channel on the server was just a cliquey "talk bad about other people" room. We actually kicked one of the moderators out of it this one time for telling his friends what people were saying about them. Basically staff had terrible judgement, and were too immature to make the final decisions on suggestions. But not anymore.

Eventually, we managed to stop all that. And now talking ill of people behind their backs can get you banned here. If a staff tried that at all, they'd be demoted very quickly. And now being staff means that you need to be mature, set a good example, get shit done, and try not to be biased in your decisions. Non-staff don't really have those kinds of responsibilities. And so, if we make all important decisions based on "support"s and "oppose"s it will probably be more biased rather than considering what is best for our wiki.

So I propose we have actual discussions about these votes. Not necessarily as threads, it could be anywhere, like on the discord. People would suggest ideas as either a thread here or in the Discord suggestions channel (where it's probably easier to talk anyway). We could discuss why it would or wouldn't work, agree on something, and then staff would make the final decision. It's more complex and allows us to find better solutions than just "yes this thread and everything in it will be a rule now" or "no nothing in this thread is good and also die". The staff decision would obviously have regard for what everyone else thinks. Like if people mostly agree an idea is bad, it wouldn't pass even if I, an admin, think it should.

When it's done, an announcement will be made about the new changes if it passes, and if not, a staff member will explain why it won't work in the same channel/thread/etc it's discussed in. We get server suggestions all the time, which seems to be the new way of doing things. And we don't just say "support" or "oppose", we do exactly as described in this thread. The last time we had a wiki suggestion was a month ago.

But what about staff applications? I've heard talk of a "trial" system for this. Basically, a person would tell an admin (like me hue hue hue) that they want to apply for staff. Or, maybe they would still make a thread for it, it just wouldn't exactly be a voting thread, but rather a discussion thread in case anyone wants to say something about it. Like if someone applies, they'd make an application thread, but it wouldn't be for people to formally vote, just voice their opinions.

Ever see anyone apply for rollback? Me neither, at least not in the last 5 months. And that one didn't pass. So we should make it a "Staff-in-Training" type of position, where the applicant is promoted for a week and they get to prove that they're right for the job. They wouldn't be immediately given moderator permissions, just rollback because in that case almost anyone could apply and just get the right to delete pages or block users or something and then they hijack the wiki and then everyone dies. I bet that all these changes would make more people apply for staff because god knows we don't have enough.

Also, Wikia eventually plans to replace forums with Discussions. If you don't know what that is, it's this. You can't highlight threads, meaning if you wanna participate in votes you'll have to actually go and manually check it all the time because you can't be notified. That would ruin votes because way fewer people would see the thread, meaning we wouldn't get enough people talking on it to determine the best solution. So the current voting system would be completely ruined if we don't change it now.

A couple more things: Voting threads are pretty dead now, nobody makes them and sometimes a perfectly good thread doesn't pass because not enough people even voted in the first place. Also it's not good to have every suggestion go through a week long process before it can be put into place. It's not good to need a thread for everything, some things need to be easier and faster to decide on. I used to have this issue where as an admin, if I said "make a thread" for any suggestion people would get pissed off at me because they felt as if I was ignoring them and forcing them to go through this kinda long process. But if I passed something without a thread, I would be called corrupt. So this would solve all these issues.

That's basically it. If this passes with 8 more supports than opposes (ugh), this will be the last thread of its kind to ever exist on the wiki. Please tell me why if you oppose, and if you have more ideas for how to make this better, also tell me! Thanks for reading all this if you actually took the time to do so. 