SMD - Management & moderation changes

[schema]

Greetings,

In April of 2014, StarMade Dock was launched as a replacement for the star-made.org forums, as a community run official forum separate from the StarMade team (what would eventually become Schine).

DukeofRealms in September of last year stepped down from the day to day moderation and administration of SMD, and since then we’ve been in the process of moving the official StarMade forums back to Schine.

The first step in this process is taking control over the management side of SMD. Since October we’ve been in the process of writing new rules, guidelines, moderation documentation, mod tool tutorials and modifying the forum software backend of SMD. We’ve also started a new team of moderators who we’ve interviewed and worked with for the past few months to take over after the transition has been completed.

Today we (Schine) are ready to manage the front-end of SMD. We’re implementing our new Terms of Service and Rules and moderation team with new moderation procedures. Schine has created these rules and moderation procedures with the assistance of some of our former staff members and feedback from our community. We completely back our moderation team in their efforts to uphold our Terms of Service and Rules as well as to follow the moderation procedures we’ve created for them.

Schine will be overseeing moderation over SMD to ensure we're achieving what we've set out.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be implementing new moderation procedures and systems as well as moving SMD over to new servers. SMD is going to be locked (read-only mode) until: February 3rd 2018, 19:30 UTC


Notification of removal:

• We've removed chat from SMD, at this point, temporarily. We currently do not have the staff to moderate chat. For a chat like replacement, join one of the community run Discords or our un-moderated IRC channel #starmade on Esper.
• We're cancelling the mentor program, we feel it's an idea that could work very well, but lacks the execution to achieve the listed goal. We may re-visit this one and the Council later down the line.
• (Scheduled to be removed) - Ratings, revert back to default like system.

Updated Terms of Service and Rules: Terms of Service and Rules | StarMade Dock

What to expect from moderation (public moderation procedures explanation): What to expect from moderation

Transitionary Period:

• All content before new rules will still be held accountable to the old rules, warnings appropriate to old rules may be issued (and if directly exchangeable, will be applied under new rules).
• All content before new rules will receive warnings under the new rules. However, no points will be issued, and no moderation action will be taken on those that post them. These 0 point warnings will not count towards the tier system and will not affect the user. They exist to notify the poster that this material is no longer acceptable under the Terms of Service and Rules. Additionally, we no longer delete most rule violating content (Tier II and below). Instead, a notice is displayed on the content stating the rule it breaks (or broke). Because of this, warnings are also needed for old content to display this notice.

Most of you have probably already seen them around, but our new team consists of:

alterintel
Groovrider
JKVocalist
Stike7g5

All team members are currently in a training/trial phase, where we’ll be teaching them the new procedures we’ve implemented. Once training phase has been completed about 1-2 months, we’ll be deciding who to push through to a full moderator position.

We’re still looking for people to join our training program, so if you’re interested and think you would be suitable to moderate SMD, head over to Want to be a moderator? and apply.


~ The Schine Team