Wow. Talk about "a response", hahaha.
The moderator count is about the same as it has been, it is just that more recent global moderators appear to be more active. It is true that there is less negative user behavior and that the forum is less active. This led to global moderators with not much to do in terms of their authority. I have also wanted to improve development areas on the forum. Before I started hiring I asked the global moderators if they had some plans on how to make development better. A lot of those ideas coalesced around programming, engines, and tutorials.
Same as it's ever been? As far as I know, that was mainly because this site had more activity back then. And even then, the team wasn't bloated for what it's worth back then. Consider the amount of activity. Point being is, if you're going to be recruiting people for specialized attributes, they shouldn't need the power to govern the users too. It would be a different case if you had a team of 3-4 people. So now that you've tasked them with the "Moderator" status, they pretty much have to delegate some of their time towards moderating the users now, instead of focusing full time on assisting on more important matters. So that still doesn't solve the initial problem here. They're moderators, after all, its part of their job description.
I then removed some of the global moderators who were inactive or less able to help out (some of whom volunteered to having their status removed). Finally I added three global moderators who I have worked with in the past (Niek on the GM Minish Cap Engine, and Martijn dh with the Project of the Month and other stuff) and Xfixium (helped out initially with the GM Minish Cap Engine but more over has put out development stuff on the forum that has been useful to many people). I felt that adding them would help the development efforts of the existing global moderators and make a more cohesive team. As such the current size of the team is not correlated to activity levels because the development areas are to be cleaned up and expecting a small team to do that would be asking too much.
You know, it probably would've been better to just provide assistance to the Community Project rather than completely ignoring us and focusing on your own project. We needed more attention from the community just to function, but nothing ever happened. In fact, I don't even know why the Community Project is rightfully called that because of how it was just put off to the side and hidden away. For that, I am offended for the small group that I worked with. Project of the Month "could" in theory still work, but I would suggest modifying the idea. We're on the downlow with activity, so my suggestion would be to push out Project of a Month to a quarterly-type deal. i.e. ZFGC's Summer of Code, ZFGC's Winter of Sprite, etc, etc...
Secondly, why the GM Minish Cap Engine? I thought that was dead and buried. Who decided to revive that project? See where I'm going here? We already _had_ a community project. But whatever, I'm going to drop it because Jeod mentioned something in this topic that I actually agree with. (will touch base later on in this post)
Ideally I have been trying to downsize global moderation, and make it so that discussion for development stuff would happen in Feedback and that those who wanted to help out would pitch plans there and would be given global moderation authority until they were able to fulfill the intent of their plans. This would be similar to your idea of an election except that it would avoid people becoming global moderators and then not doing anything with their abilities after a period of time has gone by.
It would've been better to have dedicated moderators and a team of dedicated people assisting with the site, versus turning the moderation team into a monolithic beast. It's going to get ugly because the work queue will eventually be doubled for taking that approach. It may work for now, but maybe not later.
Wouldn't a better community project (other than a Zelda game) be a collective of tilesets and spritesheets optimized for all forms of programming? (GM, MMF, VB, C++...) Couple that with tutorials for how to use said optimizations and you've got a "ZFGC-Universal" developing style for each platform. I'd think that would attract people here more than a single community fan game. Look at TSR. It's got sheets but half aren't complete or optimized. What we ought to do is restore that "Graphics" tab and expand it to all styles. (NES, GBC, LTTP, MC) Then each group of tilesets or sprite sheets can link to a tutorial topic on how to use them in the platform the creator intended them for.
While I agree 100% with you Jeod, that's kind-of impossible without having a good content management system. See, TSR has a "good" CMS. ZFGC doesn't because the one they had got killed in fire. To be honest, I thought it was already ported to SMF2.. but if there's work needed on it, I'll be happy to provide assistance here. But yeah, this is a good idea.
I don't necessarily think that everyone who has an idea should be promoted to a global moderator. If somebody has an idea who isn't a global moderator, why not delegate the ideas to the staff? This is a huge flaw.
Because the current mindset is that "if I have an idea I need to be able to make decisions and change things in the site for it to work as I intended", which is really just a copout to creating a huge spreadsheet of what your idea is. People make drafts all the time in the programming world. There is no reason for this mindset to exist as long as the staff is capable of accomplishing the goals.
That mindset just means that they take credit for their work, and be part of a collective team. Doesn't mean that they absolutely have to watch over the users. I think its discouraging to new members to see so many Moderators running around. And downsizing the team won't hurt activity or promote trolling because if there were going to be trolls, they would be trolling regardless. They don't care how many moderators there are. They are in for the lulz, and that's that. As for activity, this will certainly be affected for many reasons. Just put yourself in the shoes of outsiders and what goes through their head when they see mostly moderators? Or when they go to make a post, how do you think they feel? Alright, one can argue that we've all been here for a reasonable amount of time, but the same thing applies to even people who have been here for years. If there were cops walking around your high school and the number of cops that were assigned at the school were two cops for every 4 students, how do you think the students would respond to that? The idea here is that there's wayy too much authority.
I am not saying that all of those who put forward ideas would get bumped up to being global moderators, but that those who needed global moderator abilities to do their ideas would get those abilities so that they could be helpful.
No, you are saying that they are. You said it yourself earlier in this thread when you brought up the new additions to the moderation team, that the team were to be made more "cohesive".
Authority figures aren't meant to be monolithic. I don't suppose you see project managers modeling 3D models and programming the games at Ubisoft, do you?
In response to the members part, there was the community project which could've fulfilled this purpose. But apparently that wasn't in your interests, the GM Minish Cap project was, and kept the community out of the loop, so again, that doesn't fulfill what your objective was. Can't utilize the talents of your userbase when you don't work with them.
Basically what I envision is a restored graphics tab in the site header. The page would be similar to what we used to have, except when a user submits an optimized image (To be reviewed by staff to keep things organized, maybe?) they need to enter tags. Say I submit an optimized Oracle of Ages Past overworld tileset I made for use in MMF2.
1. Upload image
2. Image Name
3. Check boxes (tags): Oracle of Ages, Multimedia Fusion 2
4. Description (tutorial on using the tileset)
After I have all these criteria I can submit the image to be reviewed by staff, and it would be approved if acceptable. As for the user end of things, let's say I want to find a Minish Cap Graveyard tileset for my fangame which I'm developing using Visual Basic. When I click the graphics tab, I can type "Minish Cap Graveyard" into the search bar and check the boxes for the game and platform I want it for: Minish Cap and Visual Basic.
The not-so-obvious dilemma here is that everyone has a different style when it comes to programming. The graveyard tilset could be optimized one way, while the Cloud Tops tileset is optimized a different way even though they're both generic MC Overworld tiles. This is why, after the first ten or so submissions to each platform, the staff should work with the 'veteran developers' to come up with a universally accepted "ZFGC-Style" of programming.
Note: Custom tilesets and sprites should generally not be accepted. The goal is to have an archive of ready-to-go "bare bones" pieces of a Zelda game. (Movement, swimming, jumping, canon items, etc)
I'm in agreement with the tie-in to the forums. It's bad, bad, bad, bad to fragment data, and it would make life easier in terms of managing the resources if it were tied into the forums.
The tab should be "resources", and resources split up into categories. As for tags, my suggestion here would be to have a set of pre-defined tags, and if the submitter were to add their own, have it require some kind of moderator approval, just to try and keep things on the tidy-side. Don't be discouraged about having a general-resources section to the site! All it takes is careful planning, and the amount of data that is there will actually be quite a breeze to browse through.
Getting back to the forum tie-in, why would the master topic have to be locked? I'm assuming you mean "master topic" as in, the topic that is created from the resource submission. That would make the whole tie-in some what pointless because the problem with fragmentation is still there. But now with the forum tie-in, here's a problem: how are you going to keep the CMS and the forum consistent? To be honest, the way the forum categories are setup now are somewhat inconsistent. Zelda Coding, Other Coding, then just Graphics? Why does graphics have a requests board, but not coding? See what I mean? It would be better to have the front-facing category be "Coding", then "tag" the topic either in the DB or in the title description. Why I suggest the consolidation goes back to the initial problem with activity. But things are different now, if the site is to come back.
My suggestion would be to extend the functionality of the forum software to properly support tagging. And.. as for setting up the categories, here's an idea:
1) Setup a main category titled "Resources": create 3 sections "Graphics, Audio, Code", then have a system for tagging the topics to clarify what the data in these sections are. Whether they're tutorials, or if they're assets(tile sheets, maps, engine code), there has to be a "clean" way of sorting them out. Of course what I'm asking is a modification to the forum software, but given that we're a "game development" site, you would expect that we would be capable of handling such a task. Now this could actually clean up the "Projects" section, too, as the same tagging system could be used to sort out what is zelda-specific and what isn't. But I would do away with the layout at that point and restructure it, rather than salvage it.
2) Under ZFGC.com, set up a section called "Resources", then have sub-categories titled "Documents" and "Assets". Now here's where the tagging functionality would kick in: have pre-defined tags that label the topic with "graphics", "audio", etc, etc.. and have a forum template display a "clean" way of going through these different tag clouds.
I recently offered the other staffmembers to create some topics to help find uploaded sprites. Think along the lines of the spritesresources with graphical overviews organised to style. There has yet to be any negative response to it so if that continues I still plan to try some thing in the near future. No harm done and at best it will greatly benefit various users.
The concept of uploading images like we had in the previous version (in my humble opinion) was not user friendly enough.
Yeah, it wasn't user-friendly enough because of two main reasons: the site and forum were two separate entities which leads to problem #2, which is bad implementation. The staff couldn't effectively maintain a "clean" setup in terms of code and presentation, and the users felt frustrated as a result of this, hence its discouragement.
Creating a CMS takes careful planning. Of course the first question you must answer is, what data will your CMS hold? From there it would make sense to begin establishing a "sane" categorization system. Once you have that, presenting the data won't be a mindfuck like it was last time. But again, the integration I think is still important. Every "good" CMS system I've ever seen does it. Look at ArsTechnica. Their news CMS ties directly into their forums. Comments and everything. Sane data management is somewhat impossible with the current setup, so I really do hope that whoever works on the new resources system would be sane enough to know that the current insane setup is just not sane enough.
Getting back on topic, whoever _does_ work on the resources stuff, shouldn't require global moderator powers! Those who moderate the resources system would, not those who design and implement it. And the same applies to the new recruits(no offense) for the reason that their purpose of getting recruited was more for what they could do, rather than the intention of maintaining order here.
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