From my experience on the team, negative feedback has always had a lot more weight than supports. If the staff team likes someone and that someone has 80 supports, sure, that just makes them feel safer. But sometimes the opposite happens. Staff will like someone, and one day one of the members of the community will post a ten paragraph comment on their application exposing their true horrible self, and will change our view entirely. As Kam said, it's very easy for someone to just pretend to be a completely different person until they get promoted, but I feel like the actual active members of the community are usually more likely to see who somebody truly is
I disagree, Shel. It’s all text, misinterpreted comments or contexts occur, one should be able to defend oneself. Doesn’t need to be archived publicly beyond that.
You don't need to fool everyone, just the ones in charge of your promotion and it's really not as hard or uncommon as people seem to think it is. The idea of faking a personality or even faking an entire persona is not something new to this server, it's been happening for years and has continued to happen to this day (and in some cases succeeded). The most obvious case of this happening years ago, (which many will recall without me having to mention a name), and some not so obvious cases of this happening recently while I've been around the past couple years. Even posting something like this doesn't always change or affect anything. In some cases the people doing these kinds of posts are viewed as unreliable sources because of past history, behaviour or personality so in return it's deemed as useless and bias information. A lot of the time these comments are very likely true (not always), and it ends up being the boy who cried wolf situation with no hope for redemption. People may have opposing views on any given person or situation and it doesn't mean one is wrong, both very well could be true but you can't pick both sides and in many cases that I've seen it's not the side you want to win that wins. What took me way too long to learn that many of you should probably start to consider, is that conversations like this won't change anything. Believe it or not people have been complaining about how the server should be run for years; what a surprise. It's just something people will always do and always have for anything in life. Especially now, you have people running the server who are firm on how they want systems to work and won't budge, whether that be good or bad that's up to any given individual to decide for themselves. Whether you like it or not, you won't be able to change the foundation of some of the systems put in place. Suggest things you think are important, have discussions about topics you think are valuable, but don't expect certain things to change. Many things will not become what you hope they will and it all comes down to personal beliefs and ideologies.
That's the point of moderators; to determine context and the appropriate response. If an inappropriate punishment was given out, that's what appeals are for. People making reports should have an space to safely report their concern; if the accused player can walk in and start arguing with the player making the report, that is not a safe space.
Player reports should be private, even the appeal process is private until resolved at which point it is made public. This keeps the reportee and reporter from debating directly. Drogo believes staff reports are handled within the report itself as the extra step is not needed to prevent the parties at odds from debating. Having staff reports public is no different to having ban appeal public. If staff are conducting themselves appropriately, then they should not fear this. Staff reports not being public only raises the question, Why?
If true (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), then I think staff reports need re-evaluation on how they're handled. It seems like a conflict of interest to have a staff member directly responding to a report that directly involves that specific member. And as I stated in a different message on here, if the accused player can walk in and start arguing with the player making the report, that is not a safe space for the person making the report. I still think staff members deserve a similar level of privacy that players are afforded, but I do understand that staff reports are fundamentally different than player reports. IMO the biggest concern over making staff reports public is the privacy of the person making the report - not everyone who makes a report wants their name attached to it publicly. If there was a way to anonymize the report OR ensure that the player was fine with the report being public, then sure - let's look into making staff reports public.
