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takamagahara2018-05-26 10:24 am
godsoffortune) wrote in takamagahara2018-05-26 10:24 am
Entry tags:
MAY Activity Check + HMD
Welcome to another Activity Check + HMD!
The AC will run from May 26 through
In order to pass AC, you will have to provide TWO proofs of your activity. What counts as a proof of activity? Simple! Any one or more network threads consisting of ten (10) or more comments from your character OR one or more log threads consisting of five (5) or more comments from your character. To make AC easier for you, we've created a nice little flowchart for you to follow. Remember, comments must be from May in order to count. That means anything from May 1st through May 31st will count towards AC.
There is now an additional requirement to passing AC! Everyone is sent an approval email when their application is approved! We now require you do ALL of the following items from your approval email as part of your first month's AC with a new character.
| 1) Reply to the mod approval e-mail with the username that you will be using |
2) Request to join these communities: thenearshore, thefarshore, takamagahara
|
| 3) Fill out these forms and post them on your journal: permissions, god/shinki info |
| 4) Make an inbox for your character and post it to your journal |
| 5) Your application is posted on your journal as well |
| 6) Reply to the Taken Character and God/Shinki Info pages, as well as the Tag Request post |
Please copy the appropriate code, fill out the necessary information, and paste it in a reply to this post.
○ For Characters Accepted In May:
○ For All Other Characters:
This month will also have our mandatory bi-monthly HMD.
no subject
No player should have to PM the mod account multiple times to get a response. When someone posts on an official page such as the FAQ, canon updates, regains, etc., they should be able to trust that the mod team will see their comment and respond to it in a timely manner. If player comments and questions are being lost, overlooked, or ignored for long periods of time, then there is clearly an issue with how those comments are being received that needs to be addressed.
I think a dedicated post for contacting the mods over using PMs would be a good start. The existing mod contact page could simply be updated to screen comments and the text of the post could be updated to encourage commenting over PMs. PMs can get lost among all the other comments in the mod account's inbox, but a dedicated post is something that could be checked directly without having to sift through notifs. I know player activity for follower/EXP counts is tracked by the mods, though I'm not sure if the mod account/mod email itself is used for this purpose or if a separate account is in place for that. Either way, I think a contact post would be much easier to check at a glance over PMs, lessening the chance of an important or time-sensitive comment getting missed.
I also think it's worth considering the possibility of reducing the number of pages that players have to comment on. We have separate posts for updating the taken list, player contact, hiatus, drops, deaths, tag requests, location updates, god info, and shinki info. There are also separate posts for suggestions, prayer suggestions, prayers/missions, regains, canon update requests, and the FAQ. That is a lot of different places to hunt down player comments. A lot of these could easily be combined for better organization, which would be easier on players as well as the mod team. Fewer places to check means fewer places to forget to check, and it also means players can get more done in one place over the current system.
Here are some sections that I think would be easiest to combine:
- Hiatus + Drops. Most games I've been in did have these two combined, and they serve a fairly similar purpose when all things are considered. When AC comes around, you only need to check one spot to see which players are exempt and which have decided to drop. It also makes for a convenient spot for players to check and see which characters are currently around or might be out of commission for a hiatus or whatnot.
- Tag Requests + Taken List. Tags are something that should probably just be done and out of the way right when someone gets accepted. A small form for how they want their tag to look could be added to the end of the taken form, easy peasy. There's no need for a whole extra post for this when it's part of the acceptance process anyway.
- God Info + Shinki Info. I recall that this has been suggested before, but I still think that it would make things much, much easier to combine the two spreadsheets into one link with two pages, or to at least link to both spreadsheets on the same page and accept requests for both of them there. Any update to shinki/god info is very likely going to need an update to the other spreadsheet anyway. This would also potentially cut player comments down by half in a lot of situations, ie. if a shinki is going Nora then instead of one comment for the god to add the new shinki and a second comment for the shinki to update their vessel/name info, it could be streamlined into a single comment listing both the new shinki information and which god is claiming them.
- Suggestions + Prayer Suggestions. Suggestions basically is just stuff being suggested to the mods, so really it would serve the same purpose as mod contact if the post is adapted to be an actual form of contact... but, suggestions are also used to suggest events and other fun ideas that may not necessarily be time-sensitive or important to the player. Prayer Suggestions is just a more specific version of the same thing. I'm not sure how often prayer suggestions gets used anyway since it's screened, but maybe it'd be better to have one post dedicated to prayer/mission/event suggestions, and then for more important matters there would be the mod contact post? This way there would still be a dedicated post to collecting fun ideas from the playerbase without splitting it up between two posts or mixing it in with more critical suggestions.
These are just my ideas, though, so maybe there's a better way to cut things down! But regardless of how it's done I do feel like there's an excessive number of posts across the mod account that may be adding to this mod response issue. Bookmarking each post and checking them manually every now and then is also something that should help with this a great deal. Notifs are handy but when you have this many things to keep track of they're not the most reliable method. Emails can get lost, DW can break down and fail to send notifs out for awhile, etc. A manual check only takes a few seconds per page to see if something got missed. Doing this every couple of days or even just once a week would ensure that every comment does get seen in a reasonable timeframe, so no one has to hassle the mod account for an answer.
+1
no subject
We've instituted a different filtering system on the mod email account for PMs as of your previous comment, and have not misplaced any PMs since then. At the moment, PMs to the mod account are the most reliable way to get in touch with us.
As for the issue of long response times to comments on certain pages, in order to make sure that comments don't go unseen or unprocessed for excessive amounts of time, we're going to start doing manual double-checks on pages every few days. At the moment, our comment pages are split up in a way that reflects the work we do to process them on the back end, so we're hesitant to combine them -- we'll see how the double checks work and consider restructuring if we turn out to need it to keep things running smoothly.