Merge of the teams.

[Pyros 1,796 / 30,750]

10 minutes ago, Worgee said:

Idk why you think inactivity isn't enough of a need to get rid of people. You don't have inactive admins hanging around for too long either. We got rid of the inactive and if you didn't see it coming then look back and think if it's okay to not do an admin task on a server for a month and transfer that theory to MA. As I said, you can re-apply if you wish to become part of it again

Admin work and MA work is totally different.

 

Having some inactive MA doesn't hurt at all, maybe one of these inactive haven't accepted apps due to time zones and such, and maybe he gets online and accept an app there.

 

But now with the bot, that will automatically accept the ones that need to, how are you going to determine who is inactive or who is active? By who answers first the questions or check the vac ban?

 

Once again, how was removing the inactives helping the team?

 

I also don't remember saying anything about inactivity being a good or bad factor in terms of demoting people.

 

And for not telling people who were demoted, why did it happen? Even if a copy and paste pm for everyone that was demoted, why wasn't it done or thought of?

[kneegerrlover123 389 / 8,946]

3 minutes ago, Pyros said:

Once again, how was removing the inactives helping the team?

It frees up space to allow for new members to join the team, this isn't TTT.

[Worgee 812 / 13,264]

Basically what Syntax said. We get space for new members that are motivated and wish to have a change of impacting GFL in some way, shape or form. If we kept inactive people that "might" get on once in a blue moon and accept then I'd rather have 1 new member that's motivated. 

If Syntax is right and you're used to inactivity on TTT then don't take that to other teams as it shouldn't be that way.

[King_Wailord 965 / 15,597]

So am i still PR and MA or neither anymore?

[nocheat 548 / 16,549]

Oh boy.

It has been difficult reading this topic and the 4 pages that came after it.

Being a part of GFL for the time that i have i learned fairly quickly that changes are mostly done by the ones in charge (be it the old BoD or community staff team regarding community changes or managers and server staff teams regarding server changes) which for a community is a very bad way of functioning.As we can see this decision and change for fhe merge of the teams and creation of new ranks had been made and agreed upon only between people who possess the staff badge and then released to the community itself.

My suggestion for the future of this community's growth is to place a lot more importance in community feedback but not on ideas that have already been implemented but ideas that would be voted and discussed upon.This is just common sense in my eyes,one that i never saw or heard even be mentioned in GFL in the time i've been here.

 

That is just my personal recommendation to the staff team on how to approach matters in the future.As for this one change in particular i won't go into it as i've read plenty of criticism of it that i somewhat agree on(if you are interested check my recent reactions to posts on my profile) but if i were to be asked i wouldn't opt for this organisation at all..

 

Moving forward i'd just like to ask some questions about things said here i just couldn't understand.

 

First,i've read multiple times here (mentioned by worgee) that the directors alone had a say in this matter.How is it then that @Ralsei in their response expressed negative feedback on the change,actually disagreeing with certain aspects of the changes made.When 4 directors(excluding roy since he is the founder though he had a say as well) are not able to have a unanimous vote on a matter that non the less goes through you know something is wrong.But my question is how did it go through in this case?Does the vote of every director count or did this response come after an initial agreement in which case i still don't understand.

 

Secondly a question you can think of me being biased to ask but it is non the less one i want to ask and is about Member Acceptors.A team of people that have been around a lot longer than any of the new inventions,yet one that i feel is being looked at differently atleast importance and appreciation (towards work that has been done and work that will be done) wise.The question is simply why are member acceptors the only team that are discriminated of all that make up the new public relations one why do it's members not get acknowledged as such on forums(via ranks).Is it because of the new bot's role to accept most member applications and the MA role is being internally discussed at the moment?(without the team's knowledge or feedback if i may say)

 

As you can see it's not hard to guess the answers to these questions but the real one is why should anyone have to?Why don't people with  clan's membership have these things available to them.When is GFL going to be transparent with it's members and ask what they want and what they think is best for the community they love and are apart of.

 

 

P.S. When someone is demoted they should be notified of the said demotion no matter what you think of it.I can see why @Pyros had a need to voice  his questions.

Edited January 9, 2019 by nocheat

[Pyros 1,796 / 30,750]

55 minutes ago, Pyros said:

And for not telling people who were demoted, why did it happen?

still hasn't be answered 

 

20 minutes ago, King_Wailord said:

So am i still PR and MA or neither anymore?

I guess you must do just like everyone that was demoted from MA, check if you were added to the new PM or not. They don't say it anymore

[im not inactive you are 888 / 16,340]

1 hour ago, Worgee said:

If Syntax is right and you're used to inactivity on TTT then don't take that to other teams as it shouldn't be that way.

I'm not used to inactivity on TTT, all the admins are fairly active. I can say that a lot of the ones that haven't been on Steam in 2+ months were removed from the role. A lot of thinking had been done to demote these people and a lot of questions asked to the current staff about old & new admins. Everything done was transparent, something that me being former staff didn't see much of, stuff just happened and we were "forced" to swallow it. It was something I didn't personally like and was also something I voiced. It created tension within the staff team, and I can confirm that, but I'm a verbal person and when I don't personally like something I'm blunt about it. I also acknowledge when I'm wrong, which I haven't seen many people say they've been wrong in this 5-page post, which I would like to see more of. I was wrong when I was TL for enforcing the Trainee role, it was something that failed but brought new members into the team that probably wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for the role. As @nocheat said above, it'd be great if we got more feedback from the public before executing something like the merge, which from when I was also staff I voiced it to my members before it happened and wanted their opinion on it, and the great majority voted "no" on the merge, mainly because the older members knew what it was going to do, and these things haven't worked in the past & should be left there, not brought back with a new name. This is where I want the people who decided this vote to step up and say why they have chosen it, Xy did so already, and I appreciate his message, because he gave a clear message as to what the Director's view of this whole thing was and why the Council role was implemented. The Merge also didn't happen due to the Directors wanting it, while I was staff it was voted on, but it seemed like all the TLs that were voting on it weren't even a part of the merge, and the biggest team wasn't taken into consideration for a change that would affect them. We saw resignation due to this, one of the more active members, a writer, Wigglesworth resigned due to shit like this, people not being transparent with their decisions until they've done it, instead of asking for feedback and opinions while the decision was still in the "thought process" stage. You can say his resignation was due to many other factors all you want, but I PM'ed him personally and he said it was mainly due to the fact of the many changes done without their opinion, even if they'd be for or against it, it's changing stuff without their knowledge and approval to move forward, which all the changes I did to media team I talked with the team about how they'd like the change to happen, I asked them if I did something a certain way if it would benefit THEM as media team members. 

 

Some could say that admins were/are inactive at times, it's fine because we've learned to find out that PEOPLE HAVE LIVES outside of GFL, something that probably wasn't taken into consideration when demoting MAs "old faces" to bring in "new faces", which you should've also seen how many members they've accepted in the past. If accepting members is sort of like a shark tank, where there's 10 member acceptors and 1 person applying every 10 minutes, that's 10 people trying to go for 1 person, though you could put the argument of 'the application process takes a long time', then you're just bullshitting, unless the person has some serious bans on GFL and on Steam, the application process takes like 5 minutes. That leaves 10 MA's to accept not that many applicants, and it leaves people empty-handed. If it were done differently and based on how many people the person's accepted in the past, their current forum activity, and how many people they've accepted recently, then that'd be a different story, that takes all aspects of the person's will to be in that role into consideration. Forums activity shows if they're actively on forums either waiting for a new applicant or just dealing with people, answering questions, etc. The number of people they've accepted currently shows if they're a good asset to the team, someone who's accepted 100 members in a month vs someone who's accepted 10 members in a month, it sort of explains itself, and finally number of members accepted in the past, it shows history and someone who's accepted 1,000 members in a 1 year period, being active on forums vs the guy who accepted 300 members in a 1 year period, it shows who, in a period of their time in the role, how active they are, and that should've been the basis of demotion, not "oh this person hasn't accepted someone in a month, let's demote him".

 

I also feel that if they're going to be taken under the leadership of PR, they should get the role & badge for it, as well as access to the discord, if they don't then don't put them under the leadership of someone. I'll go back to the quote I said earlier in this post: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", I don't see why magically adding MA to a team is going to "fix" something that doesn't need to be fixed.

 

There's things that could've been handled more properly, and I feel like these changes are happening without discussion, they're done without seeing the CONS of a change like this. Which is also something I saw when I was staff, no one ever discusses what the bad sides of doing something is, it's all in detail of how it's going to benefit the community, but in reality all change has negative consequences, and those need to be discussed as much as the good, and try to minimize the bad as much as possible so people don't react in a negative manner. With the demotion of people, I can confirm that when I got MTL I went around and sent a PM to all the inactives and people who weren't speaking actively in the Discord or responding on forums & had 0 forum activity for a whole month even & sent them something along the lines of:
"Good morning/afternoon/evening,

I'm TheSadBandit, new Media Team Leader, I would like to know sometime within the next 2 weeks if you'd still like to be a part of the Media Team, I'm cutting down on inactive people that haven't spoken in the Discord or shown much activity, if you don't respond you'll lose your role, if you wish to still be in the Media Team, feel free to re-apply: link"

 

Based off what I'm seeing nothing like that was done for MA, and it's a huge downfall on a community to not be formal as a higher staff member and to speak without a filter, because it makes it seem like it's a toxic, abusive, power-hungry staff community. There's always a way to deal with things properly, and decisions have to have a clear path as to how to do them, not just be done out of the blue when you think about them, or without much thought.

[Joel 543 / 12,792]

Hello, Sadbandit in regard to your question,
 

What changes have you/will you do to the team? Because ever since I asked that question the answer has always been a “you will see” or “changes are coming”, and I’ve given you in detail what I’ve done, so I’d like for you to do the same.

 

So, to start off my list of what I have done within GFL so far in regards to change, I’m going to be listing how I became the role I am now, it all started off with me contact Christian/Roy, I was generally talking to him and he told about the current issues within GFL I then offered some advice and ideas that might help the community, this lead to myself and qDogg making a document, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1du0JE0PURD6BYqjb5-wXWdOOsRqq3U-EYgtjcc1cS9A/edit?usp=sharing

Then myself and qDogg got added into the “Internal” discord and a channel was created called Feedback, for nearly over a month we were getting feedback from the internal members and the Team Leaders at the time, most was positive about the changes and some weren’t regarding some suggestions we had put forward, the main one we suggested was the Merge of the teams, which everyone was concerned about this is something we knew needed to happen as most of the teams didn’t have enough power nor activity within the teams. After looking over them for a while and seeing what could be changed and the ideas we both had. Then I and qDogg got promoted to Team Leaders, this was something which caused drama and upset for how the promotions were handled and how we were just placed in the team not knowing that the other Team Leader wasn’t aware of the upcoming changes we have planned. How our promotion was executed was terrible, which this is something that couldn’t be helped as Rick had limited time to act on how this was going to happen. The tension within the team was appalling and not much time was given to the Directors or our selves to explain why we were in the roles. I started making changes within the Media team discord because I believed me joining the discord was resulting in Sadbandit and Flyingjoe being demoted. This was not the case until later on, without my knowledge as I thought it was happening I started doing changes and posting and asking the media team what changes they would like to see and I was speaking to the Second in command role within Media team which was Rose/Aura. I proceeded to do changes, thinking the demotions of the two current leaders was going to happen shortly, this was not the case, furthermore, this caused upset and disruption without the media team knowing what I was doing there and the current leaders themselves, which I have apologised for countless times! I didn’t know I was allowed to share my ideas with the Media team nor was approved by Rick to say go ahead and suggest them until a later date, this is why my comment about changes was blunt nor had any real information which I apologise for again, as I am aware this caused upset in regard to this. Due to me causing issues, I wasn’t aware at the time the current leaders of the media team created a discord chat bashing me to other members within the team and trying to convince current members to deny any changes. Plus with the merge happening, in regards to this trying to convince second in command Rose/Aura to try and get me to lose my role within the media team discord. I wasn’t aware until afterwards everyone was “plotting” against me, which is something which shocked me and it upset me when people could just come and speak to me if they had an issue or question. I don’t believe I am an unapproachable person. I encourage people to talk about concerns they have and any suggestions I propose or anything people don’t like, I do listen. With this happening and no one wanting me within the media team or nothing to do with the changes and plans and goals I had, I decided it would be the best for me to leave the media team as I felt I wasn’t wanted. After that, I decided to still be in the discord, I did eventually share my ideas with the current leader, and they seemed to really like my ideas, which I was pleased with. I don’t hold any grudges against people as we have to work together if we want things to work. I was willing to help them achieve my ideas as I wanted to see them work and implemented. I refused to have any rank within the media team discord as I didn’t want to cause any more upset. So this brings me to the question what have I done so far in regards to the teams and what are the plans.

We posted the Merge for transparency as everyone wanted transparency of changes, the final plan and how everything was going to work is still in the works, which is concerning me, since no one is willing to give us time to put a document together explaining the changes and how we want things to run with the merge and the new sub-leader rank. Sadly, the topic has become toxic and not supporting changes or having actual opinions or advice, it’s just constantly bashing on something which we’re trying to implement

 

Currently what I have done:

Somewhat cleaning up the forums, this is a work in progress, check here for updates:  
https://gflclan.com/forums/topic/10908-website-updates/?page=2&tab=comments#comment-181211

Currently, in the progress of setting up the merge and making sure sub-forums are in the correct place of the merge, E.G: https://gflclan.com/forums/forum/769-public-relations/

All the subforums before are merged within the public relations main sub-forum,

Got Rick to set up the Sub-Leader rank as this is something council can’t do, we had him give them permissions to just edit their subforum so they have no other permissions, also giving them access to accept members in their applications area.

 

I merged all the teams within the public relations rank, adding everyone under one rank, getting Roy to remove Media and Events Management, as it’s no longer a needed rank. -Thanks.

This is something which was planned months ago, as the internal discord was aware that these changes were going to be implemented and mostly agreed with.

 

(Most of the changes, was implemented by Worgee and I)

 

Worgee and I decided to tackle the Member acceptor team as that was abandoned and forgot about, we removed all the inactive members, since we went back and checked to see if any of the current member acceptors were accepting applications, this leads to the majority of the member acceptor team getting removed from the role, as they weren’t active nor accepted a member applications for weeks, and even months, so surprising when we check and do changes and remove people from the role they weren’t active in they come out of the shadows and complain when they weren’t active in the first place. This is sad as we make changes people come back and complain and ask why their role was removed? You shouldn’t need to ask when you know why. Then Xy, added a bot to accept member applications. The only apps it doesn’t accept is those with a ban on record and/or with a VAC (Xy can correct if wrong). this makes the role of accepting members easier and quicker so people aren’t waiting around, but if they have a ban or vac ban a member acceptor deals with their application. This is something which is a very good idea to have and helps bring members into the community quicker, so thank you, Xy, for that.

 

In regard to what the Sub Leader role is and what the Merge means and what’s going to be happening will be posted soon in another post. So, for now, all we ask is for your patience.

 

ALSO THE VOTE ON THE MERGE: https://gyazo.com/da9bfaebef11722cbaa5064db5212d45

 

ENJOY (all team members and manager+ were able to vote)

 

Thanks - Joel  

The topic will now be locked.