Staff award reorganization

[Simetrical]

The Constitution currently specifies three different awards for the three different staff branches, and each comes in three varieties based on amount of service. There are also various other awards available for other things, most of them not as useful to the site as months of service in staff.

The problem I have with this setup is this. Suppose we have person A, who has been a moderator for seven months and content staff for five months. And let's also have person B, who was a moderator for sixteen months and then Hex for a year and a half. Their medals will respectively be:





Person B has clearly made drastically more contributions to the site than person A, but this is very unclear from looking at their awards. If anything, the opposite would seem to be the case, if you don't catch the coloration difference. If the purpose of awards is to recognize people who have made more contributions than usual, this seems suboptimal.

Instead, I suggest (again) that instead of changing the color of the award for more service up to a fixed level, we just give more copies of the award. We'd need revamped awards for this to be feasible, of course, but y2day and Tzar have kindly provided some samples. So from the example above, person A might look like:



While person B might look like:





Or, using Tzar's awards:



vs.





Notice that since the badges are smaller, it doesn't take up much extra space even for someone like person B who has a ton of medals – and there will be only a handful of people with that many.

I think this would provide better recognition for long-time staff members who have helped make the site what it is. In principle, this could apply to some other awards as well, but I wanted to keep the initial proposal simple.


Detailed proposal text:

Section I, Article V, "Staff Awards" is deleted as redundant.

In Section V, Article II, the Moderator's Mace, Scribe's Quill, and Technician's Screwdriver are deleted from the Medium Medals section. A new section Staff Awards is added to Article II:

Staff Awards

Staff receive a small award for each ninety days of active service (or equivalent contributions), as determined by the relevant branch. There shall be four separate awards for moderation, technical, content, and the Hexagon Council. Staff serving in multiple branches only receive one award total per ninety days, which may be from any branch they served in.

If this is implemented, I'll write some software to do the bookkeeping for us. I expect that for moderation and Hex we'll just give an award every ninety days automatically. Tech and content have less stringent activity requirements than moderation, so probably some manual review will be needed there. I can do that myself for tech, I'll have to talk to Jim or someone about what to do with content (I'm not sure what they do now).

Edit: Removed the word "honorable", not needed. As suggested by Spiff.

Edit 2: Added "(or equivalent contributions)" to address Sqυιd's observation to a purely time-based system.

[Spiff]

Id suggest there should be a maximum number of a particular medal possible, otherwise I can envisage a situation similar to how the reputation icons were before the value was changed to something more manageable.

Out of curiosity, do you happen to know what the current record for staff service is, and how many medals that would translate into?

Also as a minor point, is anyone really going to be accused of serving actively but dishonourably? If someone is acting dishonourably then surely they shouldn't be in staff for 90 days to begin with.

[Viking Prince]

My first reaction is that I do not like the idea, but that may simply be because it is differant. I will need to get used to the idea before making a serious opinion.

Along the same lines you could do something similar to military ribbons and overlay stars to the award for greater time served rather than changing the color in perhaps increments of three or four months (consistent for all awards -- just pick an increment)

[Simetrical]

Id suggest there should be a maximum number of a particular medal possible, otherwise I can envisage a situation similar to how the reputation icons were before the value was changed to something more manageable.

Well, there are two reasons I don't think that's a big problem. One, it's not even possible for these to increase at a rate of more than one row per year. Two, virtually no one is actually in staff for more than a few years. I asked for the medals to be sized so that five years (an inordinate amount of time, I'm not sure anyone other than me has actually hit it) would be only about 100 pixels tall. So I think it's fine.

Plus, it seems much more reasonable to have a relatively large amount of screen real estate taken up for long-time staff than for people who got a lot of rep. Rep doesn't signify much beyond a certain point, but staff service does.

Out of curiosity, do you happen to know what the current record for staff service is, and how many medals that would translate into?

Me.







I don't think anyone else comes close. While that's a fairly imposing set of badges, it's still smaller than the max size a reputation display can get.

Also as a minor point, is anyone really going to be accused of serving actively but dishonourably? If someone is acting dishonourably then surely they shouldn't be in staff for 90 days to begin with.

I meant it as a safety measure, but I can't think of any case where we'd have actually applied it, so I've removed it.

Along the same lines you could do something similar to military ribbons and overlay stars to the award for greater time served rather than changing the color in perhaps increments of three or four months (consistent for all awards -- just pick an increment)

The exact visuals could certainly change, yes. I think this is a pretty good tradeoff between simplicity and compactness.

How will retroactive changes be made, though? Is someone going to go through everyone who has a gold mace and fix their awards to the new style?

That's what Mimirswell did when we introduced the current awards system. If no one steps forward to do it this time, I'll create a thread where people can say when they served in staff, and admins can update them. People can keep their old badges if no one's willing to do the research to port them to the new system.

My only concern is that for people with more than one staff medal -- mod and tech for you, mod and content for me -- you lose a bit of recognition. If someone was willing to go through the time, it might be a good idea to design multifaceted medals: one for base mod work, one for mod + content, one for mod + tech, one for mod + content + tech, etc. That could get VERY complex though.

It might be possible to set it up with split badges or something, but that would add complexity: conceptual, visual, and implementational. On the other hand, I don't think it's a huge deal. Someone in content + moderation might be doing more or less work than someone in moderation alone, after all.

[Spiff]

Well im sold, I'll support this.

[Justinian]

Me.

I don't think anyone else comes close. While that's a fairly imposing set of badges, it's still smaller than the max size a reputation display can get.

Yeah. I would think Trajan would be second, and maybe Asterix third. So we're talking a relatively small number of people who will have huge rows of awards (I would say at max ten people) and a larger (but still miniscule compared to the rest of the forum) group of people with modest amounts of e-peen jewelry. But e-peen jewelry which is well-deserved unlike a lot of it on forums, so I think it's a very good idea.

That's what Mimirswell did when we introduced the current awards system. If no one steps forward to do it this time, I'll create a thread where people can say when they served in staff, and admins can update them. People can keep their old badges if no one's willing to do the research to port them to the new system.

Do we still keep records of time served? I'd imagine you'd want to be able to corroborate what people say.

It might be possible to set it up with split badges or something, but that would add complexity: conceptual, visual, and implementational. On the other hand, I don't think it's a huge deal. Someone in content + moderation might be doing more or less work than someone in moderation alone, after all.

True; I guess people who wanted their various different branches shown could choose the makeup of their badges, right? At least that's what I got out of the last part of the proposal, but I could be wrong.

[Justinian]

The Constitution currently specifies three different awards for the three different staff branches, and each comes in three varieties based on amount of service. There are also various other awards available for other things, most of them not as useful to the site as months of service in staff.

The problem I have with this setup is this. Suppose we have person A, who has been a moderator for seven months and content staff for five months. And let's also have person B, who was a moderator for sixteen months and then Hex for a year and a half. Their medals will respectively be:





Person B has clearly made drastically more contributions to the site than person A, but this is very unclear from looking at their awards. If anything, the opposite would seem to be the case, if you don't catch the coloration difference. If the purpose of awards is to recognize people who have made more contributions than usual, this seems suboptimal.

Instead, I suggest (again) that instead of changing the color of the award for more service up to a fixed level, we just give more copies of the award. We'd need revamped awards for this to be feasible, of course, but y2day and Tzar have kindly provided some samples. So from the example above, person A might look like:



While person B might look like:





Or, using Tzar's awards:



vs.





Notice that since the badges are smaller, it doesn't take up much extra space even for someone like person B who has a ton of medals – and there will be only a handful of people with that many.

I think this would provide better recognition for long-time staff members who have helped make the site what it is. In principle, this could apply to some other awards as well, but I wanted to keep the initial proposal simple.


Detailed proposal text:

Section I, Article V, "Staff Awards" is deleted as redundant.

In Section V, Article II, the Moderator's Mace, Scribe's Quill, and Technician's Screwdriver are deleted from the Medium Medals section. A new section Staff Awards is added to Article II:

Staff Awards

Staff receive a small award for each ninety days of honorable, active service, as determined by the relevant branch. There shall be four separate awards for moderation, technical, content, and the Hexagon Council. Staff serving in multiple branches only receive one award total per ninety days, which may be from any branch they served in.

If this is implemented, I'll write some software to do the bookkeeping for us. I expect that for moderation and Hex we'll just give an award every ninety days automatically. Tech and content have less stringent activity requirements than moderation, so probably some manual review will be needed there. I can do that myself for tech, I'll have to talk to Jim or someone about what to do with content (I'm not sure what they do now).

I like this; it will make my e-peen bigger. Support.

How will retroactive changes be made, though? Is someone going to go through everyone who has a gold mace and fix their awards to the new style?

My only concern is that for people with more than one staff medal -- mod and tech for you, mod and content for me -- you lose a bit of recognition. If someone was willing to go through the time, it might be a good idea to design multifaceted medals: one for base mod work, one for mod + content, one for mod + tech, one for mod + content + tech, etc. That could get VERY complex though.

It seems like it could be a huge headache, especially figuring out how to dish out awards to past staff members. But overall I like it. The main concern is making the awards look cool

[Pontifex Maximus]

Support.

[Gaius Baltar]

I dont like the colors, particularly the orangy-red stf.

Oppose

[Simetrical]

I dont like the colors, particularly the orangy-red stf.

Oppose

You don't like the colors of which? There were two proposals for the actual awards, and more could be created.

[Gaius Baltar]

You don't like the colors of which? There were two proposals for the actual awards, and more could be created.

None of the designs are particularly inspiring. Quite frankly they look like some of the iron-on shirt tatoos I bought at Walmart last year for 99c. Maybe you should have Lord Rahl take a crack at the design(s).

[Garnier]

I like the idea, but I think they're too big. Years go by rather fast.

I do like how they're color coded to the associated name color.

[Simetrical]

True; I guess people who wanted their various different branches shown could choose the makeup of their badges, right? At least that's what I got out of the last part of the proposal, but I could be wrong.

I'm not sure precisely how this would be implemented. I'll have to wait until I actually write the software to see what looks practical.

None of the designs are particularly inspiring. Quite frankly they look like some of the iron-on shirt tatoos I bought at Walmart last year for 99c. Maybe you should have Lord Rahl take a crack at the design(s).

I invited anyone to do the designs who wanted to. Rahl can submit some if he wants. That's not the point of the proposal.

I like the idea, but I think they're too big. Years go by rather fast.

I thought about the size pretty carefully. I don't think they'll end up being too big for another few years, at least, and probably not even then. Most people are in staff for a year or two and then drop out for good. If they do become too large, we could easily shave off a few pixels, but I think this is a good size for now.

[y2day]

I dont like the colors, particularly the orangy-red stf.

Oppose

Colors can change my friend. Sim wanted something basic and easy to understand so that is what I came up with. The other content artists are working on more complex images. This is just the proposal for the award change not the actual image that will be used.

I don't understand the argument of people serving 2 different departments. Wouldn't you get awards for each? Maybe I read something wrong.

[Simetrical]

I am going to take a stab at the premise that Person B is unfairly underrepresented in medals. Yes, there is only one medal versus two -- but there is also a value to contributing to several areas of staff as well.

This method is a bit imbalanced against people serving on multiple branches of staff. Combination of moderation and content is not uncommon. I've been on Content for the last year and Tech for the last year and a half, for example. So I'd have one moderation, three tech, and two content. That gives the impression I've served on tech for 9 months, and content for 6 months. This is not the case, effectively cutting half off of each capacity.

I oppose as it currently stands for the second reason AL mentioned. For each staff capacity you serve in for 90 days you should be recognized.

Someone who splits their effort between multiple branches of staff deserves no more or less recognition than someone who focuses all their effort on one branch. If one person spends a year solely on moderation, and the other spends a year in all three branches, do you really think that merits three times as many medals for the latter? Staff members have a limited amount of time that they devote to the site, and being part of more branches doesn't mean they apply any more time or effort to improve the site. Thus they should receive no more awards than someone who decided to be more focused.

Now I do agree that the example implies less of the contribution of the second, but that same member when leaving Hex will receive another award for the contributions to Hex upon retirement.

Er, no, he won't. There's no medal for Hex. Divus is only awarded to a small percentage of admins, and not awarded until retirement.

I cannot believe any new member is going to be less impressed with the gold mace attached to a Hexagon badge than a silver mace and a scribes quill attached to a moderation badge.

Badges tell you someone's current role, and awards tell you their history of contributions. Consider what happens if the latter user gets promoted to Hex, or both of them retire. Then the awards are all that you have to tell the difference.

We just reduced the rep display so that it wouldn't take up as much space.

One of the key considerations there, in my eyes, was that rep doesn't deserve to be more prominent than badges and medals. In fact, staff badges under this proposal would still take up less space than a maxed-out rep display, even for five years of continuous service (which no one in the history of the site has even gotten to yet).

More is better doesn't necessarily work for awards because time-based awards aren't the most important ones, and they're the ones that would stack.

I'm not clear what you're saying here. Which awards are more important than a large number of staff awards? Remember that if you serve even two years in staff (which is a lot!), these medals would be comparable to existing medals. For instance, you currently look like:





Under the new proposal, you'd be something like:






This puts somewhat more emphasis on your staff contributions than before, but then, your staff contributions to the site are surely more important than your non-staff contributions. A more typical staff member who spent a year or less in staff could well have medals that end up being smaller than their current ones, although set aside on a separate row.

Keep in mind that as far as the postbit is concerned, if you get a small staff award and then a big one, the space taken up vertically for that row will be the vertical size of the big one. So unless the horizontal space of each award is greatly reduced, it won't change vertical stretch in most cases.

This will be a separate system I'll write. The awards will be on their own row. In your case this makes almost no difference to the height, since it knocks out a row of your normal medals. For most other people it will only stretch the post slightly, much less than having lots of rep.

Also this makes the awards purely a time based, so while currently the mace and other staff awards are only partially time based, this eliminates the quality component.

I've changed the proposed wording to make it clearer that they can be given out based on factors other than time, as now. That's not part of the proposed change and wasn't intended to be.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Someone who splits their effort between multiple branches of staff deserves no more or less recognition than someone who focuses all their effort on one branch. If one person spends a year solely on moderation, and the other spends a year in all three branches, do you really think that merits three times as many medals for the latter? Staff members have a limited amount of time that they devote to the site, and being part of more branches doesn't mean they apply any more time or effort to improve the site. Thus they should receive no more awards than someone who decided to be more focused.

Either way we toss it then we're making assumptions about activity levels. One gent could spend 8 hours a day on the site (retired perhaps), and another 1 hour a day. If the first gent happens to be in all three branches and split his time between them, he still is doing 8x the work. This is an outlandish scenario, but true nonetheless. As long as a member's activity in a given branch merits their remaining in that branch, we can't really make any assumptions beyond that about how it equates to single-branch members.

If we then want to recognize exceptional contributions in staff, especially in the case of the one-branch member who does more work as you attest, then we have the Novus award for that, which frankly we haven't given to many deserving folks. Now, this is no less true to the fact that currently we give a 'one-year' medal to folks who don't put in the same number of man-hours necessarily, but at the very least it's representative of the collective time spent in that particular capacity.

Er, no, he won't. There's no medal for Hex. Divus is only awarded to a small percentage of admins, and not awarded until retirement.

I'd like to see that section amended so that exceptions to the retirement rule are made. I guess the assumption is that voting a sitting Hex member Divus could be seen as kissing up? I'm not really sure, but it hasn't stopped us from voting still-modding folks Opifex. Maybe it should be harder to get Divus before retirement -- higher percentile of vote perhaps -- but not impossible.

One of the key considerations there, in my eyes, was that rep doesn't deserve to be more prominent than badges and medals. In fact, staff badges under this proposal would still take up less space than a maxed-out rep display, even for five years of continuous service (which no one in the history of the site has even gotten to yet).

Being less prominent is true, though I'm sure we'd have more medal-related affairs to concern us before anyone manages to accumulate whatever ridiculously large amount of rep is required to max out. It's like 1,200 rep to a row or something now, and according to my query only two users have passed that mark, both of whom took upwards of 2 years to accumulate it.

I'm not clear what you're saying here. Which awards are more important than a large number of staff awards? Remember that if you serve even two years in staff (which is a lot!), these medals would be comparable to existing medals. For instance, you currently look like:





Under the new proposal, you'd be something like:






This puts somewhat more emphasis on your staff contributions than before, but then, your staff contributions to the site are surely more important than your non-staff contributions. A more typical staff member who spent a year or less in staff could well have medals that end up being smaller than their current ones, although set aside on a separate row.

Depends on how each user values their contributions I suppose. All four of the large awards would be. In Hotspur's case the Judge's Gavel he'll inevitably get is his largest contribution, though in his case it wouldn't matter, and this is still true for our current system.

This will be a separate system I'll write. The awards will be on their own row. In your case this makes almost no difference to the height, since it knocks out a row of your normal medals. For most other people it will only stretch the post slightly, much less than having lots of rep.

That would be a good system for grouping the awards. You've looked into the feasibility of such a hack I assume? At any rate, it would be useful to use such a system to order the postbit regardless of whether this passes. Large Awards should get top billing, for instance.

At any rate, I still like the idea of quality over quantity for medals, and the tiering system. We use it in plenty of our other medals, such as PotW, AAR Comp, TWC Uni, CdeC Service, Scriptorium Award, etc; and I think at this point people have gotten used to that type of recognition. Also, if we had Jade(green), Ruby(red), and Amethyst(purple) maces for instance, those who have them would stick out like a sore thumb. On the other hand those who have a load of bars would also stick out, but I don't think it would be as fluid of a recognition.

I'll abstain on this proposal. I think more tiers would work better, but I'm indifferent otherwise. I do think we should have a Hex service medal though, regardless of if this passes, and independent of Divus. It does strike me as a bit odd that short of Divus, which he'll probably end up with, someone like Aradan would otherwise have no recognition for his service.

[Squid]

Someone who splits their effort between multiple branches of staff deserves no more or less recognition than someone who focuses all their effort on one branch.

The problem is you have no way of knowing how much or how little time a person is spending in each of their staff areas. The only thing that is really known, with reasonable certainty, is that they are spending the minimum amount of time necessary not to be removed.

If one person spends a year solely on moderation, and the other spends a year in all three branches, do you really think that merits three times as many medals for the latter? Staff members have a limited amount of time that they devote to the site, and being part of more branches doesn't mean they apply any more time or effort to improve the site. Thus they should receive no more awards than someone who decided to be more focused.

Depends how much they do in either. If the one in all three branches spends three times as much time, then yes absolutely. As I said above though there's no way to know exactly how much time someone spends on their various staff responsibilities.

[Harry Lime]

Opposed.

Medals, awards etc and the subsequent reorganising, debasement, enhancement, addition, substraction, division, multiplication & transmogrification is an utter waste of time & effort for the supposedly cream of the TWC pinta.

Just leave it as is and put something more altruistic on the table.






Don't look at me. I've got nuthin'. That will pass anyway.

[Viking Prince]

The Constitution currently specifies three different awards for the three different staff branches, and each comes in three varieties based on amount of service. There are also various other awards available for other things, most of them not as useful to the site as months of service in staff.

The problem I have with this setup is this. Suppose we have person A, who has been a moderator for seven months and content staff for five months. And let's also have person B, who was a moderator for sixteen months and then Hex for a year and a half. Their medals will respectively be:





Person B has clearly made drastically more contributions to the site than person A, but this is very unclear from looking at their awards. If anything, the opposite would seem to be the case, if you don't catch the coloration difference. If the purpose of awards is to recognize people who have made more contributions than usual, this seems suboptimal.

I am going to take a stab at the premise that Person B is unfairly underrepresented in medals. Yes, there is only one medal versus two -- but there is also a value to contributing to several areas of staff as well.

Now I do agree that the example implies less of the contribution of the second, but that same member when leaving Hex will receive another award for the contributions to Hex upon retirement. It will all work out in the long run. The badging also plays a part in this as well. I cannot believe any new member is going to be less impressed with the gold mace attached to a Hexagon badge than a silver mace and a scribes quill attached to a moderation badge.

All that I am trying to point out -- the medals and the badges need to be taken a bit more together for the impact they present.

As to the basic idea of a linear valued medal versus a color stepped medal -- both are probably equal in my mind at the moment for a means of measurement. I guess that means I would probably be neutral to the proposed change -- as long as when the actual art is presented a veto of any change is still possible.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Personally I'd rather we introduced more tiers for each of the awards, ala 'Jade Mace', 'Ruby Mace', etc. It would still allow for recognition of a period longer than one year, but it wouldn't create interface bloat. There's a few reasons for this:

1) We just reduced the rep display so that it wouldn't take up as much space. I personally opposed this motion, and suggested we cap it, but it is what it is. In doing so we overturned a couple years of accepted interface look to conserve space. Making the medals a quantity affair would counteract this move and could prove more confusing for recognition purposes. More is better doesn't necessarily work for awards because time-based awards aren't the most important ones, and they're the ones that would stack. Keep in mind that as far as the postbit is concerned, if you get a small staff award and then a big one, the space taken up vertically for that row will be the vertical size of the big one. So unless the horizontal space of each award is greatly reduced, it won't change vertical stretch in most cases.

2) This method is a bit imbalanced against people serving on multiple branches of staff. Combination of moderation and content is not uncommon. I've been on Content for the last year and Tech for the last year and a half, for example. So I'd have one moderation, three tech, and two content. That gives the impression I've served on tech for 9 months, and content for 6 months. This is not the case, effectively cutting half off of each capacity. It shows I've been in staff collectively longer, but not the extent of my involvement in each specific branch. Especially in a case where someone is both a moderator and the head of a content publication, such as Astaroth is now and plenty others have been in the past, it's not really fair to suggest those 3 months of doubled up service be only shown as one. The idea of a double-badge that shows two icons may remedy this somewhat, but in the sizes we're working with it could get wonky.

3) If we do this for the staff awards it would be awkward when placed beside the awards which don't stack. Whether or not the different looks makes other awards seem more important or less, it will be a curious dynamic either way. On this same line, you can't control which awards are displayed in the postbit without reissuing all of them in some specific order. Say you have a large award which you got before serving on staff; that award could be pushed off the postbit depending on how many we allow be displayed. The alternative is allowing so many be displayed that the postbit is unwieldy, because while it's rare that folks have very long tenures, awards only accumulate, so over time it will get gradually worse. Especially for you Sim, because the way I see it you aren't allowed to leave for another 30 years(). With the tiered system we have now someone has to have their hand in a heck of a lot of pies to really extort the interface.

I think the general idea of awarding service longer than one year is good. I don't see this as the best way to go about it though for the reasons specified.