Open Letter regarding Communities Structure

[Chazlene]

Right... firstly I believe our activity has actually increased significantly over the past couple of months, look how many new members we've had introducing themselves, we've been getting new people on Mumble and people have just been saying in the shoutbox how many more new posts there's been recently. I agree that over the past year as a whole ATK's activity has waned, but that's only due to most of the founding members of ATK going off to university and concentrating on different things. However, now that it's the summer holidays and most of us have slightly more free time, activity is on the up again, plus things are looking promising for the future due to our partnership deal with GamerFM.

Secondly Oric, about giving certain members roles such as Deputy Leader, Server Manager, etc: People are part of ATK to socialise and have fun. ATK isn't part of our careers, so you can't force specific tasks onto people who aren't going to be online all the time. In practice I think it will work better if the same powers are handed out equally to the top few members such as Vox, Phantom and I, so that when something needs to be sorted to do with servers, the forum or whatever, the person who happens to be available at the time can fix it.

With all that said I do think more power and responsibility should be handed out carefully to a select few people, but it just seems counter-productive to be so strict over who has what abilities. Also even though I just said I don't believe that our activity is dropping, we still might as well follow some of these measures to improve ATK. I think it needs to be said as well that to help draw in more members we need to advertise ourselves more, tie in with other well known gaming websites, and produce something we can show off to the rest of the internet, whether it be films, game maps and skins or mods, but all done under the name of ATK. Anyway, to begin with so we can brainstorm some more ideas we should create a 'Boardroom' subforum to the admin caves, where moderators can discuss new ideas, with any that appear good moving into an open discussion with every member of ATK.

[D_K_Head]

Right... firstly I believe our activity has actually increased significantly over the past couple of months, look how many new members we've had introducing themselves, we've been getting new people on Mumble and people have just been saying in the shoutbox how many more new posts there's been recently. I agree that over the past year as a whole ATK's activity has waned, but that's only due to most of the founding members of ATK going off to university and concentrating on different things. However, now that it's the summer holidays and most of us have slightly more free time, activity is on the up again, plus things are looking promising for the future due to our partnership deal with GamerFM.

Secondly Oric, about giving certain members roles such as Deputy Leader, Server Manager, etc: People are part of ATK to socialise and have fun. ATK isn't part of our careers, so you can't force specific tasks onto people who aren't going to be online all the time. In practice I think it will work better if the same powers are handed out equally to the top few members such as Vox, Phantom and I, so that when something needs to be sorted to do with servers, the forum or whatever, the person who happens to be available at the time can fix it.

With all that said I do think more power and responsibility should be handed out carefully to a select few people, but it just seems counter-productive to be so strict over who has what abilities. Also even though I just said I don't believe that our activity is dropping, we still might as well follow some of these measures to improve ATK. I think it needs to be said as well that to help draw in more members we need to advertise ourselves more, tie in with other well known gaming websites, and produce something we can show off to the rest of the internet, whether it be films, game maps and skins or mods, but all done under the name of ATK. Anyway, to begin with so we can brainstorm some more ideas we should create a 'Boardroom' subforum to the admin caves, where moderators can discuss new ideas, with any that appear good moving into an open discussion with every member of ATK.

I'm with Chaz here... Anything more formal than a couple of messages over steam to organise a team isn't really something I want to bother with...

and another '...', purely because they're awesome.

[VoX]

Woah, can't reply to all of that but if you want my opinion on anything specific, grab me on Steam .


Will give my views mainly based around how things are done in the PRT, as that's essentially an organizational nightmare.

In practice I think it will work better if the same powers are handed out equally to the top few members such as Vox, Phantom and I, so that when something needs to be sorted to do with servers, the forum or whatever, the person who happens to be available at the time can fix it.

With all that said I do think more power and responsibility should be handed out carefully to a select few people, but it just seems counter-productive to be so strict over who has what abilities.

Highly agree with this, in the PRT we all have our own roles that we specialize in, yet we all have the relevant permissions to be able to sort out other issues. For example, I'm simply a graphics dude, but if I get a someone talk to me on xfire about the fact their user permissions have gone lulwut (With 45 (Yes, 45) usergroups this happens a lot) so I've got the relevant access to change permissions, edit forums etc etc to deal with teams from a web perspective. Also the web guy, while he mainly codes and maintains plug-ins for us, if a support ticket pops up he's got the relevant access to sort out the dispute.

Through this all, we don't often get a massive pile up of support tickets and problems (unless everyone is being lazy or the teams are being arrogant) as there is normally someone who will sort it out if others are away.

All of this is then supervised by the Lead, who is in turn watched over by senior management (main PR guys really).


So yeah, minor insight into how we get things relatively smooth (lol) when there's a lot to do/a lot of people nagging.

Some of it can be applied here, some cant, was more an example really.

and another '...', purely because they're awesome.

It's called an ellipsis