Expo!
There's been an interest both within the community and from staff to have an expo happening. Earlier we hoped to have an autumn expo but due to a myrriad of other reasons (that I will get into) this has fallen to the wayside. Current plans is to have the expo go live sometime in November but a specific date hasn't been spiked yet. Another announcement will be made as we spike a date and it draws closer. But the intent is absolutely still to have an expo this year.
Staffing hiring situation.
We are still looking for people to apply for staff. The recruitment effort dragged on for longer than intended, but now when we are more ready to bring people on the ones that have previously applied for a position were no longer available. We want to bring in people who not only have some passion for improving/guiding Pure as a community, but also people who can handle the added stress. Modding on Pure can be somewhat draining, something which I think both current and past staff members can agree on.
With Taco leaving staff and us being currently understaffed we want to bring on more staff. Currently I will be managing the administrative work of recruiting, but the entire staff team will consider the application. If you're interested in joining on the team you can either:
- DM me your application on Pure or on Discord.
- Drop your submission in the Staff Dropbox on the forums.
- Drop your submission in the Staff Dropbox in the discord server.
We want users that have a drive for wanting to see PureZC not only exist, but to improve and become better. Even if it is a single thing you have a passion for doing and helping the team with then that's reason enough to apply for a position. We're also currently lacking in web development skills, so if you're familiar with either front-end or back-end (or both) then that is a skillset worth mentioning. What you bring to the staff team should be useful, but it doesn't have to be conventional. If you're not comfortable moderating member disputes then you can take a step back from those obligations, for example.
The Staff Situation™
For people who have been tracking who has been on staff and who hasn't it should come as no surprise that we've been bleeding staff members since the start of the year. There are multiple reasons as to why, but one of the most common reasons cited is burnout. Even among currently remaining staff members there is burnout. The only reason why I, personally, haven't thrown in the towel yet is because I'm gosh darn stubborn. But because of this constant burnout among staff we are looking to reorganize and restructure how we work. This reorganization isn't done yet, but it's one of the reasons why things have fallen to the wayside.
It's not healthy that moderating an online community causes extreme burnout with the people doing it, ergo something needs to change. While staffing and moderating things is always stressful to some degree (and not for everyone), it shouldn't be this bad. So the way forwards is to try and work away problems that causes stress and friction. We are not all the way there yet, but I'm hoping we have at least started making some headway in fixing things. Part of this is that we are trying to put together a staff handbook to makes it smoother for everyone to know what to do in common cases (such as what a mod should do if an argument breaks out, etc etc).
This changes might also mean that how we handle moderation will be different going forwards. None of the site rules will be changed, to be clear, but we are discussing how to best use the moderational tools Discord offer to moderate the chat on that end. Most the structure and routines in how we've worked have been based on a forum landscape, but it's not a stretch to say that most of the community interactions have moved to the Discord chat these days. As such we need to adapt how we work, simple as. If users get heated in chat and ignore warnings from staff to stop (or if it's severe enough), we may opt to use the timeout feature.
Likewise in regards to moderation we hope to be more agile in that too after we're done restructuring. Previous staff action have come with a seemingly large delay after any infractions, and this is something we also hope to work away with better structure.
Quest Contest Plans!
Since I joined staff I've been trying to take a more front-row seat in us running quest making contests. The Cambria Contest is wrapping up shortly so it might be on at least some users mind when the next one is going to be. Initially I was optimistic about running maybe three of these style of contests a year, but frankly it's been proven to be quite the saturation with just two. The next big contest from us will be sometime next year, likely during spring. Going forwards we plan on running two quests making contests a year.
If you happen to have any cool quest contest idea that you wish you could run then fire me a DM (or leave a post in the staff drobox) and we can hash things out. You'd need to step up to actually do some management, but it does mean it would be an official contest on pure (for however much that is worth to you) and it would help avoid contest saturation within the larger community.
Returning Contests
Anthus will be joining as a contributor to help keep Screenshot of the Week running for at least the near future. There's been a lot of mixed opinions within staff about keeping these things running. Interest tends to be somewhat tepid both for submissions but also for voting these days. There has been talks among staff whether or not we should keep them running or axing them. And while we aren't planning on getting rid of them in the near future, the main thing we've looked at is the rather low interest from the community.
For a long time Taco have had to almost pester people into submitting screens, which is frankly a lot of work and mentally draining. I know some users have very fond memories of these contests and don't want to see them go away. But we aren't the same community we were ten years ago, and our users don't interact the same way. We don't want to kill these contests, they are part of our legacy in a way. But currently if people want feedback on their screens, something which you generally did get in SotW, you can find it more quickly by just posting in the discord chat. It's a somewhat negative feedback loop where you're less inclined to submit if you don't get feedback, so there are less entries, so there's less to get excited about every week, etc. These contests will stay running as long as there is an interest, both from someone to run them, but also from people submitting to them.
