If the community is in agreement that not everyone who is throwing in their hat should be added to staff, I can create a second thread with all volunteers, put up a poll and, for example, the ten or twenty persons with the most votes will be considered as possible new staff members.
But I really do refrain from this because the ones who are not chosen in this manner will be frustrated and we might possibly lose them. In my eyes, a better solution is to list everyone willing and let the staff members decide who will join the team.
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I thought about it many times in the last years and always refrained from throwing in my hat. But seeing how desperate SG needs help and because of changes in my personal life situation, now I am ready to throw in my hat and help out.
I won't be online on the weekends and I won't have time to moderate the forums, because I am no longer active in the forums as much as I once was.
Instead I am willing to tackle the backlog of tickets, try to find some model text which makes handling tickets faster and thus reduce answering times.
Although I will be completely honest: I am an old and grumpy gamer and my tolerance for bullshit went down over the years :) So if I get added to staff, I will take my job seriously but might not give as much leeway as already existing staff members in regards to how members behave in the forums and what is written. In other words: If I catch you insulting or bullying someone, I might not play nice.
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I doubt this will happen anytime soon, or even work. But if anything happens I'd be happy to help with clearing the support tickets. I'm available pretty much daily.
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I have a lot of time online and I'm happy to help resolve ticket complaints
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I have a lot of free time so if this happens i don't mind helping with tickets.
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i am on here a lot and could help with tickets and things including adding games to the list (which are not yet included) or helping with new winner requests
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Category description
Bugs / Suggestions
Report a bug you discovered or suggest a new idea or change you would like to see implemented in our community.
First of all, there are different categories that should be proposed.
Currently it is "General," but it is also available under "Bugs / Suggestions" or else the content will not be in the sight of those who might be willing to help.
At the very least, I don't think there are any SG users who are unhappy with the old moderators and supporters. There are no
problems, including those related to nationality and politics, and there is no doubt about their contribution to the community.
Frankly, it is not necessarily a good environment to add additional supporters at this time.
I agree that it would be preferable if more tickets were digested.
In particular, it would also be desirable for the suspension and rerolling of rule violators to proceed more quickly.
However...
Have you seen what users say and do in some discussions?
The earth is currently "at war".
It is such that the moderators give at least one warning a week in relevant discussions.
(The SG's resources will have been greatly reduced in reporting and responding to those related issues.)
Some people's behavior has changed dramatically from the past to the present.
I feel that we have to tolerate "ticket delays" during the year, as the addition of an uncertain person among the support members in this situation would cause more serious problems than now.
If only the current rules and commitments were in place among the same moderators and supporters, the "wrangling" and "uproar" could be the trigger for an uncontrollable situation.
Back to the beginning, let's change the category first.
If you are going to add personnel on top of that, you might want to switch to a proposal to have the "supporter" or higher authority disclose the requirements.
Looking at the comments that the moderators are trying to collect, it's not just a guideline issue...
I've also seen some talk about being restricted from using the "blacklist" feature, which is something I remember seeing before.
Some of you have probably never heard of such a thing, but I've seen it mentioned in some context.
Why don't we start by asking such "conditions"?
For example, it would be a nightmare for everyone if a moderator or supporter were to be joined by a user who does not even know what country's language he or she is speaking.🛸👽
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Shooting my shot, I've been on this site almost from its beginning so I know how it works pretty well by now. I can help with whatever is necessary, I've got a lot of free time and I'm using the site everyday anyway.
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Usually when people send applications for work they add stuff like resumes, skills, experience and motivations. Why would the staff recruit people simply based on their names? :x
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Well, most of the names I see are well known here as nice and helping people. I don't see anything wrong with that. Personally, I'm in favor.
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This is for staff to decide. The list will include people relatively new to SG and people who are here for a long time and are well-known.
At the very least it will be a list of people willing to help, so that staff at least knows who they can talk to to see if someone really is the one staff is looking for. This is my goal with this thread, because in the past, staff could not know all the people interested in helping out with the site.
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I think there is a discussion section that only support members can see. If they are looking to add a new member, I would imagine they would discuss it there. I wouldn't think they would add anyone that is new to the site. The current support members that use the site and read the discussions on a regular basis would probably have some insight and opinions on who should or should not be a support member.
If you look at the list of current support members, almost all of them have been registered here for 8 to 10 years and there are only a few that have been here for 6 or 7. I think they will choose people who have been here for a while, have a decent reputation, and understand the site rules.
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Why not? This is a community role, not a work role.
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I dunno, I'd rather recruit competent people than well-meaning people who could potentially turn out to be incompetent, but I'm not a staff member so in the end it's not like I decide how they run things.
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I'd rather have a semi-competent volunteer close out 1% of the low-hanging-fruit backlog than living with the current dysfunctional status quo. The problem we're facing is not one of competence; it's the lack of human resources. I don't think we should let some hypothetical future concern lock us into a dysfunctional state.
I'm sure there would be some vetting process for the new volunteers. If competence is a worry, they could be recruited on a temporary basis just to close out very specific types of tickets and then re-evaluated for more permanent and more expanded roles after a probation period.
As they say, we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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Attitude and work ethic are much more important than experience or skills in most entry-level positions.
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The tickets response times are really annoying indeead. Another issue is the huge amount of bots here. Always online 24/7 to join and never response. Makes me do lots of extra works after the giveaways. These are the reasons why i seldom do public giveaways now. Don't know how you gonna get into the stuff but good luck to make a change.
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Hi Amano,
How many hours/day is expected as minimum when it comes to moderating and managing? I am daily online, but I spread my time on the platform a couple of minutes to even hours a day checking with the community.
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I am not a member of staff, so I have no idea how many hours per day are expected or if there are any such expectations at all :)
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Well, I don't mind giving a hand to the members of staff if there's no requirements in place. I take my visits on the platform every single day and I check in between work and other things I do. I'd be happy to aid with tickets moderation, re-rolls and other problems users have.
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I would love to give back to this community by helping however I can. I almost always have SG open nd check on it daily. I'd be open to investing up to 3 hours a day, especially on weekdays to help a good cause here. If requested for lack of bias, I can easily clear both my blacklist and whitelist for the sake of fair moderation practice. Whatever requirements would be necessary, I would be willing and open to uphold.
Also, if I may suggest, instead of committing to recruitment of Junior/Senior moderators, there could be a possible Volunteer role for Mods to manage a training program of sorts until Volunteers prove enough potential. It may be a lot of work in the short term but realistically speaking, they should help prepare and give assistance to newer recruits before a day they can't help anymore.
Finally, while I recognize this point would be counting me out, I would like to see people recognizable to the community at least offered mod/volunteer roles over someone who has less to lose by being a no name here, like me for instance. While I have been in the community for a fair bit of time, most here wouldn't know what a "fleart" was if you'd ask them, much less if they'd be willing to have that person act as support on a community run site but I am still throwing it out there if needed.
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I would be happy to help with some ticket queues. I’m on SG usually multiple times a day and while I couldn’t commit 100% to working on tickets daily, I could definitely do some damage to the backlog. I’ve thought about it for a while but I think the last time I saw a post actually looking for people I wasn’t able to commit what was needed and didn’t apply.
Probably won’t go anywhere but I would volunteer for a junior level.
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It is comments like this that reminds me that I've been here for ages and I'm getting old ;-;.
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We are the same SG age, we are not that old, unless we are older than flies, but not old as a tortoise
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We are working on adding more staff, like I wrote in few places. But it's not as easy as upgrading bunch of people and throw them into the fire.
As you see adding "unofficial" to the thread title still makes people think it's something official, there are two already asking for requirements. So I would ask you to change title to something like "How we could help support" or similar. Also it would fit more to the General section. As long as it doesn't look like you try to make official list and then follow with interviews I would be fine to keep it open.
I will go through some of the points that were risen.
If you are willing to join the Staff please comment in this thread and say what you want to do/how you want to help and how much time you can dedicate to your new role at SG. It's also helpful to say on what days you can fulfill your role (some guys can only be at SG on the weekends, some only during the week).
There are not ticket quotas, and people are not picked on "who can do more" basis. You may have time today but will get extremely busy with your life in 2 months. I joined when I had tons of time, now not so much. We're not paid workers, and we help when we can.
In my eyes, we need many new staff members for the following roles:
All new people would get to be junior moderators. More senior people are picked from already existing moderators. And seniority does not mean automatic "promotion".
I can create a second thread with all volunteers, put up a poll and, for example, the ten or twenty persons with the most votes will be considered as possible new staff members.
Support members will not be picked by a popular vote. It is the council of ancestors that decide who is worthy 👻 Don't want people to have impression that they will be promoted if they win some contest. Imagine offering Bad Rats in exchange for votes. They would surely win 🙀
So if I get added to staff, I will take my job seriously but might not give as much leeway as already existing staff members in regards to how members behave in the forums and what is written. In other words: If I catch you insulting or bullying someone, I might not play nice.
I was like that once but sometimes what you want to do and what is decided to be followed as a moderator team are two different things. I was "outvoted" when I was advocating in favor of some solutions or actions, and have to follow consensus. If someone would "not like leeches" and approve re-roll tickets with a reason "they won enough" - they would either change their ways or have to part ways with support.
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Thank you for your answer.
Thread title is changed and opening posting is edited. Thread was in general at first :D But was moved due to a proposal in a comment. It is now back in general.
Furthermore, thread is mainly meant as a help for you and other staff members to have a pool of people you can talk to about helping out. So the thread should only be kept up if it helps you :) If it doesn't help, thread should be closed to avoid any confusion.
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It is the council of ancestors that decide who is worthy
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Support members will not be picked by a popular vote
ok, but that would be just... a.we.so.me :D
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I don't have the attention span to help out support myself. I'm a mod elsewhere. So def not offering haha.
Years ago, on a big forum we had a rotating moderator programme. We picked 2 active members in good standing to join the mod team for 3-4 months at a time, then they went back to being regular members. We even did this during a time when we didn't need new mods, we just kept it up to give the community something to strive for. The new guys tended to close a lot of generic reports and spam stuff as they were highly motivated. Serious stuff was left to supermods. Whenever we needed new permanent mods, we looked at past rotational mods. Nice way to test people out without having to fire them if they're bad. LOL!
Could something like that work for here?
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Sounds like an interesting idea that could help against burning out :)
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Imagine offering Bad Rats in exchange for votes. They would surely win 🙀
lol.. I just learned about that reference today from one of the older members here.
I was like that once but sometimes what you want to do and what is decided to be followed as a moderator team are two different things.
How are the rules decided, and how often are they changed? Is there some guide/doc for new mods?
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There is another game in high regard among the community - Fortix, along with Bad Rats those titles are staples of "real" gaming. You have official FAQ and community guidelines in the "help" section of the menu also support have their "hidden" subforum, I believe there is even more info there.
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Learnt about Fortix too from the same person. Also, the history of SG with Skyrim.
also support have their "hidden" subforum, I believe there is even more info there.
I see. That is the kind of thing I was wondering about.
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There is another game in high regard among the community - Fortix, along with Bad Rats those titles are staples of "real" gaming.
In my humble opinion, Barbie Dreamhouse Party should also be right there with these two. I think I remember Student creating quite a few gibs for that one many, many moons ago before disappearing. I should have bought the game on sale before it got pulled off Steam, but I did not and meow I'm sad there's no way to get that masterpiece anymore. :o/
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How are the rules decided, and how often are they changed? Is there some guide/doc for new mods?
This is not public knowledge. We have SOP like any other website that need to deal with moderation.
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It is the council of ancestors that decide who is worthy
That's probably the biggest problem of SG. Oh wait, biggest one it the bots and multi-accuounts, this one is next to biggest.
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Honestly, each website has problem with multiple accounts. Even having to confirm identity and have one mobile number per account does not help. It's in no way justification, but it's also impossible to get rid of.
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Raising the minimum requirements may help get rid of some - but will probably hurt the legitimate users more than the bots in the long run.
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I can give a feedback from thousands (no joke) accounts that i checked.
To allow accounts below level 10, partly with VAC bans on top, to join steamgifts is a invitation for cheaters (mostly multiaccounters and autojoiners).
The biggest majority of the autojoiners that are so dumb to activate the thanks script on top to the autojoining are below level 20 on steam. The multiaccounters with up to 200 accounts on sg are below this level too and often below level 10 -of course is the main account higher-.
If the demanded level for the join would be on level 20, or at least level 10, would the amount of abuse drop by more as 50% | 25%.
I see such a step as "minimum security stuff" that should be done.
To lower the work for mods and not need people like me that invest thousands of hours to hold sg clean or better a bit cleaner because normal users can't fight against cheater masses if the gates have absolute no controls and let the most obvious cheaters in.
Robocop1, Robocop2, Robocop3 etc.., all new accounts, all have the same steam name with 001, 002, 003 at the end, VAC bans, all -excluding 1- steeam accounts below level 20, to give a easy example with -hopefully- someone that don't exist [if someone with this name exist then sorry, it is a coincidence]. None need to be a rocket scientist to see that such accounts aren't different people and normaly such ones should be direct marked from the system (or direct perma suspended when 1-2 other things fit to -like login times, IP etc.-).
In my case i can say my report days are over since 1 week.
It will give other ones that step into my footsteps but i am nearly sure that none of them will invest so much time as i did.
And that bring the easy fact that the abuse, with autojoiners and multiaccounts, on sg will raise. At least if the security will not raised to the absolute minimum level that i wrote above.
Don't get me wrong, i know the mods can't do much on this front but in the worst case someone need to make fire unter cgs ass that something change and members can't do it. One of the reasons why my report days are over.
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All of that sounds like absolute misery. So much complicating things for something simple. What a bore. No wonder people complain for lack of support here all the time.
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Moderation of forum where few users write in few threads is simple. Moderation of website which foundation is "I buy game, pay my money and then give this game to someone else" can't be simple. Especially with all the changes that Steam made along.
It used to be simple. Gifts could be stored in inventory, keys had barely any region locks, asset flips were barely existing, key revocations were extremely rare, your profile was reliably showing all games you own.
Now we have dozens of region locks, sites failing to inform users about region locks, scummy "bundle sites" that scam developers which lead to mass key revocations, Steam blocking sending gifts to the same region if price difference is bigger than few percents, piles of shovel ware that are added and banned on daily basis, games that keep popping in and out on users profiles making it hard to check ownership.
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From what I've gather, Ultra Moderators can recruit Junior Moderators and that's how the staff grows. However, as MSKOTOR already said, is not an easy process, less so when we consider that we only have two Ultra Moderators and they must feel a lot of responsibility when picking someone to be a part of the staff.
I know how little chance there is, but if the situation is really that bad (although I don't really consider 7 days of wait a lot, all things considered) I'll throw myself into the fire.
I have years of experience (from 2006 to 2015) moderating large communities, mostly on forums, a lot like this one, of course, I do not have as much time now as I used to back then, but I'm confident on my experience and ability, however, I do not have enough seniority here for any of that to matter, I used to be an user back in 2013, deleted my account from the site on 2018 and came back just last year, but by the time I'm known enough (if I ever am), I probably no longer will have the time to help, such is life.
What I could do, depends on what is needed the most, a lot of the current dissatisfaction with the staff comes from old tickets, so, that'd probably be a priority, as for time, I work from home and I'm my own boss, so, I can browse everyday except for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays in the afternoon and Fridays all day.
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I want to help resolve the support ticket if it is necessary. I can help a couple of hours a day.
I hope I can help contribute to the community.
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I would like to nominate jadefalcon, Cult, lokonopa, Lina and Wesley.
God, I miss jade..........
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Heh. "Back in my day kids you've got banned for just guessing stuff in a puzzle thread" vibe. I've learned making weird imgur puzzles back then. Didn't know you can do half of that before I joined sg.
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just wondering, is it possible to automate some of the easier tickets?
i think it would be more interesting to check on that approach first.
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Deletion as long as the giveaway hasn't ended is already automated. Unfortunately more automation often comes with a high risk for exploitation. IMHO it's always better to have support stuff checking things.
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I agree that not everything can be automated, but i believe there might be other cases that can be automated to lessen the work.
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You'll find a lot of pro and contra arguments in this thread.
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I was thinking of a more exact case. Eg: asking for a reroll when the winner already agree to do it, or when 7 days has passed since a key has been delivered and the winner didnt do anything. I think it is all alright to reroll in such cases?
There might be more cases that are like this that can be automated, so support can spend more time handling the more unique, case to case basis.
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Automated re-rolls could be abused in small groups to re-roll till a specific winner is chosen.
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Can you tell me how it can be abused in my examples? I'm curious.
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For CV farming like zelghadis explained here: https://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/Ucosd1n
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Well, that only happens if the system granted automatic rerolls for all cases. In my examples, the automatic rerolls only happens to a certain degree, which is not fit for your example.
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asking for a reroll when the winner already agree to do it, or when 7 days has passed since a key has been delivered and the winner didnt do anything. I think it is all alright to reroll in such cases?
Imagine the key was sent, the winner has not reacted in any way on SG, we do an automatic reroll - but in reality the winner has added you on Steam, which we couldn't see, and complained about the key not working or being region-restricted. So the reroll was not justified, the winner is rightfully angry, he drives to work way too fast, almost hits an old lady, dodges her but drives right into a nuclear power plant with 120km/h, the whole thing explodes and half of Europe suffers from nuclear fallout. Just because you wanted to automate rerolls!
I'm sure there is some room for improvement. Maybe there are things that could be automated to a degree. But it's not always as clear as one might think. The fact that communication between winner and creator can happen outside SG complicates things.
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By key i was actually thinking of sending the key through sg. I mean, sg tracks whether a key has been seen or not, so if it has been seen 7 days since it has been delivered, an automatic reroll should be allowed if the winner hasn't take any action (saw the key in this case). I agree that an automatic reroll shouldnt be done for keys that are delivered outside sg, though. That could be easily abused.
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Right, if I'm not forgetting anything, that could work. If the key was sent, but not viewed, I don't see why it should not be automatically approved after 7+ days.
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i've been considering asking about this for a while since i see so many complaints about tickets and lack of staff. i have all the free time in the world and would be willing to help lessen the ticket load. i love sg and the community so if i can help out at all, i will.
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I'd love to, I'm online a lot, and I also would be able to handle tickets in Russian (that are probably quite frequent). On the other hand, giving me a right to suspend people would inevitably lead to me suspending all these nice pro-war people in the Ukraine thread, I'm not strong-willed enough, so that probably be unwise.
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I don't have much free time these days, but I still use this site daily, so I'd be glad to help with the tickets.
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This here is in no way or form an official thread by Steamgifts, it's owner and administrator CG or any of the Staff. If any of those mentioned deems this thread problematic, confusing and wants to close this thread, please do so as soon as possible and please accept my humble apology in advance.
This thread is just an attempt by me to get things happening.
Reaction by MSKOTOR
As most or even all of you are aware, the ticket backlog has reached unacceptable response times. Reroll tickets, for example, in many cases take longer than the seven days a giveaway has to be handled.
In the last years, many threads popped up addressing this problem (most recent one) but the only thing that changed was that tickets nowadays take even longer than before.
I didn't talk to any staff member about this but I can imagine that they are also frustrated about the complaints because they do what they can but still the situation gets worse.
So, instead of CG looking for users to be added to support or users having to use a ticket in the "other" category to tell staff they are willing to help, I decided to take a more pro-active approach: this thread.
Straight to the point:
If you are willing to help the current support members out, please comment in this thread and say what you want to do/how you want to help and how much time you can dedicate to it. It's also helpful to say on what days you can fulfill your role (some guys can only be at SG on the weekends, some only during the week).
In my eyes, we need many new staff members for the following roles:* Senior Moderator = Staff members with that role, Permissions for that roleMSKOTOR made it clear that new support members always start as a Junior Moderator.
I will edit this opening posting with the names who want to help the current support members in an alphabetical list. CG and/or one of the Ultra Moderators can then use the list to chose who they want to talk to about helping out.
I hope this thread helps, that it works and that many users are willing to help support and help reduce the amount of tickets.
List of members willing to help out:
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