We urgently need 20 to 30 new support members.
The last batch of users started out great. Number of tickets went down very quick and important tickets like rerolls were resolved very fast. We were very happy.
Now we are in a situation were even reroll tickets don't get resolved in a week, resulting in a "Not received" for the one giving away those games.
We need 20 to 30 new support members and we need them fast.
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With 20-30 support members we could tackle the huge backlog of user report tickets. And make sure that every new ticket is answered fast if those support members are spread evenly across all regions, so that everytime at least one of them is online.
After the backlog is gone, maybe reduce the team again because only new tickets have to be answered.
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The site isn't big enough to warrant that many. It isn't facebook.
For once, I agree with Masafor. There wouldn't be enough to warrant that many people on staff. 5 would probably be more than enough. A few new active people would clear the backlog quite quickly. When volunteer website staff are new they tend to be very productive.
Say you start out with 10 moderators all at the same time. Over the next 6 months, 8 of those are probably going to go semi-inactive. Then you will have 1 or 2 people who probably do too much because they love the site a lot. Those people then shoulder most of the burden of what needs to be done. Eventually they get fed up and burn out. Then you have this situation of reports etc not being dealt with as quickly. It's not the easiest thing to remedy though because these are people volunteering their time. And if you have too many cooks, you run the risk of over-moderation. It's a balance. lol.
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Oh I agree. New people are needed.
We had an interesting system some years back on a forum I worked on to help combat moderator burnout. I'm not sure that it would work on SG, but we certainly had success with it. We had 10-15 permanent staff, and brought in a "rotating moderator" system. This allowed two good members of the community to become moderators for 3-4 months. All of the staff put a list together of people they believed should be given this chance based on their behaviour etc... and they were approached rather than having people apply for it. When something is new, people love doing it, so the more active mods had a lot of help. At the end of that time, they went back to being regular members. But... those who did a good job were asked to come back on a permanent basis when there was need for new permanent staff.
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Nice idea with the rotation system if enough members fit into the wanted profile.
But it needs a basic bunch of active mods that are willing to teach the new ones, besides their daily work.
I am not sure that it would fit in this case here because it give since years people that offered to help (as supporter, to add games to the free/bundle list to give two examples). But cg don't accepted the offers.
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"...if enough members fit into the wanted profile"
Haha, the website we had this system on had 100,000+ members. SG is a lot bigger than that, at least by the number of accounts signed up. I am sure there are plenty that fit into the category. But, it all comes down to the personality of the community as a whole. Different things work in different communities.
As for offering and accepting, it's not that simple. If I was in CGs position, I'd be reluctant to just promote people because they offered their services. He wouldn't be a very good admin if he was like "okay" and handed over permissions just like that (and possibly access to a certain amount of personal info on users). Trust comes into that as well. I am sure they watch people and decide based on behaviour around the forum and how they interact with others. At least, this is what I would do. XD.
As for teaching... not rocket science.
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SG is a lot bigger on the paper but in reality maybe 20k members are """active""".
So active and not a complete leecher or with red marks, that it fits to a staff role i would say below 2k.
Sure it's not a "take all that offer help" but i spoke about the well known, liked, high level users that are at everytime helpful, friendly, generous. So nothing, for me noticeable, that prevent a accepting them as helpers. As example to add games to the REDUCED and FREE lists. They would not need much rights, training and "interaction with members" (so no/not much privacy risks), to do that work and it would free up higher set staff members time for as example user reports (alone from me are for sure 150 still open... partly over a year).
I don't talked about people like me that are sometimes very direct and maybe harsh partly because my daily pain level but partly because i have soooo much experiences with "bad apples" [i say sg is complete infested with them and that make me sick because the side would be much better without -or lower ammounts- of rulebreakers] + don't be silent when they have nothing positive to say (because i think that negative stuff can lead to good goals/targets too). Don't get me wrong i am much more liked as disliked (a bit above a 2:1 ratio) but it is clear that a few people have a problem with the way i am (or my used english words, in german it is much better :-D). Besides that would i not work for free for cg because he earn money with the site, i would not hope to make a big difference because of the boundaries and i have much too much other projects that need my, not much, energy + i don't think that it can be done without a hard cut into the member base that is much too much infested from "bad apples" -that bring nothing positive for the site-.
I don't talked about people that have red marks, trolling around, make joke offers, are in general unfriendly and only want to have power to fight their "enemies/opponents".
I spoke only from real offers from different people that would maybe fit. But if none of them get accepted or contacted in over 2 years and at the same time the support gets inactiver and inactiver with each half year (because of burned out staff members) then is something very wrong.
And yes i am such a guy that repeating to point at that till someone "up there" react with a "i look into it and decide" or something else. Other ones give fast up because of frustrated but i use my frustration to move things, hopefully, to something positive in the end.
They don't have to do what i think is the right but at least see the needs of the members (not me personal, i am only one of a lot of people that clearly speaks out the need of more active staff members) and give a response.
I don't think that is too much wished after 2 years.... (more then enough time to look at the ones that offered help if they were complete unknown people and not to speak from very well known ones).
And sure he weren't a good owner and admin if he handed out staff positions/rights like smarties without to check the people. I think thats obvious :-D
I picked all my admins and mods from my own seen behavior and acting with other members or after my admins or mods brought my focus at someone and normaly my staff and i decided together if someone fits or not (each have one vote, if the result is a draw/tie then my vote get raised to 2 votes). Sometimes a few said they don't know that member and then we said look at him/her for the next X weeks and say us then what you think. If you have no time for that for X weeks we decide without your voice about it.
And that systen work very well since 20+ years that way and i had exactly one time a problem with a mod.
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Masafor, I'm certainly not as passionate about this as you. ;)
I've been on the other side of the fence, so I also know what it's like for users to go "the mods are not doing anything" even when some of them are, so this anger is not something I am willing to contribute to. I did agree with you that they need help and that's as far as I'm willing to go.
However, I am willing to make suggestions like the one I posted in response to Amano as it might spark some ideas of their own.
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You misinterpreted my words.
1.) I am at the other side of the fence too ;o)
I have my own curation with 5 reviewers, my steam group, a few other steam groups that i manage, my discord server, are in the staff of different discords to handle mostly the security, member check, banning of the bad apples and advertising part for devs.
So i know both sides very well.
2.) I never said that "the/all mods not doing anything" because i know a lot of them a bit and a good bunch of them are at my Whitelist. I know very well that a part do, daily, work at sg. And i write from time to time with different ones too.
3.) I have no anger.
I am mostly much too relaxed for that and a too peaceful guy but i know my direct words are seen sometimes as that.
I am frustrated.
Not really about "the mods" (sure i am not happy about the ones that are only active at entering GA's and do no visible work) but about cg that don't hear at the users and not at his team that, for sure, made clear that too much are inactive. I am sure the promotions were to make more staff members able to handle tickets and not need to wait for months till the one with the right role are online and have time.
Ps.: How you were able to read it as anger when i write below it that i am frustrated is anyway unclear for me in this case :-D
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Familiar names, thanks for jumping in to help out.
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Besides more members for support, the site could also use more functions to automatize some tasks without bothering support members.
Is there a reason why support needs to be involved in rerolls or GA deletions, for example?
Just let the GA creator initiate the process, if the winner accepts, proceed - done. If this shouldn't work out in some specific case, then you could still contact support.
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To identify people using multiple rerolls we still need support, so this is not automation, just delaying the time when human interaction needed, so instead of check before abuse we will have check after abuse, also allowing in some cases to abuse the system safely. That's terrible idea.
But I have a great idea for automating GA deletions. Just forbid deleting giveaways, problem solved. If someone believes they may need to delete the giveaway - they should just not create the giveaway in the first place.
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You could automatize those rerolls in general and put those on hold if some users trigger circumstances which seem unusual. And it absolutely is possible to automatize such basic checks.
Then support could check those triggered cases. Instant solution for most users, far less work for support in general. I have no idea what would be "terrible" about that.
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Abusing rerolls suggests that in some cases one reroll is enough. All those cases will go unnoticed. But now when I think a little more about it - it's a terrible idea to automate all rerolls, but it's a great idea to automate some simple cases, that could be checked. For example, if user already has the game, and it's not "limited profile features", it should be re-rolled automatically, and so on. This should indeed reduce load on moderators without any side effects.
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Finally. And imho a reroll request for a public GA could also pretty much always be granted automatically. If there are scenarios how people would manage to abuse those, I'm not aware of them. Maybe on very high levels, but this would then be a logical trigger to add, for an inspection by support.
Anyway, it wouldn't take all the workload away but life could definitely be made easier for support. Not only in regard of reroll tickets, there are other unnecessarily time consuming procedures too.
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Well, reroll without reason is kinda bad idea, even for public giveaways. At the very least it contradicts the rule of "no custom giveaway rules". I don't want to be rerolled if giveaway creator didn't liked how I thanked them, or my avatar, or my country, or whatever. Endless possibilities to abuse.
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If there are scenarios how people would manage to abuse those, I'm not aware of them.
Abuse - creators who persuade new-user-winner to mark giveaway as received even when game is not delivered, as "they will get something else in exchange". New user may not know the rules (even when they should), and even when people read FAQ and guidelines there are some nuances left around. Why not believe someone who's on the website for 3 years already and sent 50 games to people? They know rules better than I do, right?
I don't want to see re-rolls that are granted because creators told winners "it's something you need to do". Right now we can double check if winner really agreed on re-roll and understands how site works. And "persuading" re-rolls on new users would happen so infrequently it would not trigger any alarm bells.
I like idea of having trigger for winner "request re-roll", so that they don't need to ask for re-roll each single time in comments, we don't need to chase creator to make ticket etc. But automatic re-roll approval - not really.
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I'm not really sure if I understand some of your points. Someone being persuaded to mark a game as received, isn't really a matter of rerolls, right?
Persuasion into rerolls oth could be prevented by confronting the winner with their rights in plain words, before they confirm the reroll request. A simple alert would be sufficient to keep these cases so very rare, that it doesn't really seem like a good reason why all the other requests should be checked manually.
Anyway, I made my (imho helpful) suggestion and it's not up to me to decide.
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Someone being persuaded to mark a game as received, isn't really a matter of rerolls, right?
It shows that users already "bully" newcomers into breaking the site rules. They will surely have even less problem to "bully" them into those automatic re-rolls, as pestering someone for re-roll is not against the rules.
And re-rolls can happen because of so many reason it would not be possible to make short FAQ when to agree on re-roll, and when not. Same with agreeing on giveaway deletion. One thing is when it's winner who requests re-roll. And other is when creator does not want to send game "because they had to wait 1 day already", "because they dislike avatar" "because winner has too many games" "because winner has too high level". Right of the winner is to deny any re-roll request from the creator, if they want to receive their win. Without a reason or explanation.
But writing it like that may sound insensitive towards many situations creators face on everyday basis.
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If both the "asking for re-roll" and "granting permission for re-roll" were automated,
and if that then generated something like a ticket,
and the Support Staff could then review said ticket, marking "Confirm" or "Deny," and give a reason for the decision,
then such a function would save a lot of time for Support.
It would be nice to avoid all of the messaging and chasing people that is currently required of a simple re-roll.
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And I agree with that :D
If we'd have simple "Winner agreed on the re-roll" tick to which we can accept or deny. Or creator getting notification "Winner requested re-roll, do you want to proceed?" which would create re-roll ticket with any comments left by the winner or creator - which we again can accept or deny - it would surely speed things up.
But it can't be automated, especially with all problems with improper regional restrictions, or games not being reported by SteamAPI.
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Well thank you for thanking them.
It's always nice to know someone is pleased and appreciates.
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Good luck in your new roles. It's appreciated. π
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Hi SG, we updated the support team and added 5 new users earlier this week. Please give the new support users below a warm welcome! The team is just short of 30 users right now, and the pending ticket queue has greatly improved thanks to all of their hard work.
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