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Great post Jeff!
Jeff wrote:Bwahahaha! Computer support? Me? Jeff – you’ve gone off your nut! CC is fine, and of course if I see something I can help with elsewhere I certainly will.Well…Computer support is not really my cup of tea. The only reason I post in there is if I can relate to one’s computer troubles, offer a suggestion, and -maybe- help them a little (if the problem is very minor). I’m really not that good at computer support though, but I am go for that CC one. 😉
RabidKitten once said that BBB is a place where people come for help with their IM/Computer…etc. , we help them and they leave for good. Something like that, I couldn’t find her post. So what we need to do, is change our image a bit. (To keep member’s coming back, feel welcomed, and enjoy this site even more.)
Again, I would like to say that I am interested in the social networking part if we add it. Offering some suggestions, etc… I will try my best to post in the new forum sections, reply, etc. I think that the forums that MySpace has are pretty interesting. (Note: I am not recommending that there be a forum section telling people how to edit their profiles, or use myspace. I am talking about the other forum sections that the myspace site has.)
But, if we want this “re-vamped” version of bigblueball to work, we will NEED to tweak or image a bit. Really. The whole, “all IM, all the time” feel on our home page needs to be beefed up a bit… Maybe a “Vote on our latest poll!” or “Did you see the latest LOST? See who did in our Television forum!” and really strive to keep that approach alive…some things like that on our home page might suffice. New slogan maybe? All I know is that we will need something that changes our image a bit. We need to start focusing on fun things! :p (To keep bringing members back and create a better sense of community). But still keep our identity as an IM powerhouse.
I really liked these ideas that Dave posted while he was on staff: https://bigblueball.com/forums/staff-room/40157-fixing-bigblueball-3.html (The “fixing bigblueball” post). They were, in my opinion, excellent ideas. It’s good to see that we have already implemented some of them. 🙂
Just my current view and standing on the situation is all…
Wow, Jeff and Dermot, you guys really hit it on the head. Good work as always. =P Nice to see everyone pitching ideas and coming up with plans. 🙂
Its took me by surprise that I’ve been put on the list of people not being active :/ Although I may have less posts, I’ve been lurking frequently (My last visited will prove that). If there are topics where I have nothing to say or what I would say has already been said, I won’t say anything. Don’t think that should be seen as a bad thing?
I would quite like to stay on the team, and I am very happy to help our users with general computer troubles and Windows Live Messenger. I am also wondering if I could be considered for the social networking subforum, if it is created, because I’m a regular user of bebo, facebook and myspace.
all the best,
stig
If we are going to add a PDA/Blackberry forum, I’d love to start a project for Blackberry. I’ve been using once since November, and I’m still learning the ropes, but there is a lot of usage on it now for IM (Blackberry Messenger) along with social networking.
Stigmata;226365 wrote:Its took me by surprise that I’ve been put on the list of people not being active :/ Although I may have less posts, I’ve been lurking frequently (My last visited will prove that). If there are topics where I have nothing to say or what I would say has already been said, I won’t say anything. Don’t think that should be seen as a bad thing?I would quite like to stay on the team, and I am very happy to help our users with general computer troubles and Windows Live Messenger. I am also wondering if I could be considered for the social networking subforum, if it is created, because I’m a regular user of bebo, facebook and myspace.
Thanks for the response, Stigmata. You were in that middle area (I was looking mainly at the 30 day post count), but it’s good to know your interested in participating. As you can see, I’m looking at reinvigorating things. Along with that, I’ll be looking at participation level (not just “watching over” the forums). I think as things pick up, there will naturally be more opportunities to jump in discuss, but until then, it may take us (the staff as a whole) to stir things up.
MrOats;226337 wrote:Great post Jeff!Well…Computer support is not really my cup of tea. The only reason I post in there is if I can relate to one’s computer troubles, offer a suggestion, and -maybe- help them a little (if the problem is very minor). I’m really not that good at computer support though, but I am go for that CC one. 😉
RabidKitten once said that BBB is a place where people come for help with their IM/Computer…etc. , we help them and they leave for good. Something like that, I couldn’t find her post. So what we need to do, is change our image a bit. (To keep member’s coming back, feel welcomed, and enjoy this site even more.)
Again, I would like to say that I am interested in the social networking part if we add it. Offering some suggestions, etc… I will try my best to post in the new forum sections, reply, etc. I think that the forums that MySpace has are pretty interesting. (Note: I am not recommending that there be a forum section telling people how to edit their profiles, or use myspace. I am talking about the other forum sections that the myspace site has.)
Thanks MrOats! I agree with pretty much everything you said. Hopefully you will see I’ve picked things up a bit. Expect more of that from me. There are some things that definitely need to change, and this is just the beginning.
Ven0m;226341 wrote:Wow, Jeff and Dermot, you guys really hit it on the head. Good work as always. =P Nice to see everyone pitching ideas and coming up with plans. 🙂Thanks Ven0m! I agree — good to see and hear from everyone. By the way, I got your contact add request and you’re now on my WLM contact list.
detn8r;226377 wrote:If we are going to add a PDA/Blackberry forum, I’d love to start a project for Blackberry. I’ve been using once since November, and I’m still learning the ropes, but there is a lot of usage on it now for IM (Blackberry Messenger) along with social networking.Excellent, detn8r! I think mobile is a natural area to expand (who here doesn’t have a mobile phone???).
I’ve got my first exam in Spanish 2 tomorrow night, so I’ve gotta go study, but I’ll be back…
MrOats, quoted by Jeff wrote:Thanks MrOats! I agree with pretty much everything you said. Hopefully you will see I’ve picked things up a bit. Expect more of that from me. There are some things that definitely need to change, and this is just the beginning.I have seen you picking up things a bit and appreciate it. Thanks. 🙂
And good luck with that Spanish exam. 😉
A reminder… I gave five staffers until 18-Feb to let me know if they wanted to stay on. I also sent them each a PM. I’ve only heard from one so far (Stigmata). If you are one of the five and want to remain on staff, you’ll need to reply. If you’re no longer interested, that’s fine, but please let me know.
Now for the business of staff organization…
I’ve been struggling with how to structure things. I mentioned that I was planning to go back to the Team Leaders concept, because I was concerned about the lack of coverage in certain areas. I still want to make sure all our bases are covered, but I’m leaning away from Team Leaders.
The reason is that many of you have expertise and interest that spans many areas. I don’t want to hold anyone back if they want to jump in and get involved or feel constrained because “that’s not their area.”
Instead, I’m going to stick with a role-based permissions, similar to what they do at Neowin.
Here’s what they use:
Quote:Administrator
This should be obvious, there are 4 administrators on Neowin, 2 site founders Marcel and Myself, Daniel (was the first staffer we took on and was promoted to this in early 2001) and our American investor Brad Wardell aka FrogboySupervisor
The Supervisor group was created just over 2 years ago to take the load off the admins, the staff selected (usually a group of no more than 5) are long term trusted staff. They are given administrator permissions and can make operational decisions without fear of being over ruled by the admin group. This group also has an ops forum and many decisions are talked about and decided between admins and supervisors with the help of developers.Public Relations
This group consists of one person, that is Marshalus. He is the voice on most legal areas and the first point of reference when contacting third parties on behalf of Neowin, he is also communications officer and has setup our Jabber system for staff Instant Messaging service.Development
This group consists of coders and developers for all aspects of behind the scenes work at Neowin, including image creation. This group has exclusive access to our servers.Global Mod
This group is another name for “Super Moderator” meaning that anyone in this group can moderate anywhere including news comments.Moderator
This group contains staff that are usually new to the staff and have been given a specific forum or number of forums to moderate exclusively, they cannot moderate everywhere so we try to keep this group small. They also have permissions to edit News comments.News Staff
This group is our news editors, anyone in this group may not moderate the forums unless they have been given a secondary group which allows this.Chat Mod
This group is for IRC moderators.Non Staff
Veteran
This is where ex staffers go that have contributed a lot to Neowin. Not all ex staffers go here, if they leave on bad terms or simply did not deliver while on staff then they are instead returned to Registered.+Subscriber
The people in this group paid for additional privileges and enhanced service, or just to support Neowin financially!+Most Valued Contributor
This group was selected exclusively by the Neowin staff, it is a group of members who the staff felt have been model members and very helpful to existing or new members of Neowin.I’m looking at a simplified version of this, but wanted your feedback.
Most of the existing staff would probably fall into the Global Moderator category. I would probably go back to being the sole Administrator, and detn8r would be a Supervisor.
We wouldn’t need the Developer, Public Relations, News Staff or Chat Moderator groups (at least, not for now).
What about expertise? I’m open to suggestions for identifying expertise. You might take a look at the Sitepoint forums, where they have an annual member poll to identify the “Best _____” in various categories of expertise. For example, in the topic I linked, the poster was a staff member (an “Advisor”) as well as “Database Guru of the year 2007.” It would be neat if we could do something similar later this year… (AIM Guru, Google Talk Guru, Trillian Astra Guru… etc.).
Anyhow, give me your feedback as quickly as possible, because I’m interested in getting this going!!
To be honest, It looks a little congested to me. (The whole neowin idea). But the version that you suggested, (Global Moderators, Administrator, Supervisor) sound pretty effective for BBB.
The SitePoint “Of the Years” sound very interesting. Maybe an image showing the members award details could go under/near their avatar?
MrOats;226471 wrote:To be honest, It looks a little congested to me. (The whole neowin idea). But the version that you suggested, (Global Moderators, Administrator, Supervisor) sound pretty effective for BBB.I agree that the Neowin format is overkill for us right now. That’s why basically we’d have a “flat” structure. It can always get more complicated when we need it to. 😉
MrOats;226471 wrote:The SitePoint “Of the Years” sound very interesting. Maybe an image showing the members award details could go under/near their avatar?Here’s an example of how it looks:
[attach]1256[/attach]
Jeff wrote:Here’s an example of how it looks:Yes, that looks very nice. Although we may need to do some tweaking to give a “BBB Feel” to it. (Something similar to our staff badges).
…I don’t have Photoshop or Illustrator… So only ideas will come from me so far. 😉
I think this layout will work perfect. It’s much more apparent and manageable. I must say though, if we look into “of the year,month,whatever” a second button is ugly. We’d have to work on that 😉
I think this structure sounds good…but what happened to the “Editor” who was going to collect articles of sorts for publication? Has that been scrapped? I think it was an awesome idea….
I’d also like to toss out a suggestion, which would likely work best on a voluntary basis. As some of you know, I’m friends with Eagle_Kiwi and we generally spend time gaming together with different friends each week. This weekend, we had a small group of people tossing around possibilities and solutions to different problems each were having with Java, program installations on Vista, Ad-Aware errors etc. We realized, computer geeks that we are, it was actually much more fun troubleshooting together than gaming. I’ve also had some truly wonderful text conversations with Philip that have helped me sort through things much better than if I were left to ponder them on my own.
It might encourage a sense of “team” if we were able to coordinate something like that for the staff on BBB. Perhaps a time or 2 each week (or month, or even “as needed”) when 1 staffer would be willing to host a voice conference (Paltalk and YH voice conference are both viable options) or text only conference (WLM and YH both have good facilities for multiple party text conversations) where other staff could come and voice/text their ideas or problems. Voice is by no means a requirement, it just tends to flow a bit faster.
I realize we have people all over the world and timing can be difficult at best. But sometimes solving a problem for a member or visitor might be accomplished faster, and it might offer a way for moderators to be in closer agreement on ideas they’d like to present to the supervisor or administrator. Not to mention, it ‘s just a really good opportunity to learn from each other.
Just thought I’d toss the idea out. Even if it’s never “officially” endorsed I’d be eager to see if anyone else is interested at all. I’d certainly be willing to coordinate at least some if anyone wants to.
-Doris-
patndoris;226483 wrote:I think this structure sounds good…but what happened to the “Editor” who was going to collect articles of sorts for publication? Has that been scrapped? I think it was an awesome idea….I’m glad you raised that question. I also think it’s a good idea. Right now anyone can create a news post. If they are not on staff, it gets moderated before it goes live, so technically, we’re all news editors. But maybe it would be better to have specific people identified for that role. Any thoughts from other staffers on the news editor role?
patndoris;226483 wrote:I’d also like to toss out a suggestion, which would likely work best on a voluntary basis. As some of you know, I’m friends with Eagle_Kiwi and we generally spend time gaming together with different friends each week. This weekend, we had a small group of people tossing around possibilities and solutions to different problems each were having with Java, program installations on Vista, Ad-Aware errors etc. We realized, computer geeks that we are, it was actually much more fun troubleshooting together than gaming. I’ve also had some truly wonderful text conversations with Philip that have helped me sort through things much better than if I were left to ponder them on my own.It might encourage a sense of “team” if we were able to coordinate something like that for the staff on BBB. Perhaps a time or 2 each week (or month, or even “as needed”) when 1 staffer would be willing to host a voice conference (Paltalk and YH voice conference are both viable options) or text only conference (WLM and YH both have good facilities for multiple party text conversations) where other staff could come and voice/text their ideas or problems. Voice is by no means a requirement, it just tends to flow a bit faster.
I realize we have people all over the world and timing can be difficult at best. But sometimes solving a problem for a member or visitor might be accomplished faster, and it might offer a way for moderators to be in closer agreement on ideas they’d like to present to the supervisor or administrator. Not to mention, it ‘s just a really good opportunity to learn from each other.
Just thought I’d toss the idea out. Even if it’s never “officially” endorsed I’d be eager to see if anyone else is interested at all. I’d certainly be willing to coordinate at least some if anyone wants to.
-Doris-
I think it’s a great idea. Let’s do it! I did something like this last night, although it wasn’t specifically focused on troubleshooting. I posted a notice in the forum that “the office was open” and that I would be in the #bigblueball channel for the next few hours. A number of people (some staff, some not) dropped in on what is otherwise a pretty dead channel.
You or anyone else could do the same thing, using Skype, Y!, WLM, our IRC channel, a Meebo Room or whatever makes sense. Ideally… it would be nice to give advance notice, like “Join us for a live Yahoo Messenger troubleshooting session this Thursday beginning at 7pm EST…” or whatever.
And thanks for the response! 🙂
I hadn’t responded to this thread because I have been thinking about what to do. Thus why I log in everyday here, but hadn’t posted anything so far.
I decide to hang my hat 🙁 The reasons won’t be surprising I’m sure..
One thing is that I’m not as available as I used to be in the past, where I would participate like crazy and even came #1 in staff posts at times :p
The other reason is that I don’t feel the need/urge to be the staffer that I once was, probably cause all the issues in my area (msn) have been answered/solved nowadays.
That’s why I would post more on the Off Topic section lately, which is still not very developed in my opinion as I’d like to see much much more material in it.I also see that most of the staff’s expertise area is WLM/MSN and I don’t think I fit in there anymore. I’m sure the “younger” staff will do a great job there.
It’s just that generally I’m not attracted to it as I was so.. A little bit of all the above create the reason of why I’d like to retire.
I’ll still be around of course, but it’s time for new blood to join the fun. I’ve been staff for around 3 years and I’ve got along with -almost- everyone just fine and dandy and I know how great you guys are.
When I receive e-mails, even these days, from random bbb members asking me about a WLM issue, I feel honored because I know that my work here did not pass by unnoticed.BBB rocks 😎
George, I, for one, am sorry to hear that you intend to retire from BBB. If I remember correctly, you were the one who responded quickly to my pleas for help when I first posted in BBB. And “younger staff?” I’m 47, young man 😀 .
Jokes aside, it has been good to know you, and I hope to see you lurking and posting in the CC area. Hopefully BBB will be expanding CC this year, so I’m sure you will find the opportunity to post every now and then.
Till then, yassou, my friend.
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