Let's get our affairs in order, shall we?

[notsure]

And of the 50% non-English players, how many have a smattering of English to rely on?

English players/members of staff cannot be responsible for being fluent in every language in which the game is played.

If there are so many Polish players, they should be able to put forth a few who can moderate or be on staff.

notsure

[SekoETC]

It's not the fault of the English community if Polish players don't join the staff. Maybe the departments need to be advertised more and they could even be made bi-lingual or multi-lingual but that would require people who are willing to translate messages to and from the members who do not know the other language(s). English is spoken by several nationalities while Polish is only spoken by Polish people, so you can't expect everybody to start learning Polish just because it happens to be the most prominent language group in a game that was originally English. If someone wants to then good for them, but this is just a game, in the real world you would benefit much more from knowing Spanish or French or Russian or Chinese.

The fact that people need to join CD in order to get moderation rights might be holding some people back. If it says that the staff functions in English and someone would be perfectly capable of moderating a forum in their own language but could not manage to report their actions in English, they would require a LangD member to translate for them. There's supposed to be at least one capable translator per language group and I'm sure several could be found for Polish to English. But who wants to join staff / stay in the staff when it's full of sleepers and bitching? I think it would be better if people could be given a public vote of confidence and they would be given modding/game developing rights accordingly.

[formerly known as hf]

There's a lack of active forum admins, agreed.
Surly was the first CD chair given forum administration rights, as, at the time I was chair and Rev before, there wasn't any pressing need - most forum administrators were active. We now have no active forum administrators it seems.

That's not neglect you're pointing out there. Until the past six months or so, Cantr's staff have been numerous and active enough that there hasn't been a need (or, as far as I have seen, a need made public) for so many people to have disparate moderation rights. LD stood up a few years back and agreed to take moderation where there was no CD member. I'm not sure why PD weren't given access - again probably due to a lack of activity.

Which is the problem. If there's a lack of moderators where there should be.
But where are the applications? PD and LD shouldn't have to be doing CD's job, sure, but if the issue is as problematic as you suggest - where are the CD applications from the Polish players?

[rconley]

Doug R. wrote:
The default language is English.

There exist Polish irc chans, too, but those suffer from the same lack of designated moderators, and a new segregated yahoo group would not solve this, and Doug taking on the role of English CD himself doesn't seem much improvement either.

Is this really the the right message to send to half our Cantr community?

For goodness sake, would you lay off Doug already and get over it. If you want a Polish group start one. There is nothing wrong with what he is doing and starting an English one if that is what he wants to do. If you want to take the initiative and start a Polish or whatever else group you want to do, go for it. No one is stopping you. But stop using the forum as an attack on him for EVERYTHING he has to say or do because of personal issues. It gets old


As for the staffing issue, it is difficult when our own Personel department consisted of two people. One of which I know hasn't been around. Sleepers and those who get into the departments then lose interest or don't care after seeing the other side of things tends to be a big problem. I don't know how many applications are turned in for each department, but I know of several who have come to me asking if I've heard anything and complaints of those same people not hearing ANY word back. I'm not sure that those accepting apps are even active at this point.

[El_Skwidd]

All,

Marol's quit the game, leaving no active members of the Programming department. We have several competent and active programming aspirants, but they're helpless to do anything.

It seems like that's the immediate problem at hand. Why are the aspirants helpless? Can't they be inducted into the PD without an existing PD member?

Also, not to beat a dead horse, but Yahoo is free. Any language group can set up their own group there, and all it takes is a liason between each language group and the English group to keep the community together. I personally would love to do it, but I'm a silly uneducated American and all I know is English and a modest amount of Spanish. My ethnicity is Polish, but that doesn't count for anything.

Polish isn't the only problem, is it? How many Chinese, Spanish, German, French, la la la la players do we have?

[rconley]

Doug R. wrote:
All,

Marol's quit the game, leaving no active members of the Programming department. We have several competent and active programming aspirants, but they're helpless to do anything.

It seems like that's the immediate problem at hand. Why are the aspirants helpless? Can't they be inducted into the PD without an existing PD member?

No PD cannot induct a new member into the PD. All applications go through a process (providing the people supposedly looking through them are active). I believe it all goes through the Personel department and I believe (might be mistaken) from what I understood at least that all apps are approved / denied by the GAB. Its been my experience in PD that the Pd chair can give rights to things to the aspirants but cannot just add members to the department. It is likely the same with other departments, but that also has to mean we have active people looking over these apps. We've got a lot of sleepers on staff as it is.

It has seemed to me that most staff members lose interest once they actually get on staff. And those that don't, are constantly harrassed and pushed to the point of leaving or not caring themselves. And yes, there is way more than just an issue with Polish. We have many languages with the same issue.

[marginoferror]

Let me speak as a current aspirant:

There are multiple problems. One is, obviously, that we don't have any sort of access to the actual game code or the database. We only have access to a test server, and even that access is partial (I have been stalled for weeks waiting for database access to the test server, although I have partial access to the code).

This problem can be solved by someone with admin access promoting us within the programming department. Marol is one person, and I am sure he would be willing to simply pass on his credentials if he was asked to by the GAB. Probably some members of the GAB also have access? I'm not sure.

Anyway, that problem is pretty solvable. The bigger problem is that programming department aspirants will need a *lot* more training to actually be able to use their access safely. Cantr is not an industry-best-practice programming job. It's an incredibly fragile, tangled mess of PHP. Even a programming aspirant with solid knowledge of PHP, MySQL and Subversion couldn't possibly be expected to step up to the plate and handle all of the tasks expected of a ProgD chair without weeks or months of training, and most of us (especially me) do not necessarily have solid knowledge of the relevant technologies.

And lastly, there is the simple issue of trust: I assume the GAB has concerns - perfectly understandable concerns - about handing over the keys to the game to people they barely know. Part of the long aspirant apprenticeship is to let the ProgD mentor get to know the aspirants and decide whether they can handle the responsibility. Without someone to take over that role, giving aspirants admin access might be an unacceptable risk. Of course, if *no-one* has admin access, then that in itself is an unacceptable risk.

I don't see an easy solution here. Either marol decides to come back, or another former member of ProgD does, or Cantr's future is in serious jeopardy. As we all are reminded every time we look at our player pages, Cantr's present is in serious jeopardy too.

[Pilot]

Which is the problem. If there's a lack of moderators where there should be.
But where are the applications? PD and LD shouldn't have to be doing CD's job, sure, but if the issue is as problematic as you suggest - where are the CD applications from the Polish players?

Mine, as well of the ones of many other players I know of, is lost in cyberspace.

The only staff members I find when needed to moderate the Spanish forum, are those of PD (Randi and Sanchez) and of CD (Hermi and Anti) and I'm very grateful for their work. In every case I took the initiative and supplied the translations because these staff members don't have the time or the Spanish knowledge to take care of it alone.

There are many players willing to donate their time to help in the different areas but there is a lack of interest of Personal Department to attend their applications.

I'm on LD and PD because I'm persistent and still had to poke some heads to make myself noticed and I have to say I wasn't hired using the standard channels because those didn't work for me.

I don't think making an alternate forum will solve the problem we have at the moment. Washing our hands or turning our heads is no good either.

We need to find a way to solve the fact that marol is not here, make noise so GAB/C will have to decide in the matter ASAP.

[BarbaricAvatar]

IRC is already safe (i.e. off-server), but accessibility is a problem. I still maintain that IRC is one of the last bastions of public user-unfriendliness left in the computer world, a place that relies on codes to work like an old DOS machine. If the link to the IRC goes down on the Cantr main page, I don't have a clue as to how to find and access it.

I found a way!

Go here: http://gogloom.com/Newnet/cantr/
And click on the blue 'online chat'.
New way into the Cantr irc! Nothing more than a browser is required!

[formerly known as hf]

Which is the problem. If there's a lack of moderators where there should be.
But where are the applications? PD and LD shouldn't have to be doing CD's job, sure, but if the issue is as problematic as you suggest - where are the CD applications from the Polish players?

Mine, as well of the ones of many other players I know of, is lost in cyberspace.

Hm. I knew there were issues, but had assumed there was still an active personnel member of staff.

This is where I start to complain a bit about the bureacracy of the staff setup. I moaned a little about this before, as it can get in the way. It's not just in the way but brings things crashing down if the bureacracy requires input from chairpeople and game admins who aren't active...

[Tiamo]

Hmm, the staff problems look much like the problems within Cantr itself, where leaders fall asleep without handing over the keys, leaving their community in chaos.

This is mainly a matter of organizing things properly. If staff members would fall asleep this would have to be recognized (how?), those staff members will have to be unseated (by whom?) and be replaced by someone active.
Also, the distribution of rights should be in such a way that there is at least one (preferably more) staff member serving as a backup for every key staff position (the department chairs), even if not actively involved in that task/department.
But most important: there should be an active leader (with backups!!!!) who makes sure things keep going smoothly, solving (or preventing) problems like the ones that caused the withdrawal of rconley, marol, seko and probably others. It seems the absence of such a person is the main reason for the current chaos.

[Chris]

I don't know the details of Cantr's staff departments, but it sounds like a tangled mess. I don't see why someone with Marol's stature doesn't have the power to ban a forum abuser. Let the people who do stuff do it, and everyone else stay out of their way. One warning should be plenty, and then (unless it's a minor offense) it's goodbye, have your fun somewhere else.

[trexdino]

I joined it, and I too hope we won't have to use it. Marlo, if you are reading this thread, we miss you and appreciate you. Please come back!

[Cdls]

I have my own web server that will not be going down any time soon and am willing to allocate space and install a forum if there are people interested in an actual "forum" type backup. The web server is hosted professionally and not on my own system and they have an uptime guarantee of 99.99% and I have not experienced one problem since going with them.



Secondly, if Jos is not wanting, willing or able to continue on this "project" is there any possibility of releasing rights to it to someone wanting to see it continued?

[wichita]

Anybody feels like they could do a more active job of recruiting and managing the staff is more than welcome to apply for a PerD position. Please. We need someone in there handling that at the moment.

There have also been some technical issues that were holding us back in receiving and handling apps. Marol was working on those before he quit.


I am not going to write much more, since I don't just want to rant too much. The finger pointing at the "English community" for not embracing (or are we expected to succumb to) the non-English speaking communities is absolutely inappropriate and disrespectful in its own right. I'm sick of reading it. We've reached out and we've had Polish speaking staff on board whenever possible. And you know what? They worked about as effectively as the English staff. And do you know why? I guess it's because we're all equal human beings. Huh. Fancy that.

I personally tried to get more involved with the Polish community to help include them, but unfortunately I have real life obligations that occasionally get in the way of me spending the fifteen hours a day it will take for me to work on this game and perform to the expectations and satisfaction of some people out there.

Maybe it's time I finally march off in an unappreciated huff of too. Seems to be the popular thing to do lately.



Having said that, there should be no problem with setting up the backup message board.