Staff Status bar

[Doug R.]

I was inspired by the old gaming meters that tell you how good or bad your internet connection is.

Basically, I propose a three color meter (green/yellow/red) that would appear next to a staff member's name on the Department page. The color would be set by the staff member from their account settings, and the color would reflect their level of availability for staff work:

Green: Ready and waiting for something to do.
Yellow: Is either occupied with current staff tasks or facing a deficit of available time.
Red: More or less inactive.

This graphic could either be visible only to other staff, or could be made visible to everyone.

[theguy]

sounds good

[Piscator]

Interesting. I see a risk of people forgetting to change their status when they hit a period of little free time though. On the other hand, I don't see a good way to automatically detect one's availability.

Instead of having a separate bar, could we perhaps just colour out the names, just like it is done now to show whose accounts timed out?

[SekoETC]

Maybe there should be some sort of a button for "I'm looking for something to do/I did something staff related today" and it would increment a counter when you click on it, and the counter would automatically decrease each day so that your status will go yellow and red if you haven't clicked it in a while.

[Piscator]

Thought about something like that, too, but I guess few people would care about it, so it wouldn't be very accurate either.

[Doug R.]

Interesting. I see a risk of people forgetting to change their status when they hit a period of little free time though. On the other hand, I don't see a good way to automatically detect one's availability.

Yes. It would be more for people to say when they're not available, than for when they are.

A time clock concept would be pretty good too. When you do staff work, you punch in and punch out somehow. It would have to be easy to do though.

[Piscator]

Maybe it could be linked to the use of the staff tools. Wouldn't work for CD and, I assume MD, though.

[Doug R.]

It wouldn't work for anyone. 90% of staff work is staring at a screen, or writing, not clicking links.

[catpurr]

Remembers me of Wikipedias Stressometer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Wstress3d

[chase02]

It wouldn't work for anyone. 90% of staff work is staring at a screen, or writing, not clicking links.

Yeah, I was going to suggest automatically 'decaying' the traffic light based on when they last logged in, or something that staff do regularly..

[Snake_byte]

I'm not staff (yet ) but I think this is a good idea because it lets the players know who is available so that we don't over-burden any one staff member.