The risk of allowing admins who will only be on to bannu.

[ChirpGoesTheBird]

Note: I go into this making a note that I am a bit nit-picky, and this is less me making a suggestion and more of me bringing up a topic that probably needs to be brought up.
Tl;dr, absent admins allow idle interloping. AAAII if you will.

I know it sounds like a bit of a petty qualm, but I've noticed that there are a lot of admin applications (And admins) from people who are rarely ever on. Which, at first glance, isn't much of a problem, but can be if you take a closer look.
If a non-admin is rarely ever on, and applies for adminship; from what I've seen at least, chances are they'd rather be an admin than a player.
And, as Jer made fairly clear in the admin guidelines, isn't a good thing. Because then people just associate you with a ban-hammer. And I want your discussion and opinions on that.

On another note, there are a lot of.. Very absent admins. Those who are rarely ever on, or take LONG breaks before coming back. And, just my personal opinion, these admins should be put back to the Trial-Admin state. Because things change on VORE. Things change a lot. The player-base becomes different, and I've witnessed firsthand what's acceptable become different. Things become problems and thus the rules on them are reinforced, and some things become less of a problem, and thus the strictness of those rules are lowered.
The rules are not set in stone, and can change; as we all know.
My point here being: With how often the server changes and shifts, in both rules, admins, and player-base, shouldn't it be necessary that an admin who's been away for some time to be put in the back-seat to have a glance at how things have adjusted?
I am by no means going "ADMUNS HAVE UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH CAUSE THEM TO NEED TO LEAVE FOR SOME TIME NEED TO STRIP THEM OF RANK"
But rather just that, when I took my.. Ehh, 4-ish month break from VORE, I was confused when I came back, because it had changed quite a bit. Not for the better or the worse, but things were different to the way they had been. I also want your discussions and opinion on this.

And a last note, if you think I am just getting overworked about what amounts to a small problem, or just being whiny, please tell me. Preferably over PM. Because if that's so, I really would like to know. I know that I can see problems as bigger than they are sometime.

[rikaru19]

I personally think the admin team should be in contact via Skype to discuss issues like this, rather than resort to demoting due to inactivity. Real life can be a huge bitch sometimes so it isn't fair to do this at all.

[antsnap2]

First I think your concerns are fine and warranted, so don't stress about that. :3

Retired admins are a thing. Kisuke still pops up now and then. Admins absent for a super long time should be demoted to that imo, instead of trial. I think retiredmins only get ban powers, and since they are experienced they tend not to use them willy nilly.

I share your concern about the slew of admin apps from faces I've never seen before. We also accept some apps because they look good in terms of the actual content, but if you look at their player history they are here maybe a couple hours every other week. Yeah sure, as an Admin they will be on more but...

[ChirpGoesTheBird]

I personally think the admin team should be in contact via Skype to discuss issues like this, rather than resort to demoting due to inactivity. Real life can be a huge bitch sometimes so it isn't fair to do this at all.

I said fairly clearly not to demote them. Just have them take a bit of a break, while they see if / how things have changed, wether that process be a week-long or a month-long. When an admin's gone for a year, I feel like the system is neglected when they come back and are still in the exact same power-standing as they were the day they left. And I know new-ish players don't like seeing random admins they don't know popping out of nowhere and acting like they're veterans.

[Wickedtemp]

I actually had a conversation about this a little while back.

To summarize? I'd support demoting inactive admins (like... 3-5 months of inactivity?) to "Retired Staff". And I'm not talking about "Oh, hey, here's my bi-monthly visit to the server!" kind of activity. Glerm, for example. I hope I don't come off as sounding harsh or rude, that isn't my intention at all... But when they finally came back a week or so ago, I didn't even know who they were. I mean, I hadn't ever seen Arokha in-game, but at least they were active on the forums so I at the very least knew they existed. Then, I look at the staff online and... there's someone I had never seen nor heard of before. I asked another player, they didn't know either. So, I don't know how long their hiatus was, but I've been playing on VS somewhat regularly for like... around six months, and I hadn't ever seen them.

Bay12 had this same issue for a while, and that --along with a few other issues with communication within Staff and Staff-to-playerbase communication-- lead to many, many problems. It snowballed until I think a Head admin resigned, another head-admin stepped down to just 'normal' admin, a couple admins resigned as well. Also, another Head admin (who I also didn't even know existed because they quite literally never logged on to the server in the year that I had been playing) finally came back, surprised that their server was having communication issues when they themselves were barely even active.

Admin inactivity can kill servers. Right now, it isn't too bad here, and honestly I'd say that most of the admin team is doing a fairly decent job of being active. But this is the sort of thing that needs to be handled the moment we see signs of it, so as to avoid it snowballing into larger issues.

[Aces]

I already have a policy of removing admins who have been inactive for too long. Keep in mind, we have a Skype group and a Discord group (we use the Discord group now--Discord is best for contacting us now), but any time I notice admins lacking in their duties for more than 3 months, I demote them to "Retired."

Glerm I have to check in on but Arokha is extremely active on the development side of things. Other admins have been quite active otherwise.

[antsnap2]

I already have a policy of removing admins who have been inactive for too long. Keep in mind, we have a Skype group and a Discord group (we use the Discord group now--Discord is best for contacting us now), but any time I notice admins lacking in their duties for more than 3 months, I demote them to "Retired."

Glerm I have to check in on but Arokha is extremely active on the development side of things. Other admins have been quite active otherwise.

Yeah. If you are an admin, not super active, but a SUPER active coder then it's fine IMO. The reason being is that if they are active coding, they are probably on Skype/Discord, and can be reached when a griefer does things.

[ChirpGoesTheBird]

I already have a policy of removing admins who have been inactive for too long. Keep in mind, we have a Skype group and a Discord group (we use the Discord group now--Discord is best for contacting us now), but any time I notice admins lacking in their duties for more than 3 months, I demote them to "Retired."

Glerm I have to check in on but Arokha is extremely active on the development side of things. Other admins have been quite active otherwise.

But if they're on once every five months for the server, and actively coding, shouldn't they be coders, rather than people who're in charge of managing the playerbase that they don't interact with? It hurts general staff credibility when a player who's been playing for 3-6 months is still learning new admin names.

[Aces]

I already have a policy of removing admins who have been inactive for too long. Keep in mind, we have a Skype group and a Discord group (we use the Discord group now--Discord is best for contacting us now), but any time I notice admins lacking in their duties for more than 3 months, I demote them to "Retired."

Glerm I have to check in on but Arokha is extremely active on the development side of things. Other admins have been quite active otherwise.

But if they're on once every five months for the server, and actively coding, shouldn't they be coders, rather than people who're in charge of managing the playerbase that they don't interact with? It hurts general staff credibility when a player who's been playing for 3-6 months is still learning new admin names.

Not always, no. If they are still able and available to jump in-server and respond to problems, they should be allowed to do so. I see no purpose in strictly keeping admins and developers separate like other communities since all this ever seems to do is create unnecessary conflict.

[antsnap2]

Not always, no. If they are still able and available to jump in-server and respond to problems, they should be allowed to do so. I see no purpose in strictly keeping admins and developers separate like other communities since all this ever seems to do is create unnecessary conflict.

Death of Baystation was due in part to this right? Coders had a bunch of features but admins/bosses wanted them implemented slowly with this insane development schedule. Least we have Polaris though.