Forum Staff Roles

[TechAngel85]

Member Groups

 
Staff
Role-based member groups with authorization to perform administrative tasks on the site.
 
Administrator
Project leadership, coordination, development, guidance to lower staff roles, and website/community administrators

Step Admin
Project leadership, coordination, guidance to lower staff roles

Uber Moderator
Supervising moderators across all forums, all moderation tasks

Moderator
Limited-authority moderators over select forums

Step Curator
This group includes members who help curator our official Guides.
 
 
Members
Members can belong to more than a single group. In such cases, the member can indicate his/her preferred group label. Just send one of the staff a PM.

Watcher
This is the default, limited-permission group for new members. Members will be promoted to 'Citizen' once they have contributed 10 or more valid posts.

Citizen
Our standard members, fully fledged, validated and bestowed all reasonable rights as the name indicates.
 
VIP-Supporter
Members who have substantially contributed and supported Step in terms of project work and/or ≥ $50 in donations. Any good-standing member that contributes 2,000 or more posts will automatically be promoted to this group.
 
Mod Author
If a member is the verified author of one or more mods on the Nexus or any other valid mod-provisioning platform, they belong to this group.
 
'XYZ' Team
Special members that support endeavors indirectly related to Step. Examples include administrators of Step-hosted, 3rd-party guides and content.
 
Founder
Previously, the original creators and maintainers of STEP that have since departed or disappeared into the unknown. They have a decorative member title and some additional permissions if/when they return.

---

Joining our staff

All users who are interested in becoming more involved with the Step Projects are encouraged simply "dive into" our community. Become active on the forums, help users with questions, write some wiki content, etc. We are a community-based site, therefore, users don't have to be staff to help out! However, those that are interested in a deeper dive should know...90% of users that offer help have no knowledge of wiki development or mod development, or are fairly new to our Community. These users are what we would consider our "front line workers" and will usually be sent along a path to gain experience. The first two roles are:

1. Become a Staff member. More specially, a Mod Tester; which only requires users to have STEP installed on a profile without any added mods. This role's only responsibility is to test mods being suggested by the community within that STEP profile, determine if it fits the STEP Mandate, and post the findings. Bug testing the Guides also fall within this role. This can involve anything from taking comparison screenshots to playing through parts of the game for testing mod changes. Once staff gain some experience within this role, then they can be considered for higher roles with more involvement. Experience users will often gain is determined by how much the user desires to learn. Skills with the modding tools (e.g. CK, xEdit, xLODGen, DynDOLOD, etc.) are often gained as these are recommend tools of our trade that of the most useful for testers. Skills with them aren't required, but users expect to have to use them eventually for testing and troubleshooting.
   
   It should be noted that 99% of users who take up this role see the work involved, and end up MIA. We say this to be honest and real. Testing is not glamorous work, but it's work that all of the staff have done at some point because all staff beyond this role are expected to know how to test mods and be involved within that process. It's the foundation of what we do. Unless the user has special skills, such as coding, we've seen that users who can't cut it in this role, will not be able to contribute much to roles that are more involved with Project. Therefore, the Staff role is really considered our "proving ground" for new staff members without special skill sets.
    
2. The next step beyond testing, is to become a Moderator. This role's responsibility is to help moderate the forums and answer support questions. Users considered for this role usually have spent some time within our forum community, have had little negative behaviors, and have some knowledge of the Project (experience gained from testing). Therefore, these users are members of the community who have show themselves mature and trustworthy enough to handle moderation tasks. Users of this role are also required to be familiar with our Community Citizenship Guidelines, else they wouldn't be very effective moderators as they are entrusted to handle all types of forum moderation, including passing out Warnings when appropriate.

All level of staff are encouraged to create and update wiki content. Only once staff members have been around for a while, gained some experience, shown responsibility, and shown interest in diving deeper into the Project will they be promoted into "leadership" roles; Uber Moderator, Project Staff, and Admin. These positions have higher-level access to the site, tools, and sensitive Project stuff. Therefore, it's obvious the members of these roles would be well respected and trusted members of our community.

Users who are still interested in diving deeper into the Step Projects by taking up a staff role, please PM one of the Admin. 

[z929669]

We made a couple of edits to the info in the OP