Community champion?
Roy made some excellent points on new people and how they may post in the wrong place even if the post is not relevant to the posts prior too it over on the get satisfaction support forum.
Apparently a community champion has tools to move these posts to there own post string.
With the amount of new members joining since next gen launched and the amount of traffic increasing to the forum surely the forum would be better organised if you recruit some more community champions.
Keith at the end of the day can't do this alone because of the massive increase in traffic and he would certainly struggle to be on the forum 24/7. Surely now is the time to make a change.
https://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisf...
Apparently a community champion has tools to move these posts to there own post string.
With the amount of new members joining since next gen launched and the amount of traffic increasing to the forum surely the forum would be better organised if you recruit some more community champions.
Keith at the end of the day can't do this alone because of the massive increase in traffic and he would certainly struggle to be on the forum 24/7. Surely now is the time to make a change.
https://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisf...
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Comments
- providing the person a champion badge (next to their name on the forum) and halo/border around their avatar
- potentially constrain the way in which that person interacts with the forum, i.e. one must consider more carefully what one writes, the tone one uses and the image you present
The first of these is of limited value to people and the second is what would typically impact on some of the other long standing and helpful members of the community such that they may prefer not to be a champion and thus continue to maintain their strong voice and style.In general YouView do the moderation and management of the forum, and this is ably done by Sanj and Phil. That YouView expect and do manage the forum is a good thing and I would not want to see them step back and leave it to the members to run as the official voice and presence is key.
There is a status (for non-employees) above champion and that is even more rare. A champion can be granted a management seat which gives more access to additional features. YouView have placed significant trust in me by granting me that access. The primary original reason for granting me that access was to work around limitations of the GetSat system and allow me to maintain the consolidated lists (i.e. to be able to edit my own posts when others can only edit their own posts until someone else follows on or likes it). A management seat does provide access to some moderation tools but that is not the primary reason I have been given this privilege and hence not something I use in general (although I will do occasionally when there is a clear action and it is outside of times that YouView staff might get to it quickly).
Forking replies or comments on other topics can be a good way to start a new topic when someone is really posting in the wrong place. It is a crude feature (as implemented by GetSat) though so all one is doing is forking out a post to start a topic. As such it is not a tool that allows for significant tidying and management, e.g. one could not shuffle around large numbers of posts between the various next gen feedback topics in the hope of getting people to where they would ideally be and thus improve the order of the forum. Given the limitations of the fork feature it is almost never used on this forum.
Ultimately as I've noted elsewhere there is general agreement that the GetSat system is sub-optimal (for the needs of this community), particularly when the forum is busy or has a large number of new users, and the likely best longer term solution will be a switch to another forum system. I would not expect that to happen any time soon though and would expect to see the issue with next gen addressed first.
Keith is a great Champion for us and in many ways is difficult to live up to. We will be considering potential champions but aren't ready to make that decision just yet.
We'd also like to give more of our time to the community to help keep the forum in shape and will be looking to improve on this in the near future.
We now have Sarah, very capably filling the shoes that Sanj stepped out of upon his well-deserved promotion, and adopting a rather more proactive style than Sanj did so that we now have more visible moderation going on than ever before.
And now that the flood of complaints from outraged recipients of an unwanted NextGen update has slowed to a trickle of disgruntled murmurings, the forum is anyway almost back to normal.
One might also wish to consider if others were champions then they would most likely be expected to moderate the robustness of their engagement on occasions and that may be to the detriment of the community in the longer term.
https://community.youview.com/youview/topics/youviews_first_champion
- the GetSat platform (and similar) are put in place by companies (in part) to drive peer to peer conversation and support and thus reduce the burden on the company. In part that also equates to letting the users self regulate rather than offer extensive moderation or others to do so around the clock.
- champion status provides no privileged access at all, it is just a badge/title
- to perform any moderator type functions (delete posts, edit posts, change categories, block users etc) requires a management seat/license. These are normally assigned to employees but on rare occasions can be assigned to a (special) champion.
From that one might conclude:As noted before though, champions just get a badge and that is that. It is very rare for non employees to be given moderator access on such a forum and if used for active people management (either overtly or covertly) would likely change the nature of their involvement and further limit what they can effectively say as a normal member.
A different point to wonder might thus really be what sort of forum management is needed and wanted. Those may be the same thing but could equally be different. We have seen some robust engagement between various members of late ranging across fairly new people, long standing regular contributors, and semi-dormant well respected long term members. In such a case would members expect to see moderator actions, i.e. for all one knows some or all of those people may have been reached out to and offered some guidance or equally they may have all been seen to be firm but fair play and left to find their own way. Unless an action is seen as being of urgent need then official engagement from YouView is never that far away and is more likely to be effective. Overly quick action by a non-employee may do more harm than good. One could ask the question if one were a moderator what would one do at a given time, how might such an action then unfold, and would it really just be better for an employee to have taken action at a more considered rate?
What I think most people around here would really like to see is more evident progress with the YouView system than forum moderation. Positive progress with YouView itself will naturally lead to a more positive and harmonious forum