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Staff Feedback Thread

Link Thread Closed
General staff feedback and our responses will be posted here.

This thread was created in an attempt to improve relations between the staff and the userbase and to encourage use of the Staff Feedback page.

If you would like to receive a response in this thread, your feedback must:
  1. Be serious.
  2. Not be addressed towards specific staff members. Those kinds of feedback get forwarded to the relevant staff and get addressed privately.
  3. Only contain information available publicly to the userbase. This includes information in public forums and Discord channels.
  4. Not be a copy of or very similar to feedback we've recently received. If we receive multiple pieces of feedback on the same topic around the same time, we may only respond to one of them.
  5. Not describe potential security vulnerabilities. These will be taken seriously, but won't be discussed publicly for obvious reasons.
  6. Not be a hacking question. Questions about how to use tools, fix problems encountered in-game, and so on are more appropriate in the relevant forums, where other users can see them and help out.

If you send feedback with multiple parts, only those parts that fit the above rules will be responded to in this thread.

If there's an issue with this thread, please PM me or bebn legg.


edit (June 23, 2018): Fixed guideline #3. We will only respond to feedback that contains publicly available information. --FPzero
edit (December 23, 2018): Added guideline #5. We will not respond to feedback that contains potential security vulnerabilities. --Noivern
edit (March 8, 2019): Added clarification about feedback with multiple parts. --Noivern
edit (August 15, 2020): Added rule about hacking qusestions.
Both of these pieces of feedback are old but were submitted after this thread was made, and the reason they weren't addressed was because neither I nor Impetus knew about them. But now we do, so here we go. #w{=3}



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If you know who this is, you would know that sometimes, I was critical towards you (the mods) for seemingly being biased or acting like everything's fine even though it clearly wasn't. The idea to put up these two threads is definetly a step in right direction, keep it up!


Thanks for the encouragement! I can only hope the other thread doesn't get too much use, but this one definitely should.

If you have any suggestions as to how we can improve further, please feel free to shout at us.

Also for the record, everything sent through the staff feedback page is anonymous. The system doesn't tell us who you are.



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dear staff, you didn't specify what was leod's resignation reason, so I'm sending this because I think this is a lack of transparency (considering the reasons of the other ex-staffs anounced in the post were said)

thanks


leod's resignation reason was simply a lack of interest in moderating.

The staff status post this refers to was edited very soon after this feedback was received, likely in response to it. So you probably already know this, but hey, better a late response than none.
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DeathPenguin bumped an almost 7-year-old thread asking for the meaning of ASMT and SMWCP1 acronyms almost 2 weeks ago. What's the "funniest", no mod has paid attention to it, informed them about a bump (publicly) and closed that thread yet. What's the matter with staff? How did they not do anything to that unnecessary bump?


Not all long bumps warrant publicly informing the user and closing the thread. Bumps are handled on a case-by-case basis, because not all of them are bad.

Let's look at this specific bump:

  • The thread topic was fairly generic and still had discussion value (even if it was dead for almost 7 years)
  • The question DeathPenguin posted was relevant to the thread. Asking what ASMT and SMWCP stands for was a valid question because they weren't previously explained in the thread.
  • The question could be answered by anybody.
  • The post spurred more discussion afterwards on the topic.

Nothing about that bump warranted staff action. It was fine.

We do need to respond faster when things happen, though. You are right about that.
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As a noob when it comes to modding, (not coding, I am good at JavaScript) is there any way to make mods on Chromebook? Any emulators that are mod-compatible, and any way to run the tools without wine? If possible can you reply quickly? (For those posting, Chromebook is a little different than Linux software, but should be compatible.)


The user feedback function is not here to be used for general hacking questions. Ask in SMW Hacking Help.
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any status about the document section? there has been documents since months without moderating

yeah, we recognize that area has not been getting any love at all lately. we've been swamped in a few other areas, but thanks for bringing this up again - we'll reach out to some of our staff to take a look at things.
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Two questions:

1) Was Wakana's resignation related to his hack?
2) How can we trust the feedback form is truly anonymous if it requires us to be signed in to even use it?

Oh and btw, good job on the changes. I'm liking them so far.

1) following the rejection of wakanas hack he left the smwc discord and requested his mod powers be removed. we obliged.
2) noivern summed things up better than i did here prior, check his post below
3) cheers 👍
Elaborating on idol's response:

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Two questions:

1) Was Wakana's resignation related to his hack?
2) How can we trust the feedback form is truly anonymous if it requires us to be signed in to even use it?

Oh and btw, good job on the changes. I'm liking them so far.


1) Citing "personal reasons" in the staff status thread (or "lack of interest" for that matter) is probably a meme at this point, but we don't share the fine details out of respect for the person who left staff. The exact details are their business to disclose, not ours.

2) Unfortunately we can't prove that feedback is completely anonymous without showing the code behind the form, which is not a feasible solution. All I can say is that posted feedback as the admins can access them does not contain any personally identifiable information, be it username or user ID or anything else that we can associate with your specific account unless you purposely add it to the feedback you submit. I really don't want to say "trust us" on this but this is a "trust us" situation.
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you are System
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation
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I think there are a bunch of loosely enforced rules that aren't actually specified in the rules anywhere. I don't think saying "use common sense" is enough, because then the entire rule page could be "don't do dumb shit".
Like, insulting the mods has been going on for a fair while. Some mods get offended by this because they consider themselves to work very hard, even though questioning authority is not punching down, but the opposite. It's not flaming, because flaming is malicious and has more to do with responding to things in a discussion with something like "You are wrong about X because you're low IQ" instead of providing an answer. The previous rule thread said:
Originally posted by Kieran Menor
Treat other users with respect. Don't provoke others.

This is more specific, and I think it would be good if the current rules said something along these lines.
I personally don't think it's a good idea to not allow insults in general, because what can be considered an insult can be done as a joke and not actually be insulting to the other party. The site has a long history of banter between the mods and users, making fun of people for being stupid, things like that. Different things are insulting to different people, but I'm not the one who makes the rules.

I mean, not going off-topic is an actual rule that could be considered "common sense", so I don't see how this would be any different.

1) Yeah, we've been strongly reconsidering the current state of our rules & how rather nondescript they've been coming across as. We are planning to update them after a series of long discussions with our staff team, and I'd invite your guys input on rules you feel are not specific enough or are not needed, along with any other issues you have. You can always use Feedback or just PM an administrator about it.

2) I don't think it's wise to conflate insulting a moderator with challenging authority. Let's say you say "the mods are real shitty". That isn't challenging anything, it's not constructive nor does it seek any sort of solution - it's just complaining & insulting. You are welcome to actually challenge moderator decisions & be productive via Feedback or PMing an admin, but complaining about the mod team or moderators is not that - it's just complaining. The power dynamic of SMW Central is not representative of real life either; I can get this notion if it were challenging a real-life occupation, like challenging politicians who have both power & resources from their position, but our moderators really get little out of their jobs other than just helping out. The people you feel are fair to insult really work hard just to help out the site and make sure things work well. It's not about power dynamics, it's not about challenging authority, it's just about respecting a system integral to the site & the people who really work hard to give back to the community.

3) Regarding disallowing of insults, it's important to remember that our forums are not a personal PM system. More than the intended recipient at play view what is said. Just because you say something to someone you are able to do in a personal setting doesn't mean that same thing works when 50 other people see it. Context is the most important part of any dynamic like that, and SMW Central does not have that context with each post. Basically, other people see what you say, so just because you can call your friend a fucking idiot in jest doesn't mean everyone else is gonna know it's in jest. Ultimately it's important to shape what you say here taking into account that your audience is not secluded.

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Blue bans limit too many things, instead of just not allowing you to post you are:

- Not allowed to edit posts
- Not allowed to delete posts
- Not allowed to vote on polls
- Not allowed to edit your profile
- And some fifth other thing

Make them less severe please? And add an option to make brown bans temporary. It makes way more sense to do it that way. Or at least add another type of ban that just limits posting ability.


The point of a ban is to take time to reflect on what you've done wrong and take the time to re-read the rules, considering what things you've done to get yourself where you are and how to avoid that in the future. It's a punishment - and the amount of limitations should be a heavy deterrent from doing anything to be banned for. We aren't going to make blue bans less severe. We have no reason to make brown bans temporary, either. If you're permanently banned you're permanently banned - that's all there is to it. Users can appeal their bans and can be given the chance, but if you're permanently banned the only thing deciding if you're coming back is the judgement of the staff team & whether or not you can show you've changed enough to not get banned again.
Originally posted by System
Staff feedback is anonymous, right?

Yet you get a PM when you make feedback, aren't the admins able to read these?
What about the site logs? Can't it be tracked if someone's providing feedback and then pinpoint who did it?

uh, yeah, good point. Just a redirect page isn't very much confirmation that it worked, adding more felt like a good idea at the time. But I forgot exactly how much access admins have; while they don't read PMs without a clear reason to, they have the ability. I blame 5am coding, I do that way too much...

Fixed, and I'll go delete the pms from everyone's box. This thread is sufficient confirmation, anyways.

Logs ... I suspect Kieran left the default Apache logs on, which could narrow down the possible senders a bit if we really want to. I'll ask Kieran if they're needed, Cloudflare should block most or all spambots who'd produce interesting logs...
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation
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I personally think it's kind of silly that people are seeing Halloween as a perfect opportunity to make their names obscene. Sure it's inoffensive but it makes me rather uncomfortable, mostly because a lot of the people that do it are in fact memebers of the staff or used to be. Not the best first impression to new members in my opinion.


This should absolutely not be the case. However, there's not much to work with here. I haven't seen any Halloween names yet that I would consider obscene or offensive, and nobody as of yet has reported any.

If you had specific names in mind when you sent this feedback, report them specifically to us so we know what we're working with. You can submit it as feedback again if you still want to be anonymous.
Originally posted by System
[removed] set a one-character holiday name being just a period. It's obviously against holiday name rules because it's really hard to click on it. Shouldn't a little change be implemented so you cannot change your holiday name to something that has, let's say, less than 3 characters? A prompt that your name is too short would also be welcome! ^^

Fixed and fixed.
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation
Originally posted by Layouts with Site Malware/Spyware alerts
Hello. I am not sure if there's some place specific to report this kind of thing. But I'd like to report that some layout sites are making my scanner's alerts pop off like crazy.

May be false positives, but it'd be nice to at least find out who's layouts are causing them and have them host their layouts/images here.

Here are some threads with reported issues recently (20 posts per page):
https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=[redacted] (Spyware - [redacted])
https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=[redacted]&page=57 (same site alert as above)
https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=[redacted]&page=56 (Trogan - [redacted])

There's some more but I am just wondering.
Is there a way to report potential layouts that could not be good? I'd like to see this answered in the feedback thread if possible. Just in case other users notice this. Thanks for your time!

After doing some investigation, I concluded that the reported alerts were triggered by avatar URLs, none of which linked to suspicious images. This is the response from one of the antivirus vendors who, according to VirusTotal, detected one of the URLs: "Your request has been reviewed. This is not a false positive incident. The site you have specified is a known source of malware". It seems to me that they've blacklisted the entire domain because of unrelated incidents, so there is nothing we can directly do about this. I may later remove the avatars in question to prevent these alerts from happening.

As for the last paragraph of the feedback, a system to report content is planned and it can, until it's implemented, be discussed in issue #102.



Originally posted by SMAS RAM map context are missing
Ersanio (id 3) here.

Me and spel werdz rite (SWR) have slowly been working on SMAS stuff again and today he wanted to consult the RAM map but noticed an oddity: The context field of the addresses are empty.

Link to the map as it's invisible in the menu.

Me and spel werdz rite do not remember when it was in order last time. I suppose it was still working properly a month ago at February 6th, 2019, when SWR linked me an address and didn't notice anything weird, but this is only an assumption.

I'd like to ask for two things.
- Please restore the context field of the SMAS maps.
- Could I have an export of the SMAS ROM, RAM and SRAM map tables in some way or form (SQL, JSON, XML, CSV)? For these maps: smasrom, smasram, smassram

Preferably contact me on Discord so we can discuss things in real-time. I'm present on SMWC Discord so finding me should be easy:
Ersanio#9746

Else, a PM would also do, but I don't check SMWC that often.

After the feedback was sent, I filed this as issue #117. It was fixed just a few minutes ago.

For future reference, the entire memory maps can be accessed as JSON from /ajax.php?a=getmap&m=[name]. Since this is an API endpoint, its output format will not change without prior notice to those who've declared they're using it.
Originally posted by Welcome to Scrydan's Feedback Part 2
PR - Youtube
I can't believe I haven't checked out the C3 videos! I love them. Absolutely love them. o FPzero has done an amazing job with the videos, and recently watched the Winter 2019 ones. He has an amazing voice and is the kind of content I'd like to even just listen to.

Way to "leak" the staff forum names! Now they're not going to be a surprise anymore! My childhood is forever ruined!

But yeah, I enjoy these. I also would love to see some more podcasts or streamed versions. I propose that there could be threads opened up an possibly interview some interesting members: heck, some staff video interviews versus just text would be lovely! o Noivern said it as a joke but let's view staff feedback live!

Maybe there could be a live stream of selecting random tools, random resources, and then making a short demo hack out of it for fun. I could elaborate more on this idea. I have more ideas than skin cells I swear.

I might do more feedback soon. I also want it to be known who is sending this because it is important, and I'd like to make sure if possible that my answers are modified. Feel free to contact me! [o Scrydan]



P.S. Can feedback have a preview button? I might just make a thread about it later (like other features) in any case. I also want to apologize for the terrible jokes. I like to mix it up!


Sephazon is the one handling Youtube right now. He's currently out because of illness, but this feedback will we awaiting his return. :)

If you haven't already done so, please post this in the Events and Public Relations section of the userbase survey. Any feedback we can get is appreciated.




Originally posted by Scrydan's March Feedback - Staff Engagement
Greetings! For it is I, Scrydan. Bringing you the latest in regular user feedback news. It is a start of a new month, so without further ado...

Today, we're going over perhaps more ways of staff engagement!

Submission Mods: Personally, I'd love to see some hack moderators or submission moderators in general stream their submission testing process! It could be a way to point things out and if it requires a lot of testing, could be both amusing and have them point out any flaws. Regular videos are cool too! I know this used to be sort of done with moderation but this could be a neat thing to do and bring back.

PR: Spotlights are awesome! But I think we could do something like it on a grander scale along side it. What if there's a staff thread made, and all the staff just chat for awhile in it and sort of give a feel for how they usually chat.

Might give some people a look at how some inner jokes are made or what have you. Think of it like a spotlight interview, but like multiple staff just chat and chill. Not every staff needs involved, but ones who do want to sort of talk about some specific topics could.

Think of it like each month, a topic is brought up and staff chat about it for a couple of days or more. Then it gets closed and placed somewhere public and stickied before it is archived. Might not be the best idea but just throwing a few around. It could be a thread that is talked into with multiple topics and revealed to the public every 3 to 6 months. Only an idea.


Next, we could bring to discussion the possibility of some events to bring out more personalities. One thing that isn't so much an event as it is site related. What if all new staff had like an "introduction to staff" thread where they could talk about themselves a bit, what they're interested in, and what they hope to achieve for the site.

We have the Staff Page, but what if we also got their initial reaction as well? I think something like a Staff Introductions thread that is closed and staff post in would be a lot of fun to see all staff (even current) to go on and talk about anything.

Thing is, many have introductions from years ago (some over a decade) so it might be a good idea to allow them to be reintroduced.


As for events, I think staff can be more inbuilt into SMWC lore. Not sure on specifics, but I want to write more about this here. Some events happening somewhat frequently would be pretty awesome way to keep some traditions going.



And that's all for now. It is 1:25 AM in the morning and wanted to drop some thoughts your way. I do hope you all have a fantastic day!


wew there's a lot here


Submission Mods: Hack playthroughs have been on the SMWC Youtube channel often, but they inevitably die down because of lack of interest. Unfortunately there are no plans at this time to stream let's plays, let's moderates, or anything similar. Streaming or otherwise recording moderations is likely never going to be a requirement to be a hack moderator because that's just too much of a burden to place on them, it has to be their choice.

That said, Dode and Linkdeadx2 both stream their hack moderations and you can find links to their channels below:

Dode: https://www.twitch.tv/dode
Linkdeadx2: https://www.twitch.tv/linkdeadx2


PR: A staff chat thread made with the intention of publishing it publically sounds... pretty forced. You're not going to get organic chat out of it because chatting in this sense is not optional. I don't think it's a good idea.


Staff: The Meet the Staff page already serves this purpose. An "introduction to staff" thread, in practice, is only going to be a lot of "welcome to staff!" posts. I suppose you could put the same info in both threads for redundancy, but there's very little difference between the two to justify making such a thread.


Events: I'm not sure what kinds of events you have in mind, but we'll be hosting several small events all throughout the year. Send me your ideas about what contests you'd like to see more of, and I'll bring it up with staff.
Originally posted by a search bar for threads/forums
I likes this idea, because in music/,gfx/payches have this, why not?

This was suggested a while ago in the Issue Tracker as issue #90. It was postponed because of the technical implications of searching through all posts, which would require systems we don't have on the server. Searching thread titles is planned for the future, but I personally doubt its usefulness because of how vague they can sometimes be.
Originally posted by Error when setting up profile
Hi. For some reason, whenever I click on “Edit Profile”, it will say that there’s an error and that I need to be logged in to do that, but I’m already logged in and wasn’t sure about why this might be happening. I checked FAQ to see if there was anything covering this but I didn’t see anything. I just wasn’t sure about what I might need to do because I wanted to join the Discord Sever, as well.

Thanks


Honestly not sure what's causing this, it's possible that it's just Cloudflare being dumb again. We have caching issues with Cloudflare sometimes and it's possible that that's what's happening here.

A user in #verification was having this issue, but said that they fixed it by clearing their cache and hard refreshing. Anybody else who's having issues with things not updating (like new post markers) should try this too.
Originally posted by Adding a "Both" option to if a custom song is custom or not
Sometimes there are certain situations where you technically ported a song, but it's been remixed in a certain way so it's also technically "custom". It would be nice to have a "both" or "remix" option alongside if it is custom or not, so ports like this and this can be more distinguished.

Thanks.

This is closely related to the discussions currently going on in this thread. After all of them have been settled, I'm going to add this along with the other suggestions there, as long as no music moderator vetoes it.
Originally posted by LM news stickying
It's a little silly how the news post with the newest LM version is stickied to the very top, making it harder to notice potentially more important news. How about adding a paragraph to the site intro instead? Beneath "help getting started" might be a good spot.

We're definitely aware that the stickied Lunar Magic announcement can be confusing. Currently, there are plans for a better way to handle the different types of announcements by adding a tagging system, but I agree that moving the paragraph above the news is a better idea until we figure out the specifics of the proposed system.
Originally posted by ASM Workshop Feedback
Hi guys, I would only want to notice the hard work the ASM mods are putting into the ASM workshop - it has been incredible both the duration of the lessons and the dedication they put on it, specially Major Flare with its compilations. I would also note something that I'm not sure if its positive or negative about the workshop: it's highly theorical; with this I didn't mean that there weren't exercices to do during the explanation, I mean that the workshop wasn't very focused on how to make resources. Only during the basic workshop there was some (very) basic talk about how to create blocks, sprites, etc, which is (I think) the thing people who don't know ASM would want more. I think the workshop was more focalised (not sure if you wanted to make it that way, but it felt that way for me) on users that already knew a fair bit of ASM and how to code basic resources, since following the intermediate and advanced workshops would be very difficult for someone who just learned what is a LDA a few days ago and didn't even coded anything. As I say, I'm not sure if that's positive or negative (for me was positive since I already knew how to code but advanced tips and topics from the advanced and intermediate workshops were super useful for me, much more than a sprite or patch or uberasm-focused workshop would be) but I think if you guys make another workshop maybe you could make room for a more resource-focused sections of the workshop, because I'm sure that would attract even more people to the workshop, but also keeping the advanced and more theorical topics since there will always be an audience for them and we can't also forget about the advanced ASM'rs we have here.

Our teachers did a fantastic job indeed! I can agree with you about the focus - even with a half-dozen teachers lecturing for hours on end, there's just too much ground to cover to appeal sufficiently to coders of all levels. At this moment we don't have any concrete plans to run another workshop, but if we do so in the future we'll certainly consider a stronger focus on resource development. Having Major Flare's compilations ready in advance would be a big help in this regard.
Originally posted by Feedback
Comment: So, it's been a week since I sent my lenghty staff feedback (titled "The current music team"), and it seems like it was just ignored. You have a thread supposedly for transparency when a piece of staff feedback is sent, but mine hasn't been discussed at all in there. Was it because it was too negative? I don't think that should be a filter if you're actually trying to be transparent... but oh well.

Look, I'm sorry if I couldn't say anything remotely positive in my feedback; I just couldn't find anything worth mentioning for one of the moderators I discussed other than how fast they're moderating stuff, but even that can be turned into a negative because they don't have the knowledge necessary to do that, so it worries me a lot.

Could it also be because of this one rule?

"2. Not be addressed towards specific staff members. Those kinds of feedback get forwarded to the relevant staff and get addressed privately."

Because my feedback was NOT directed towards the two staff members I mentioned; it was actually directed towards the staff in general, especially the team leader and the site's admins. I had to give direct examples of what I meant to not be dismissed as "too vague," but that doesn't mean I was actually intending only for them to read my message. I'm worried about the negative impact those two moderators (one more than the other, however) can have on the music section; if it affects an entire section of the site, it should be clear that my message's target was the whole staff team, with focus on the people in charge of certain decisions.

Also, just in case there needs to be any more proof of how underqualified your music staff is, take a look at this sumission:

https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=section&a=details&id=20872

If you download the file and take a look at the .txt, you'll notice that it's very poorly optimized; instead of reducing its size in the ROM, it's doing the exact opposite! This should be a straight removal reason, especially because it's done repeatedly.

For example, this part is 19 bytes in decimal:

[>d<af+]2 [>f+d<a]2

While this, being the same notes without loops, is 14 bytes:

>d<af+>d<af+ >f+d<a>f+d<a

Yes, 5 bytes might not seem as much, but when it's repeated multiple times - especially with some badly-used label loops - it adds up. Aren't ports supposed to be optimized as much as possible to make it less likely that a hack runs out of ROM space? I can accept that sometimes you leave certain things pass if they aren't looped because, if looped, they save literally one byte and it's only one instance, but that's different from a failed attempt at looping that ends up increasing the insert size; this should at the very least be pointed out so that the user doesn't make the same mistake again.

The fact that the port was accepted without the moderator even noticing the inefficient looping baffles me.

-

Let me spell this out again in case this is also ignored: THIS AND MY OTHER FEEDBACK MESSAGE IS MEANT FOR THE ENTIRE STAFF TEAM, WITH EMPHASIS ON THE PEOPLE MOVING STRINGS IN THE MUSIC SECTION, NOT JUST THE MODERATORS I QUESTIONED.

Thank you.


Firstly, I'm sorry you feel this way. However, I feel you severely underestimate the capabilities of the people I've hired. The thing is, I don't expect my moderators to be absolute perfectionists in their craft - to demand that would be completely absurd and hypocritical, as I don’t even think I'd qualify as that. Your feedback, while valid in your concern, seems to do little more than point out mistakes in other peoples' moderations. While we should at least strive to be as mistake-free as possible, they're going to pop up every now and again no matter how laser-focused or perfectionist each and every moderator is in their job.

To touch on the error listed in this feedback: yes, it could stand to be mentioned in the comments of the submission. Beyond that, though, the mentality for moderations is to not demand that every last thing be looped perfectly down to the last byte - however, we do strive to nip bad looping practices in the bud through comments in accepted submissions or rejections, in the cases where much larger errors are present and the minor nitpicks can be mentioned as an aside.

Your prior feedback was not ignored. Your theory is correct though: it was not posted because it did fall under that second guideline in the OP. To be honest, it was found rather inflammatory, with nothing indicative that the feedback was for the whole of staff or for the leaders. I considered making a response initially, but it was unanimously agreed on by both the admins and most of the other team leaders that it should not be posted due to falling under the second guideline, as well as its general tone, and I ultimately agreed and contacted the appropriate moderators to inform them of the complaints instead. However, for the sake of transparency, I'll post it with censored names and removed links (in a collapse tag, so as to not make this post appear gigantic) so as to not identify the people you called out - I'll leave it up to the general public from here to decide whether or not it's not a specific complaint against the users in question.



To address this briefly, a person's ability does not 100% correlate to their ability as a moderator, and one could argue it never has. You can refer to the old days all you wish, but in the old days each and every moderator here, former or otherwise, has had some truly questionable stuff submitted and hosted on the site, even during their tenure as moderators. Not to mention, I'm certain that if you dig around in staff histories, you'll find several people who were promoted with no apparent knowledge or even a known identity in hacking prior to their promotions. To demand that every port submitted by a user be comparable to some of the best the site has to offer is absurd, and by this logic I shouldn't even be on staff as I haven't submitted anything since 2014, three years before my promotions, and one could easily point out several improvements that could be made in them. You could also pick at my Idol submissions, the last few things I ever did as part of the community, and it could receive much of the same treatment.

I choose my moderators not only basing my judgement on their ability to produce good ports, but for their ability to help further the music section. Each and every moderator fills a role in some way, and the two you called out have been an immense help in my pursuit to make the section as good as it can be, just as much as any other moderator I've had the pleasure to lead. There could be valid concerns brought up for each and every music moderator, myself included to a degree, and some of which the general public doesn't get to see. Despite this, I will still continue to have faith that they will improve on their respective faults, work past them and become better for it, and I'd like to respectfully ask of you and anyone else sharing these concerns to try and adopt these feelings and not let this burden your perception of the music section.

To also give a quick aside regarding the remoderation complaints, the specific improvements that have been listed for the low quality removals are in place on the off chance someone would wish to touch up the more salvageable ports and make them conform to today's standards. Though I imagine the vast majority would choose to do these from scratch rather than work off an already provided skeleton, it's nice to have the option.

If you'd really like to know more detail about what I've brought up (as I don't feel comfortable expressing them in a public forum in a post such as this, and I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to in the first place), you're more than welcome to DM me so we can discuss this further - I'm not going to be hostile at you for not liking my team, my decisions, me as a manager or about staff standards as a whole.

That said, the errors and concerns you pointed out in your feedback messages have been relayed to the respective moderators. I have no immediate plans to cut anyone at this time, as I feel it's not justified nor is it necessary for the team nor the section. If the problems continued to persist for months down the line, then action could be taken. Until then, again, please have faith in my abilities and decisions. I'm not asking you to 100% agree with me without question, but I do hope you can understand the reasonings behind my choices, even if only somewhat. That said, I appreciate any future feedback and criticisms, albeit constructive, that you or any other user have.
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