Response to Form

Hello Leader Amino!

As you can tell, I'm here with a response post for the recent form. Now this post will not be very pretty in of layout, since I'm working on this between shifts. However, I do want to start by saying I appreciate that y'all did not ask for us to do things that only TA can do! I believe only one response had one answer that was a TA thing, which is a huge improvement from last time! So thank you, it really saves our team a headache.

Moving on! I'll be covering specific things that were brought up in sections. There are some important things that I'll be noting so please read everything! And thank you to everyone who participated!

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The first thing I'm covering is a request that we got from about a third of all responses. Y'all said you want to have more input on what we do in this community. We are definitely down for this, so long as it doesn't start any unnecessary arguements or any sort of bullying. So long as everyone can be respectful I'd definitely love to have the community interact more. We previously did this with some polls from the first form, which ended up receiving positive for the most part. I'll be starting this community interaction today, which will be detailed on in this post.

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This next thing I'm covering is the one issue we had with the form. About a fourth of all responses complained that certain s are now inactive. We CANNOT control this! Eventually s will leave this app, and be done with it, and I do not blame them considering what a lot of s deal with! (Even I deal with crazy stuff!) So if you see a favorite member of yours stop coming on, it may be that they just don't find this amino useful, especially since TA isn't here, or they may just be inactive on the app as a whole. We cannot change who decides to be active and who decides they don't want to be. Mods eventually learn everything they need here, and stop being active, or they just leave amino.

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Onto the next thing! This is a lose-lose situation for our team. Challenges! Quite a few of our responses requested that we start hosting challenges again and complained that we don't hold them enough. Here's the reason we stopped, though! s complain when we do hold them. Every time we host one, we get a dozen or more complaints about how this amino shouldn't be holding challenges. Not to mention we don't get too many folks who in them, which further makes us think challenges aren't good here. So to resolve this issue, I'll be posting a community poll at some point to let everyone here have a say so holding challenges. For now community polls are going to be how we start having the community give more decisions for our amino!

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The next thing to cover is that a handful of responses complained about our team happening to be on hiatus at the same time. Now this did happen recently. I'm not going to apologize for it, because things do happen and I hope everyone can be understanding. For a lot of people, it was back to school season at the time, including for colleges. With the current pandemic, it has been more stressful than normal for a lot of s. The majority of staff in all aminos I moderate in took some form of hiatus during this time, including staff here. For myself, I had started a new job and was balancing my new schedule with my other job, as well as dealing with my grandfather ing.

To boil it down, a lot happened for each of us at the same time. This is a rare thing, and likely won't happen again anytime soon. Typically our staff team is better balanced, but this year is throwing everyone for a loop. Bear with us, please.

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Moving on, the next thing is that people are annoyed that we allow s to request staff here and requested we ban such posts. To avoid confusing people, we mean the posts where s are in need of staff and ask if anyone will assist. We aren't going to do this, as we do not want to limit the help s can get from our amino. Naturally if someone is spamming the posts we will handle it, but that's different. We are going to try and find a way to still allow s to ask for staff help in a more efficient way. Not sure how we're going about this yet, so it's a work in progress.

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Next we have had people complaining ers advertising in private messages. If this happens, please FLAG IT! We do not know if this is happening unless it is reported. To flag a message, just hold down on it and click flag for review. Choose spam, and submit it. We will then proceed to handle it from there. Just to flag the MESSAGE and not the profile. We do not allow advertising, especially not in private messages. As with a lot of aminos, people do try to sneak and do it anyway, so unfortunately we cannot stop them unless we are aware of it happening.

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The next thing we received on was the fact we feature templates. It seems a handful of s think we should stop featuring them. This will not change. Not only are they helpful for who may need these templates, they also deserve some love. A lot of them are made by our wonderful Template Creation Committee, and they work hard to make different templates for everyone. These are made to help everyone's moderation be a little easier in some form or fashion. We typically try to limit template features to 2-3 at a time, at most to avoid the feature feed being all templates. Oddly enough though, there were also a few that requested we feature more templates.

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Bouncing off of that, we also had a lot of requests to feature new informational posts instead of old ones. Unfortunately we can't do that unless new informational posts are being made. If y'all want to make updated informational posts or create new ones to help out new mods, please do! Just ensure they're accurate with their information (for factual posts), and that they are helpful. If you need some ideas for post updating, feel free to ask! I love to see what y'all create to assist!

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Our next request was that the staff here start answering questions more. We do this when we can and will try to do it more! However, if it is a subject we aren't super knowledgeable in, we will likely skip it. We will also not comment if someone has already provided an answer that we would have given! So sometimes we will just like/upvote the comment which matches what we would've said. No need for multiple of the same comments. We will definitely try to interact more though.

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We also had a handful of requests for a post containing links to helpful blogs in our amino. I'm assuming y'all want something like a FAQ post? I don't know though. Let me know.

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Finally we had multiple people complain that some s have a habit of acting like they know it all, and bragging about how many aminos and/or what aminos they lead. We have definitely seen this and it does bother us at times. However, there isn't much we can do, unless they start breaking our rules in the process. Y'all are welcome to ask them to tone it down, just to not be insulting when you do. Everyone here does have a right to let another member know that certain things make them uncomfortable. If it bothers you a lot, I recommend blocking the specific in question.

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Anyway, that covers everything that was mentioned multiple times. There were a few things mentioned once, but I won't dive into those. Thank you again to everyone who participated! Please continue to give us your suggestions, as we would love to implement more of them. Just to keep other in mind when you do!