Regarding Contacting Staff:

Since this is an issue yet again, we need to talk about it.

Firstly, if you see someone is trolling or otherwise causing trouble, do not spam-ping the staff role. One ping, at maximum, will do it. Pinging individual mods you can see are online (namely green dot and not playing a game) from the member list is preferable. If that's not viable, or you get no response, fine, ping the role.

The role is not meant to be pinged frivolously. Treat it with the seriousness it deserves because you are pinging nearly a dozen people, and throwing 2, 3, 4 pings at all of us isn't going to help matters any more than it would me doing the same for announcements.

Secondly, when you ping the role or person, actually include an explanation of what is going on. It doesn't need to be a thesis, just "x is being a homophobe," or "x is spoiling a movie," or "x is spamming chat." Bear in mind why you had to ping the role to begin with: if we see something going on in chat, we normally act on it then, so you pinging us means we weren't looking or paying attention to chat. Which means if we're pinged and not told why, you push on us the task of piecing together the chain of events ourselves, which is frankly just wasting everyone's time and energy. Again, you don't contextless pings without explanation do you? Why would we?

Third, do not ping us over a "suspected" troll. Ping us if something is actually going on. A ping comes with the implicit expectation that there's something we need to act on right then and there. But if nothing has happened yet, if you're making blind guesses with minimal evidence, and then announcing your thoughts in chat and telling staff to act on them? I'm sure you can see how that might hurt everyone's relationships with members and prove extremely unwelcoming to newbies.

If you think someone is suspicious, but as far as you know no one on staff has noticed and the person hasn't done anything, the proper course of action is to just DM an available mod with your worries and the source thereof. Don't ping the role even if we're unavailable; we don't need  false alarms over stuff like this. Just hold on to it until someone can talk about it. They can then evaluate the situation themselves and pass on any relevant info to the mods in our private channels.

I get that this server has a lot of LGBT and furry people in it, and people who troll to target such demographics are rampant on Discord. I can understand why any prospect of dealing with another such person is less than pleasant. But, again, put yourself in their shoes. You don't want to walk into a server and immediately get in trouble for being suspected of being a troll or other sort of troublemaker without due reason.

Finally, don't ping the staff role over anything that isn't actually about moderation. A bot not working? We have no control over that. A question? I'm sure you can ask it while pinging one mod at most, or just ask in gen.

In conclusion: PLEASE use the appropriate discretion when pinging staff or seeing troublemakers. We don't want to have to start punishing people for what's becoming misuse of the system.


**__About Sword & Shield Discussion:__**

Since this is becoming a problem too, please keep discussions centered around the content of these games in #sword_shield_discussion - you can get the role in #get_your_roles_here. When we say people want to go in blind, we mean it quite literally. This includes those who aren't viewing the trailers and such, and don't know about the content of the game.

Some stuff is unavoidable because, lol, this is the internet. But please keep any detailed discussion in that channel. Or related videos, memes, pictures, etc. Basically, if you think it could go there... please put it there.

It's not hard to follow, and blatantly not doing so disrespects the reason the channel exists in the first place and the wishes of those people in turn. It is becoming very, very tiring for the staff to handle these time and time again as well.