Kingdom Hearts (LB) Moderation Proposal

First of all, The "Why?":

From my time as a part of the Kingdom Hearts Leaderboard Moderation team, there have been times where communication issues have arisen, backlogging of runs to be verified and topics for discussion being completely dropped/ignored/forgotten about. From the outside, this raises concern as it appears disorganized as not only do they not know the progress of any issue/discussion, but things pretty much get lost to the void of time.

So how do we deal with this? Clearly some sort of system needs to be put in place to better organize the moderation and to help keep track of what needs to be discussed, as well have sufficient members to be able to keep things ticking over. The logic I have behind this proposal is that having a larger team with sufficient numbers, that is suited to each specific area, then this will help the performance of the moderation. On top of that, this would be a sort of modernization, helping to allow the mods to cope with any influx (I think that's the word) of new runners as the community itself is much larger now than when it was during the Teamspeak days (double digits v numbers exceeding 300 now!), hence being able to be a system that not only works now but will be able to be tweaked and improved over time as long as the foundation is there. Additionally, to solve the issue of the outside view, perhaps a change in transparency needs to be considered.


The Proposal:

https://discord.gg/E5kgjnp

Please see the discord link posted above for a template of how I would see the organization of KH2 moderation (please note this is an example, using it because KH2 moderation was the subject of some of Desa's points. In this idea, the discords would be splits up into KH1, KH2, KH3 (including 0.2), KHBBS and finally KH Handhelds(CoM/Re:CoM, Days, Coded, DDD). The idea would be to have better organization in order to keep track of any discussions that are outstanding at to be able to keep note of what has been previously done, should it be needed for a reference, or to present to the community. I feel that having this organization would help communication improve. But more would need to be done on top of this.

I feel that this idea is customisable and if seperate discords for various areas of the moderation are disliked, this template can be applied within the current mod discord, so that the moderators can keep track of things in a clean manner.

In this proposal, I feel that each section should have two seperate series mods assigned to them (raising the number of series mods from 4 to 8). This would help to prepare and hopefully address the issue that was raised of inactive series mods. Additionally, I would convert the role of a series mod to being that of an advisory role, suited to the game that they are looking over, making sure that discussion is done / not left and forgotten. With this, the verification process would be purely down to a set of mods, which would vary by number to suit the game / area they are moderating. These mods would be a combination of existing ones assigned to the game they wish to moderated as well as the introduction of a few more appropriate mods to help promote discussion and ensure swift verification. To address Desa's points about whether or not inactive mods should be removed, this could be taken into account potentially when constructing this new team.

I would also say that a moderator can only be part of one team, to ensure that people aren't doubling up on discussion and potentially focusing on moderation / discussion for one game while another could suffer. For example, WyattW8 is a mod of most games currently throughout the series and does a good job with verification and discussion, but it could be seen that being a mod for too many games could hinder him in this suggested layout.

For example, we could assign series mods in this allocation:
KH1 - Saiyanz, Toji
KH2 - Choose 2
KH3 - Choose 2
KHBBS - Sonic, RebelDragon
KH Handheld - Drazerk, Choose another

We could ask the community who would like to join the moderation team, similar to how it was done last year, and once done we could decide internally who would be willing and would best suit being a series mod.

From here, each mod would be in just the particular game's discord as well as the general series mod discord. While it may seem daft to be in multiple discords, keeping the original mod discord for series wide discussion as well as using it to note down what has been discussed per game and what is still outstanding.

While this improves organization and hopefully discussion, there is still the issue of transparency between the Mods and the Community outside of official forum posts and the #leaderboards channel in the Community Discord. Personally I feel that there are 3 methods that would complement this proposal:

1) Having similar 'discussion catalog' / 'to be discussed / 'forum catalog' tabs' to that of the individual boards within the community discord where updates would be posted to keep people in the know. This is a basic solution and would help people to see whether updates have occurred and what things are still outstanding, basically having the same knowledge of the situation as the moderators.

2) Having the main mod discord be public. For this to work, I feel that the discord would need to be adjusted, to include the kind of tabs i mentioned in 1) for each game (instead of having seperate discords). On top of this, the general discussion area would be kept private so that discussion could occur without influence from others (or potentially the fear of someone being judged for how they are in a discussion etc), but instead having a feedback area for each game within the discord, to help transparency and communication.

3) This is a similar idea to 2) but would be adjusted. Take the mock kh2 discord that I posted above. Each individual discord would remain public with the same accessibility as in 2) but the main mod discord would remain private for series-wide discussion and posting of updates. The argument against this option would probably be the whole "being in multiple discords" thing but it also promotes to the community that they can customize their interaction with the mods and follow closely the games that they are genuinely interested in.


That's the end of the proposal. It is still a rough idea as of right now but I feel with other peoples' ideas and suggestions, this could be transformed into a very helpful system. I believe that this would help to improve the performance, not just for now but for in the future. Any feedback / suggestions that anyone has would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading

- Jel