- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Here is a list of items I thought required addressing, and that I sent to Achronos a whiles back. He didn't respond, unfortunately; however, I thought you might find the list to be interesting--especially if you are a group administrator. And without further adieu:
Member Management:
* Forum-side Promotion: not unlike the “Unleash Ninjas” button, this would allow group leaders to quickly promote members based on forum merit easily and rapidly. While it is not a replacement for admin-side promotion (below), very like the Unleash Ninjas button, it allows for quick and simple access with minimal interaction with the admin control panel. I could see such a shortcut to the APC being implemented in things like group contests or “add the our link to your signature” threads.
* Admin-side Promotion: here I give a list of suggestions to enrich and enhance the power of the APC that each group leader is provided with. First, a member search button would be excellent. For larger groups, once could spend hours searching for the member-in-question to manage. A search tool would be an excellent addition here. Second, a check box or “selection” tool for members would allow one to change the roles for large numbers of members. This would work almost exactly like the pending news item management features in place already. You check the box for multiple members on different pages. Their names are added into a “queue”, which is located in the admin control panel under member management. From there, you can change their roles easily and quickly. In groups of all sizes, this would allow admins to handle multiple members at one time.
* General Group PM: For smaller groups, it might take 15 minutes to PM the whole group. But for larger groups, It can literally take hours to get one message across to all of your member-base. I ask that you install a feature allowing admins to send a general group PMs. I’m sure your first reaction to this will be that group leaders may potentially spam their members. This problem can be easily fixed by placing a default limit on the number of general group PMs per week, say one or two. In this fashion, Bungie bandwidth will not be sucked up and members will not be subjected to spam.
News / Post Management:
* News Submission Viewing: At this point in time, when I receive a news submission, I can only view the summary and not the main message body. Again, on a small level this is a slight inconvenience but on a larger scale, it makes news management cumbersome and difficult. I request that when a news item is pending, that an admin can view and edit the contents of this message before submission. Such a feature would be amazingly helpful in the news management process.
* Quick Post / News Deletion: at the moment, one has to go through each and every post manually to delete them. The same thing applies for news stories. A simple check box feature with check / uncheck all functionality would make managing large amounts of inappropriate posts or outdated news stories far easier. This applies for both large groups with high activity, and smaller groups going through a drastic reorganization, and having to delete a few pages (10+) of posts. Either way, for managing large amounts of threads, an admin-only “delete the selected” feature (highly similar to that implemented in the PM box), would be a godsend.
Ranks and Rank Management:
* Stopping Group Takeovers: As you are all too aware from both the Mjolnir Battle Tactics affair and hundreds of other groups, group takeovers are quite a phenomenon on Bungie.net. This is easily remedied and has been done so on other forum software. I understand if the base design logic of Ideal Science BB cannot be changed at this time, but to avert group takeovers, the solution is simple. Make it so that the only way a founder can leave is if he / she manually removes themselves. In other words, all members—regardless of their role level, are limited such a way that they cannot remove or demote the founder under any circumstances. Such a feature is present on other forum board software (Invision Power, PHPBB, etc), and the implementation on Bungie.net cannot be exceedingly complicated. This would have two merits, the first being the takeover problem would stop. The second being group management would become far easier. Leaders could delegates promotion tasks to moderators—without the fear of being kicked.
* Forum Actions / Moderator Logs: Certainly the administrative logging system you put into place was a huge step forward. However, full forum logging is not complete. Frequently, especially in group takeovers, it can be hard to keep a record of who [locked / deleted /stickied / edited] which post and when. If such moderative actions were stored in a simple text file, not unlike the administrative actions are, and then can be accessed for review by an admin. If the last one hundred actions were stored in a log and than linked to the appropriate post (deleted posts would be cached until the log auto-removed them, e.g. the first deleted post would stay cached until the log had 101 entries), it would make tracking down corruption and power abuse far easier.