TOPIC: [TTT Admin] TheXnator's Application

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Steam / Forum Name:
TheXnator

Steam Profile Link:
steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198064645052/

I am From:
England, The United Kingdom

Time Spent at ZARP:
3 years

Age:
16

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I have been in ZARP for about 3 years now, originally joining onto the TTT server back in 2016. I had played on some other servers which didn't really draw me in, with staff which didn't strike me as very inviting. After getting bored of most servers, I stumbled across one which claimed to be 24/7 Minecraft, something I had not seen before, and the map seemed rather interesting. After joining this server, which happened to be ZARP, I came to discover a well-managed, friendly community which made me want to stick around. One of the main things which drew me in was also the way in which the staff members are chosen and trained within the unique democratic system we have here at ZARP, which allowed me, despite my age and lack of prior experience at this point, having an equal chance to other people, and allowing me to become a part of the staff team based on what people saw from me, and not from any subjective viewpoint. When one of the people who I had met on the server (Liam), managed to get Moderator on the server, I began to look into that. It had been a desire of mine for a very long time to become a staff member on a server in order to help people, so I decided to apply, and got my first ever staffing position as a Moderator on the ZARP Gaming TTT server. 2 weeks later, I got admin, then branched out to SSRP and Deathrun, continuing to expand into the community to get to where I was today. This led me to expand upon my interest in development and to refine my own development skills, learning GLua in order to create the ZARP Prophunt and Murder servers, develop most of the Pointshop servers and eventually reach where I am today, in the position of Community Developer.

Since joining ZARP, I have developed an incredible passion for the community which has only grown over time, and this has really spurred me on to get to where I am now, and has made me hold a desire to become a Community Manager in order to greatly help out the community far more than I have been able to with my current powers and positions.

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In my time in the community, I believe that I have managed to pick up a vast array skills which I am sure would be immensely helpful towards becoming a Community Manager. Before joining the community, there was not a lot that I would have been able to put here, since I was originally quite shy when I first joined, unable to handle a lot of situations which I would be able to handle today. From the positions that I've held in the community, and especially from owning multiple servers and becoming a Community Developer, I have managed to expand my array of skills, to name a few:

• Kindness
• Calmness
• Patience
• Fairness
• Stubbornness (in appropriate amounts, fighting for what I believe to be the correct outcome)
• Professionalism
• Appropriate levels of maturity (not immature, but able to take and appreciate a joke and be serious when the situation demands it)
• Understanding (of people, situations and processes)

On top of these traits within my personality which I have improved on / developed over the course of my time in ZARP, I have also greatly improved on my ability when it comes to coding, which has been constantly developing (pun intended) even more since I began to work on ZARP servers to eventually become Community Developer, currently being in charge of development for the Pointshop servers, including bug fixes, additions of new features, Poinshop updates and much more, furthering my experience and dedication for the community as a whole. Before joining the community, I had at least some level of knowledge in Java, HTML, CSS, JS and Python, and since joining the community and having to do development work (and actually creating the servers in some cases) for all of the Pointshop servers, and also through work outside of the community (gmodstore), I have developed a knowledge of GLua, PHP and more, and therefore I have managed to greatly improve upon my knowledge, now being able to achieve far more than I could have done in the past, which can be proven through the features that I have worked on for the Pointshop over time, and my current projects in the community.

I believe that being Community Developer has also greatly improved my management skills. Being in a position of power over the Pointshop and being tasked with the management of these servers has required me to work my hardest to ensure that I am capable of meeting such expectations, which I think that I have been able to do professionally and efficiently. Having this experience is something that I believe contributes heavily to being a Community Manager, as I am already in a position where I have had to work closely with the Community Team, meet deadlines and ensure that Server Owners, their staff teams and the users of the servers were happy, communicating issues which were out of my hands with the Community Team and doing my best to assist in making relevant changes. Due to this, I am sure that I will be able to deliver on what I plan to do as a Community Manager, since I have been able to work on my management and planning massively in this position.

When it comes down to contacting me, I always read messages pretty much as soon as I get them, and give a reply if needed. I can always be easily contacted on pretty much any platform (most easily via Discord), and I am usually online on Teamspeak and the Forums, so can also be contacted / address relevant issues there.

I believe that, as a Community Manager here at ZARP, I would be able to greatly improve on these traits and skills, through implementing them into the community, improving on them as I use them to work on greatly improving the community, working on my plans and integrating my skills into the ZARP Community Team.

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Of course, my overall goal as a Community Manager would be to help the community as a whole to expand and rise above where it is currently, with the initial goal of bringing the servers that have dropped down in ranking back to where they were before, and hopefully to bring them even further than that, providing the greatest possible experience for the users in the community, which I would achieve by implementing many changes / improvements to various aspects of the community.


Community Council:

Myself and uzi have spent some time speaking with members of staff in the community in our attempts to work out what the best course of action to ensuring that the members of the community are happy. Our research into different servers and potential areas to improve on led us to the understanding that one of our primary focuses should be the staff team.
As a part of this, we feel that the implementation of a "Community Council" would be hugely beneficial to the community, and would definitely make a lot of staff and users feel more satisfied with the community as a whole.
The Community Council would be a group of users/staff selected by the Community Team with the sole purpose of ensuring that staff and users are happy across all servers. In order to do this, they would not be given any extra powers in-game, but would hold a weekly meeting with the Community Team in order to relay information, suggestions, issues and anything else that they feel would be relevant.
We feel that a Community Council like this would give the opportunity for users to feel like they are being listened to more, and it would improve upon transparency between the Community Team, staff members and users, creating a dedicated team to bring forward suggestions for community-wide changes and even server specific updates directly to the Community Team in a format that should be listened to and taken into account appropriately and systematically.
We asked a range of staff members for their opinions on this idea, and we did not find anyone who thought it would not be beneficial to the community. Most of the staff members we asked also expressed that they would be interested in participating in the Community Council in some way should it become a thing.


Lead Team Applications:

Something else which is quite apparent is that there are some issues with the current Lead Team selection policy. Previously, the way that this worked was that you had to b brought up for Lead Team by an existing Lead Team member and then voted on, without any application process. This led to a lot of complaints about Lead Team members only bringing up their friends, and so the applications system was introduced, with Lead Team members voting each week whether to open or close Super Admin / Head Admin applications for the following week. The opening and closing of applications was eventually scrapped to bring the current system where applications work similarly to Moderator and Administrator applications.
The key problem with this is that it gives a similar mentality to Mod and Admin apps. Rather than trying to enforce a high standard, a lot of people get accepted with the "bare minimum", and sometimes even less than this. This is something which needs to be changed, as it leads to a lot of people losing motivation due to getting Lead Team without having to work for it and also brings a lot of people into the Lead Team who simply are not ready, leaving them overwhelmed and causing issues within the team.
Of course, these issues can never be completely solved, as any system for selecting staff members will have flaws with potential bias and mistakes in selection, but a good way to make a start on working on these issues would be to introduce a policy which would impose rules / regulations on who can apply for Lead Team.
A good set of requirements to begin with, which must be met before being allowed to apply, would be: at least 3 weeks as an Administrator, no accepted report abuses, official warnings or punishments on any ZARP server within the past 2 weeks, at least 3 hours of activity per week for the past 3 weeks (this is the minimum requirement of activity in general) and having attended at least 3 Administrator meetings.
These requirements would ensure that people would not be accepted into the Lead Team actually have a criteria which they have to meet and, rather than having it as an entirely opinionated application process, there would be clear facts which would, bu policy, have to be taken into account.
The following policy could be added to the Lead Team Applications policy (zarpgaming.com/index.php/help/policies/7...ad-team-applications)



A similar set of requirements could also be put onto the Head Admin applications, being slightly stricter and needing to have been a Super Admin for a set amount of time and having attended a set number of Lead Team meetings.


Attitude and Motivation Focus:

Something that I have noticed in the community is that there have been a lot of issues surrounding attitude and motivation of staff members, specifically with those higher up, which has definitely had an impact of that of lower ranking staff members, and has led to a lot of users leaving the server due to seeing this as their initial impression of the community.
As a Community Manager, I would personally like to take a strong focus on dealing with attitude and motivation, which myself and uzi have been working hard recently to get to the bottom of. It is important to ensure that we impose the correct expectations on our staff members of all ranks, and that the Community Team also try their hardest to uphold these standards, and so one of the key things that I will be trying to do, which I believe will definitely be aided by the other plans outlined here, will be to ensure that these standards exist and that they are enforced.
Regarding motivation, a lot of people have lost motivation due to seeing a dwindling playercount on SSRP, however we feel that improving upon attitude will make some impact on bringing in new players, as they will not be scared off by a poor attitude from staff and Lead Team members. This of course will not bring back players alone, however updates are currently being worked on for the SSRP servers which will also play a role.
It is clear that ZARP's DarkRP servers have unrivalled content which isn't present in other communities, so something we do need to focus on is improvements to the community itself and the overall impression that we make on users, creating a friendlier and more welcoming environment to ensure that new users stay around for long enough to see what content we have to offer, rather than leaving before they are even able to do this.


Punishments for Lead Team and Community Team:

As previously mentioned, it is important that we enforce standards in attitude and behaviour across the community, however that brings a range of problems. When a Lead Team or Community Team member has something which is deemed an "outburst", they will usually not receive any kind of punishment, whilst a Moderator or Administrator doing the same thing would receive an Official Warning or a demotion for it. This has led to issues where people feel that higher up staff members are not held to the same standard as everyone else, being able to get away with more, whilst the reason that they actually don't receive an Official Warning is because they work very differently for higher ups. It is a shame to punish / demote someone of such a high rank who has done a lot for the community over such a minor thing, and so it is a bigger deal for a Community Team / Lead Team member to get an Official Warning.
Given that they work differently and the ranks themselves are different, I would like to change the way that punishments work for Lead Team and Community Team members as a whole. Official Warnings and demotions (or demotions to specific ranks) work well for Moderators and Administrators to enforce a good attitude consistently between the ranks, but this simply does not work with Lead Team members.
I believe that the best form of punishment to put forth for Lead Team and Community Team members is a form of punishment which actually forces them to show that they have learned from the mistake and one which lets the community as a whole know that this is the case. This could be achieved by implementing a system where, instead of voting on giving someone an Official Warning, the relevant staff members would vote on a specific "sanction" for the staff member in question. This vote would require a decision on a specific area of staffing / the community and also a specific timeframe. The staff member would then be required to focus on this area of staffing / the community for the designated period of time, potentially also having to carry out specific tasks (for example, if a staff member was showing a poor attitude, they could have to spend more time dealing with users ie. training, managing staff in-game, etc.). They would also be assigned a staff member to keep track of them and, at the end of the time period, this staff member would present a "report" of how they have been doing. A further vote would then take place to decide if there should be any further action (in case the staff member has done terribly and has shown they cannot cope with their rank).
When something like this happens, the community should also be informed on the relevant meeting outcome to ensure that they are aware that action has been taken and so that they can also keep an eye on the staff member, putting them at ease through being able to see what the Lead Team / Community Team are doing to enforce the standards that we expect from the entire staff team.


Forum Changes and Improvements:

I believe that we could make a lot of changes and improvements on the forums with the intent of modernising the community a lot more and to improve community interactions through this medium.
For one thing, it would be nice if we had more integrations with the forums. For example, the activity tracking made by me and DEADMONSTOR could be integrated so that it was linked either to people's profiles directly or just easily accessible via the forums. I made a suggestion about something like this a little while ago which would allow a range of statistics to be shown on people's profiles, which could also include their weekly / total activity across servers.
Something which a lot of communities also have is leaderboards for money and activity on their forums, which I think would be beneficial to keep people competitive for trying to get onto the SSRP money leaderboards. We could also display other things on these leaderboards such as items, activity and some other statistics.
A further improvement I think could be made, and something I am working on currently, is to integrate server ranks with the forums. Currently, all ranks are stored in the MySQL databases, and so they can be easily accessed from anywhere. This means it would be possible to, much like with VIP, display server ranks as badges on the forums.
Something else that this would allow would also be automated staff lists, much like other servers, where we don't have to constantly update the staff list manually when we get new staff, staff resign or staff get demoted. This would allow for easy sorting of ranks for specific servers, checking up on staff activity via the forums and much more.
There are also some other, smaller improvements that I would like to make to the forums as well, such as proper application / forms for server applications and reports to avoid users having to copy templates, buttons to accept / deny reports and move them automatically to archive subsections and much more. If you do have any forum suggestions, please feel free to let me know!
Things like this seemed to be very popular within other communities when I was researching improvements with uzi, and with ZARP being a community which is unrivalled in the amount of activity we get on our forums, we should definitely be looking into ways to ensure that we provide the best, cleanest experience here that we can.


TTT Server 2:

A hugely suggested expansion to the community over time, from current and old members of the TTT community, has been the reintroduction of a second TTT server with a larger map pool. As a Community Manager, I would strive to bring in a second TTT server, as has been planned for a little while now, hopefully on an American host in order to allow the TTT server to further expand out for the American players of the Gmod TTT community. As someone who was staff on TTT when we had the last server, I know that it does provide a much needed break from the constant repetitive gameplay feel that you often get on the current TTT Server. When we had the server previously, there was less of a demand for it in the community itself, and the server had a lot less content on it, so people were being drawn in to the main server purely for the maps. With the server now, there is a lot more incentive to actually join for the content, so a second TTT server is much more of a viable option than it was in the past, as a clear option to bring in old and new players alike and ensure that people are less likely to get bored of playing the same map constantly. My main concern for a second TTT server would be staff members only playing on the second server, as has been seen before, but with an expanding staff team, the chances are this will be less of an issue now, and a few policy changes or even just some requirements for staff members on TTT itself could help to ensure a balance across servers.

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Currently, I hold the rank of Community Developer, which has allowed me the opportunity to work on my skills and gain the experience mentioned above.

Before I became Community Developer, I also held the following ranks:

Prophunt Server Owner
Deathrun Server Owner
Murder Server Owner
Surf Server Developer
SSRP Head Administrator
TTT Head Administrator
Bhop Administrator
Jailbreak Moderator

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As always, I am open to anything that anyone wants to say regarding this application, and any form of constructive feedback which could help me to improve towards this position, or across the community in general. Thanks for reading my application!

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I'd also like to publicise that I will be running for Community Manager with uzi!

We have been working hard together to come up with plans to help with the growth and development of the community, speaking with staff members and doing some research into other community to try and uncover the underlying issues which the community has been facing, putting forth our own ideas which we feel will greatly contribute to overcoming these issues.

If you would like to support us, we would appreciate adding this image to your signature as a sign of your support:

Personally I don't think you have had enough playtime as a mod to prove you are worth of Admin but everything else is good, playtime, attitude and your a good player In TTT.

Thanks for applying for staff at ZARP TTT! During our weekly staff meeting your application, question answers, game trackers and in-game warnings are checked and then the staff team votes on your application.

This time, the staff team have decided that you still need to work on your application and then apply again next week. To try and help you they have summarised some positives & negatives discussed during the meeting:

You can apply again at any time, and thanks for supporting ZARP!