Change to minimum monthly activity

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    We are going to be changing the minimum monthly activity requirements later this year to require admins to hold a minimum of 12 hours a month of activity. This is to try to help encourage admins to be on more regularly throughout the month and to engage better with the community on the server.

    We will with immediate effect be updating the ratio in the plan activity index, this will mean you will need to average 3 hour per week, every week over 3 weeks to show as "Active" on the server.

    I would strongly encourage admins (and anyone in the community for that matter) to check on their profile on plan ( https://play.totalfreedom.me:8080 ) and ensure you are showing up as "Active" in the activity index.

    Going forward we will look to move away from planned and scheduled activity checks, and they will become random with the EAO Team checking all admins rating in the activity index, and having conversations with those admins that are failing to meet the minimum activity requirements. We've noticed in previous activity checks that some individuals would come on towards the end of the month just to hit the quota, and by basing it off of a rolling average that will be substantially harder to do.

    I'm hoping that this change will be welcomed and will ultimately continue to enhance the quality of our administration team in their commitment to our player-base.

    Happy to answer any questions folks might have, and just to reiterate, this is not going in to force with immediate effect, the current activity removal policy will be enforced for at least this current month.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

    Very pleased with this change. Really didn't like the way some admins popped up out of nowhere on the 28th or whatever to muck around for 3 hours then do the same thing the next month. Glad you've taken action.

    Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.

    Well, it's... an interesting change, and I'm not sure if we'll accidentally remove so many admins with August's activity check that we have to pause future checks again.

    Discord link to the discussion in adminchat of the activity index that led to 3.00 originally being set to 1.5 hours

    However, I'm... not sure how I feel about using the activity index for this. Hear me out...

    For whatever reason, Plan, instead of totaling the last 3 weeks and calculating the activity index based on the total divided by 3, calculates the activity index for each of the last 3 weeks individually and then averages those.

    With the way the activity index works (you can get closer and closer to 5.00, but you can never quite reach it, and the derivative of the function at zero playtime is 5 for just 2 hours), this means that 0+0+24 hours is (0+0+4.62)/3 = 1.54 while 0+2+2 is (0+2.5+2.5)/3 = 1.67.

    Reaching 3.00 with evenly-balanced weeks only takes 3+3+3 hours, while missing a week completely for some reason means you have to get 18+18 in the other two to get to 3.00...

    an activity requirement for a provided service seems a bit weird. seems like the only people who'll be affected by this are admins with tight schedules.
    if i were an inactive admin and wanted to keep my rank, i would just join for 6 hours for two days then be gone the rest of the month, effectively changing nothing

    better idea imo is just reward activity instead of punishing inactivity.

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    ↩  jwmphall if i were an inactive admin and wanted to keep my rank, i would just join for 6 hours for two days then be gone the rest of the month, effectively changing nothing

    ↩ @'Ryan' Going forward we will look to move away from planned and scheduled activity checks, and they will become random with the EAO Team checking all admins rating in the activity index, and having conversations with those admins that are failing to meet the minimum activity requirements. We've noticed in previous activity checks that some individuals would come on towards the end of the month just to hit the quota, and by basing it off of a rolling average that will be substantially harder to do.

    This was addressed in the post.

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    ↩  StevenNL2000 I think the main problem is that we don't actually care about the admin's activity, we care about their engagement. We are only using activity as a metric because we've decided it is too hard to measure engagement. "Doing the bare minimum to retain admin" would not be a thing in the first place

    Quote

    ↩  volleo6144 For whatever reason, Plan, instead of totaling the last 3 weeks and calculating the activity index based on the total divided by 3, calculates the activity index for each of the last 3 weeks individually and then averages those.
    ↩  volleo6144 Reaching 3.00 with evenly-balanced weeks only takes 3+3+3 hours, while missing a week completely for some reason means you have to get 18+18 in the other two to get to 3.00...

    I'm with volleo on this, how do we address it?

    TotalFreedom's Executive Community & Marketing Manager

    ↩  Tizz So this is part of the reason for trying to move towards something that is driven by averages / the plan data (Though I agree the plan data isn't exactly ideal, but I'm encouraging people to use it now as an early indication as to how close / far off they would be from meeting this).

    At the end of the day we need admins who can regularly interact with the wider community, I do fully understand that for some folks live gets in the way / working scheduled and such will get in the way, and within reason I fully plan for the EAO Team to be able to accommodate that, however I'm really sick of those handful of folks that come on to do the bare minimum because that's not fair on the community as a whole, or the other members of the admin team who then need to go even further above and beyond to pick up the slack.

    I'm not saying this will be perfect, and it may yet get thrown out the window and replaced with something else if it doesn't look like it'll work as well as I think it should be, but the ultimate aim is that the entire staff team can average somewhere around 3 hours per week on the server, which doesn't feel like it should be too huge of an ask as a rule of thumb.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

    I agree that changes to this policy are needed. However, I like the general direction this is going in and hopefully it can be tweaked as time goes on to make things easier for those who are actually trying to be active despite IRL stuff.

    I've just re-read more carefully this excerpt:

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    ↩ @'Ryan' having conversations with those admins that are failing to meet the minimum activity requirements

    This makes me think the activity index won't be used for automatic removal but instead for investigating why an admin isn't reaching the threshold and, if necessary, accomodate any reasonable need. Which is fair enough.

    TotalFreedom's Executive Community & Marketing Manager

    ↩  Tizz Yeah I'm keen to move away from "Automated Removals" except where they player has clearly gone totally inactive, I want the activity checks to form 1 part of a number of tools the EAO Team can have at their disposal to help better manage our admin team and make sure we're all doing our best for the community.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK