New Peg Com Friend Policies
Per our rules the Office of the President is responsible for all guild public works. On our discord we have numerous Peg Com friends and visitors to our server. Our old system for handling this is becoming inadequate. Over the next few weeks I will be working on what this new system will look like. I am asking for public comment on the system and any ideas members may have. Here are some initial ideas for features of a new system:
1. The system needs as little tacking as possible.
2. Needs to be self correcting.
3. Easy to understand.
4. Does not allow in general for permanent status as a Peg Com Friend, absent some really good reason, like they are a guild leader of another guild we want to stay in contact with ect.
5. Easy to be complied with by the membership.
6. Make the difference between being a member and Peg Com friend, very clear and easy to understand.
Post any thoughts or ideas you may have below.
I agree there has to be point where they join PC or be removed to keep things organized but this would require mass micro managing or creating a discord bot that tracks peg com friends like when they joined and how long they have been squatting. Definitely something that the next pcsc will have to discuss. I was just about to purge eso peg com friends that have been camping in our discord myself funny you brought this up. One thing you can do is put a 30 day pc friend limit if they don’t join they are removed and must ask to be invited again. At least this way you can remove the people who are not gaming with us and keep the people who have friends in other guilds etc still gaming with them
We do need better rules and we need a better system of invites, which is why I've been working on a bot lately and figuring out what all of our options are in these regards. Until recently I've just been toying around with the API, its various wrappers and the programming languages they're in, but now I've got a database setup to be able to track discord users using their unique unchanging ID (not the name@handle#tag that you normally see). No, it's not tracking or really doing anything as of yet, I've just been working on the DB design and potential flow. That was up to a few days ago, so it's nice to find this post today because I was thinking the same thing.
OK, bot aside. We do need a set of rules, and we more than likely will need more than just Aer enforcing and managing them, and they should be simple enough that we don't have to _have_ to have a bot to enforce and manage them providing we don't grow to a point where we have 1000's of users online all the time and 100's of new users joining all the time. At least for now.
So, I'm in complete agreement with Aer on this. As a recruiter for Neverwinter, and now doing recruitment advertising on forums, I'm faced with a chore myself. I don't give out the Discord link in chat or in posts, unless it's more a one on one situation or to a couple people in the alliance and then it's a temp link. But, nevertheless, now that people are going to pegasuscommand.com for Neverwinter and finding the official Discord link for our server, I've had to monitor new arrivals and catch the few that I have who are interested in Neverwinter. I have to say, it's a pain.
It's not so bad if I just gave a temp link to a couple of people and I know to watch for them... But, when it's a random hit to our website from a forum post or website link from in a game, I have no idea where these people are from or what they're interested in unless I scroll through the user list and see "Playing Neverwinter" or one of our other games. So, I'm also afraid that more than likely we've had many come through who were actually interested in joining but never had anyone greet them properly and left before they filled out the website application.
Case in point, I had one guy who had a few questions before starting the application, then had questions regarding the application, and also had questions regarding the game and what he should be calling himself across all of this. It was just by luck that I caught him when he first arrived and seen he was playing Neverwinter. I'm sure if I wasn't around and no one else noticed he was a Neverwinter player, he wouldn't have been greeted, prolly wouldn't have said hello or asked for help, and prolly would have moved along looking for help elsewhere more than likely from another guild.
Bah, I ramble, but I hope my points are coming across. We're a great guild with a bunch of good people and we're growing. We need to better streamline our intake procedures. Now that Aer isn't personally going around inside every game and getting new members, us Game Commanders and Recruiters really need to step up and fill our roles if we want the games we play to grow and thrive. We need to get together on this stuff and help each other.
So, in conclusion, here's a few things I think we should agree on and do:
1. Cover all the points Aer made above.
2. Create a "WELCOME TO PEG COM" section, possibly replacing "INFORMATION" section with #information being a channel. Also possibly a "NEWS" section, and a "HELP" section with appropriate channels.
3. Have an official over-all "#invited" and/or "#welcome" text channel that new connections connect directly to outside of "#general"or rename #general to #welcome and create a new general chat channel to keep random chat and new arrivals separate so we know if there's a new unread in #welcome it's a new person and they should get attention and if there's new text in #general we can get to it when it's convenient.
4. Have an official "Welcome to Peg Com" voice channel.
3. Have an official "#welcome-to-_________" text channel for each official game section.
4. Have an official "#help-with-___________" text channel for each official game section.
5. Have an official "#________-news" text channel for each official game section.
6. Have an official "#________-members" text channel for each official game section.
7. Have an official "#________-lfg" text channel for each official game section.
8. Have an official "Welcome to ___________" voice channel for each official game section.
9. Have an official "Help with _____________" voice channel for each official game section.
10. Have an official "_________ Members" voice channel for each official game section.
11. Allow for other required channels per each official game.
12. Restrict access to all channels based on roles or the lack of roles. Basically, allow read+write access to @everyone in welcome, invite, introduction, and help type channels and finally allow read only access to news and informational channels.
13. Restrict channel management to specific roles so that official news, rules, and information channels can be properly maintained and pruned of discussion that's no longer relevant.
With proper Discord permissions and a decent layout new arrivals should only see relevant content and easily be able to navigate to where they should be going and better be able to get assistance and see the rules. As things stand, they get dumped in the middle of a conversation in #general with a lot of sections and channels to sort through. They also get overlooked until they get kicked for the most part. We should also be able to invite directly to a specific welcome channel text or voice. As it stands, it doesn't matter if we create an invite link to a specific channel, the way things are setup they go to our set welcome channel (which is general) regardless. So, when we do invite someone we're expecting they have to search out where they're going. I've personally heard some of these people fall into random game channels because that's where there were some of us.