Let’s talk about roles, shall we? I’m pretty sure 99% of the website’s members also inhabit the discord and the website is so formal and official so I might as well post it here.
I think our implementation of roles on the discord server is almost completely useless and disincentives them from being actually used, when the concept COULD be useful. The problem is basically that people want to have colors and they want respect, even when they aren’t actually useful for helping other people. The easiest to see example of this problem is the Graphicors role, which like half the server has at this point, even if they’re inexperienced spriters. These aren’t people who can help others get better, because they’re in the same level as those seeking advice. Plus, if you tried to ping the role, you’d ping/piss off SO MANY people. The hardline way of solving this problem would be to just wipe everyone’s roles and be more choosy about giving back out roles, but I have a better solution to hopefully make less people gray and unhappy. I affectionately named it the Rolevolution.
The core of the rolevolution is that roles should be split into two categories. Display roles and Utility roles.
Display Role:
- Unpingable
- If you ask for one you can have it.
- Basically there so one can both have a color and show their biggest area of interest.
- Each user can only have one, it’s mostly for the color.
- Have a softer color than equivalent Utility roles.
- Can possibly be given out automatically via a command by FEUBot.
Utility Role:
- Pingable
- Includes Lord and Paladin roles.
- Far more exclusive than display roles; should have some kind of technical barrier.
- Utility roles show that you want to help others, and have the technical skill required.
- This only really works if you actually encourage people to ping it when they need help.
- Have a sharper color than equivalent display roles
Utility Display Role:
- Unpingable
- Each utility role has an equivalent display role, with priority over all of the others.
- Exclusively for determining what color to prioritize when a user has several utility roles. Also used for sorting in the sidebar. Everyone with a utility role has one of them.
Other Notes:
- I think the Design and Writing roles are pointless and aren’t actually worth anything as a functional role. They could remain as display roles but I don’t see much purpose in them as utility roles. Like what’re you gonna ping design for, really. It has such a nebulous definition. Plus writing is such a personal and specific thing that I don’t think pinging writers would ever be really useful for anything practical.
- Within this, a channel specifically for dealing with roles would probably be useful just so #general doesn’t get spammed to hell and back with role requests/bot commands.
in summary colorz pls.
