You’ve been around longer than I had been when I became an admin.

Nothing against you personally, but I consider you fairly new, and one of my points in the deleted commentary was to be more stringent in standards for being an admin. Many of our current admins do not understand the system, how it works, what to update in the templates, how to admin proposals, etc. Still, the templates are not my biggest concern. Based on some earlier comments, I believe that you do not understand what admins are supposed to do. Read some of the wiki documents on admins carefully, and show me that you understand what you are supposed to do, and you’ll have my vote.

@Wak: Sheesh man lol. He did ask to learn how to be a good admin. and I seem to recall a certain person wanting to be an admin early in their nomic career lol.

On the side, the only reason why i haven’t really admined anything was either someone beat me to it or i was busy out of game.

  due to inexperience.  This is, what, your second proposal?

I don’t have a problem with the timing, its the lack of preparation. I read all the wiki documents before posting a proposal, and then some. I also know how most people would want to look around the site when granted adminship, and I have found quite a few dangerous problems in EE… such as a “delete weblog” button, though I do not know if it works. I haven’t tried. :P. This coupled with the general sense of youth I get from him, and his post about “wait, what exactly does an admin do again?” has gotton me a bit worried. Like I said—AL? If you want my vote, PM me and prove you can handle it. I am nothing if not reasonable. If you show me that I have no reason to worry…

I am explicitly abstaining from voting. No one (except me) has been adminned since I joined, so I don’t know the standards or anything.

Yes, this is Lizardman’s second proposal, although his first proposal seems to have been invalid. He’s made five other posts since joining; one join message, one unidle message, and three small questions.

I’d be interested to see Wakukee’s lost post on adminship. I’m beginning to wonder if admins should explicitly be restricted to just processing proposals, players and the ruleset, and some other badge of status is needed in order to edit the blog templates (just as an informal “don’t try editing templates” agreement, I don’t think we could actually implement it in EE).

The front page HTML source is pretty broken, after three years of well-meaning admins updating for new dynasties without being 100% sure how HTML or ExpressionEngine works, and it was a little dispiriting to see what looked like “oops, I’ve broken voting icons/the blog during the course of my admin duties, still, no time to work out how to fix it now” a couple of times last week.

Being a fairly new player, I have always wondered why exactly the majority of consistent and serious players seemed to be admins. On the wiki, there seems to be no criteria to “become an admin.” The wiki really only gives a brief manual on “how to be an admin.”

Feeling a little overwhelmed, I’m not exactly asking for permission to run shell scripts here. To be honest, I have never worked with Expression Engine before; I felt like at the time of requesting admin-ship, that if I were granted the privilege, I would be taught how to admin proposals, idle/unidle players, etc. I feel a little lost; is there some page on the wiki that is buried? Have I not found the link to the complete guide on how EE works, or how the website is run? It doesn’t seem in my place, considering I have yet to run a dynasty, to ask for global permissions or rights to EE where currently serious players expect a working weblog; I’m not 13. I’m not going to just go poking around and altering things that I don’t know what they do. I know exactly what the “delete weblog” button will do; it will delete the entire weblog! Not only is this a very juvenile and unintelligent thing to do, it will ruin the fun of others in addition to permanently deleting a _lot_ of data that a majority of people seem very sentimental about. This is why I asked for a tutorial. There is only a very brief, and relatively short admin guide on the wiki, as I mentioned before.

To be fair, I can understand where all of you are coming from. Kevan and Wakukee especially. It really seems like you both _know_ the responsibilities and techniques of being a good admin. I, however, do not. Is one born with the ability to ride a bike? Does it not take practice and hardwork before eventually the training wheels can come off? Although I respect everyone’s opinion, it seems a little unfair to expect me to know exactly what is required of being an admin, or how to work simple tasks in EE if I have never even tried. In addition, there really is no information available to me, beyond the simple admin guide. When one asks to learn to ride a bike, I hope the response is never “come back when you know.”

Does posting a proposal equate to being a good admin? I’m not exactly sure. I don’t really post proposals because I am not a very creative person. If an idea comes to me, then I will write a proposal, considering the Ruleset allows me too, and go from there. Isn’t the simplicity of voting on proposals, and editing the GNDT qualify me as a player? I still am playing the game, whether or not I post proposals; considering it is early in the dynasty, I would rather add supporting rules, and in the case of this particular dynasty, spells that can be cast, or techniques of expanding one’s workbench, then framework rules which could or could not cause problems later. I thought that just because I don’t really post proposals I want to help in a manner that reaches back to all players.

If there are rules and requirements for admin-ship, please, let me know.

Does posting a proposal equate to being a good admin? <—no, but if one is not a serious blognomic player, there is no way they can be a serious admin.

A definate no unless you begin playing more seriously. Sorry, mate.

@AL: Pretty much, don’t use your admin powers when the ruleset doesn’t tell you to*. That sums up all of the rules, honestly; if we can trust you not to do that, then we can let you in.

*Also, admins can, at the beginning of a dynasty, change the color scheme and header, along with the GNDT color scheme. But given that insane freak accident that happened earlier in the dynasty, let’s just leave it to the more experienced ones…

Posted at the same time as Wak.

Darth: That was a complete coincidence. No one’s fault.
As far as I can tell.

Yes, but it’s still a good idea.

Kevan:  Part of the problem is that of institutional wisdom.  We use gifs for the voting icons because we always have; but it’s not clear why until things break.  I don’t remember how the emoticons module interacts with various types, and there’s no a priori reason png shouldn’t work.  However, in practice it doesn’t, and it requires a whole bunch of bother to make the change. 

I am also this proposal.  We are not lacking for admins at present, tbh, though it is perhaps time for more people to be given more power, and perhaps formalized in some way.  75th trombone and I discussed this a long while ago, when he/I/Kevan/Angry Grasshopper were, in effect, the four superadmins.  Do we need more people on the list?  Almost certainly.  How do we vet them, though? 

Something that would be helpful to write would be a quick form to change the colour scheme and add/subtract header and sidebar pictures without having people paw through the templates.  Shouldn’t be that hard to template, either. 

This should likely be a front page post.

And as soon as new .gif voting icons are uploaded, that problem will be fixed anyway.

They were, dude.  As long as all the pointers back to the .pngs have been fixed, which I doubt we’ll find until next time the icons change.

Apathetic: I’ve been here for, what, three years now, and I’ve never been interested in being an Admin.

Excalabur: My issue with the voting icons is more the apparent ease with which they were broken, and the slow, casual way in which they were fixed (which they still aren’t). It feels like the “any admin can have a go at changing stuff” attitude is contributing to this; if you break something, it doesn’t really matter, you can go offline and someone else will probably notice it and fix it. A clearer “only these specific users should edit templates” approach might help here.

Lizardman: The wiki’s Admin Manual seems fairly exhaustive, when read in combination with the Ruleset. What do you think it’s missing?

As for whether a prospective admin should already know how to be an admin, rather than learning on the job - I think they probably should, and it’s not much to ask. All of an admin’s duties are clearly defined by the ruleset, which an active player will have read and understood during the course of play. It only takes the added technical skills of the Admin Manual to find out how to fail the oldest pending proposal, or add someone to the GNDT, or whatever else.

Please note that Excalibur is currently idle, and his vote does not count.

Also: Ex, maybe it has somthing to do with http://blognomic.com/update/index.php?C=modules&M=Emoticon
in the Modules? I personally cannot access it, but I assume that you can.

Lizardman’s been here long enough, but I’m not sure DC’s argument is persuasive; DC proposed to be admin, what, 3 times before he got it? and basically just kept requesting until everyone else gave in. An effective strategy, no? ;D

Wakukee:  Please learn to spell my name correctly. 

Yeah,  I can access that page, (though I can’t find a link /to/ it) but not alter it.  May have something to do with Safari? 

Kevan:  In what way are they still broken?  All I was to do was upload the new versions, which I have now done (several times): what’s still busted, I’ll see if I can fix since yuri and DC ain’t.

The icons are fixed to me. maybe a control F5 will reset ya cookies? Ik that’s happened to me before lol

Also, Qwaz: First I proposed as a joke, then someone else made an anon CfJ, then I proposed again.

???

Ah. Double Wak.

Pulled a Wak? Sounds like a fun term to use when we goof up lol. no offense Wak.

No, pulled a Wak is fine with me. You could say things have gone al Wakky too, though. ; ).

Note that this proposal really is moot. This proposal does not make him an admin, just requests it. Also, I don’t know if he has a wiki account, but it is required before adminship. Given that this is his second proposal… I’d say that if I wind up admining this, I am not going to make him an admin, I’ll have him repropose properly. Just saying.

Excalabur: They look fine now, maybe it was just caching the images yesterday.

I’d still caution against giving admin rights to a user who apparently isn’t sure what an admin is supposed to do.

Well I guess I better self-kill this. I doubt I’m going to be an admin anytime soon with some of the reactions I received. 

You were winning the vote, so you would have been an admin in less than an hour if you’d stayed the course ;)

It’s interesting how much discussion this has caused; by some of the criteria put forward I’d never be made an admin.

Josh:  In some sense the blogger days things were less breakable (Except for deleting the whole blog, sigh).  There’s also usually only a push to get admins when no one is really adminning things.

I’d still be interested to hear why Lizardman feels the existing ruleset and admin manual don’t sufficiently explain what an admin is expected to do. It’s hard to see these things with new eyes, when you’ve been playing the game so long, so it’d be good to get some feedback.