I don’t know. Community Sage is a pretty funny name. Does it really describe what it needs to?
I would probably go with something like:
• Community Official
• Engagement Wizard
Are we explaining to new users that these people will help approve posts? Or are they just gonna have to guess, the name doesn’t seen very intuitive for it with something lax like sage.
Do Community Sages have control over the Post Approval team?
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Well, as the first post here says, that’s the Post_Approval group now, not Community_Sage. All documentation regarding post approval has been up-to-date for a month+ now to refer to the new Post_Approval group, yes. They don’t have to guess.
People can also click on “Community Sage” (i.e. do it on my title here above) to view more information.
I don’t think that way evethough it sounds funny it has a better meaning. It means the man of community.
I’m thankful for that as well. Top Contributor (at least to me) isn’t something that can be fully automated, because it requires, by its nature of interacting with New Members, a level of integrity and good understanding of the rules. I think the manual review does that very well.
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We don’t have to interact with new members anymore than we did as full members, like the original post says 
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Just to emphasize, but the whole point is that we’re stripping any additional responsibilities from Top Contributor and it’s really just to show that these are some of the best contributors we have here. They don’t need to give people feedback and they don’t need to review promotions anymore, that’s the old program.
They can of course give feedback to posters on their posts to help improve them, and we encourage everyone to do that, not just Top Contributor.
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The post approval team includes the community sages.
The post approval team (both community sages and regular members) give feedback on the requests. The sages do the final move once it is ready and open it.
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All potential top contributors are manually reviewed to avoid situations like this. I doubt anyone has the ability to bot replies that provide genuine help depending on the context of the thread to the extent that forum staff are fooled.
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It still involves being a trusted member of the community, but yeah, not as “communicative” as it used to be.
Thanks for the response.
How are members selected for the Post Approval team?
(Apologies for the OP edits I hit enter too soon. D:)
I meant more that they still play an important role as being fairly trustworthy members of the community. They might not review others for promotion, but they’re still going to be looked up to by a lot of newer members, mainly because they have experience, and can still help others out.
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Now that we’ve finally streamlined all the ranks, we just need to make more transparent how each of these higher ranks is selected, and we plan to do that with: (mentioned above)
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I’m looking forward to the post you mentioned which will detail the promotion process of each rank. Sounds pretty informative.
So with these changes in mind, is the promotion of top contributors an ongoing thing or is it periodic? And is it possible to lose it if we quit being active/contributing as much in the future for any reason?
Congratulations to the other 75 top contributors by the way!
Yes, but also no – an invite-only process surfaces fewer people, so it requires much more effort in general to maintain, and it also opens the door to nepotism. By having automated selection criteria and only applying a blacklist filter on top, the selection is much more fair, and it is a much lower workload for us and DevRel (almost none, they just need to go through a small list of users every while) to maintain while also keeping the quality of contributors very high (because our criteria are very high, and the blacklist filters out bad apples in terms of stat gaming or forum moderation).
Batch:
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Yes, the title can go away if you stop being active, but the criteria for that are pretty lenient so don’t feel like you need to post every day or even every week or so.
You can lose the title, but not the badge. Once you ever got the badge, you keep it forever.
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Having likes received as a statistic seems…unreliable. I may be wrong, but there are definitely a few (not the majority, but still) people that when trying to get into the forum, think that if they like everything they see, they get in.
Not a bad statistic, just seems somewhat
unreliable.
In unrelated news, today Google reported an unusual uptick of searches for the query “define sage”. We’ll keep you updated as facts roll in.
Honestly, I’m glad to see we’re moving past manual processes. This will definitely allow for the DevForum to grow.
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No worries, the criteria are more complicated than plain likes received stats, and we will filter anyone out that games the stats.
Teach us the ways of the Community Sage, Builthomas Sensei.
On a serious note, this is a pretty cool change. Its also great to see a bit of clarity of what a ‘Community Sage’ now does and how they achieved their role. Well done guys!
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