Due to the massive influx of new members to the Dev Forums recently, it has without a doubt become increasingly harder to be noticed and moved up to full member status. The current premise is that those who have shown to be valuable members of the community will be promoted.
However, I feel like due to the sheer amount of new members, and the increased amount of topics and posts it may be difficult to spot “full member worthy” individuals within the community. Therefore, I am suggesting a feature that would allow full members to click a new member’s profile and hit the “recommend for promotion” button if they feel this individual has been contributing exceptionally well.
This would help staff and top contributors keep a closer eye on those who the community really seems to appreciate. New members would not be able to recommend each other, to prevent abuse of the feature. I think this would help get the community involved in the process and make life a bit easier for those in-charge of promoting new members they deem fit.
If the premise that lead top contributors do struggle with spotting new members who should be promoted to member is true, then I agree with this post. It’d be a nice way for the community to highlight users who it believes should be considered for a promotion to them.
I, however, assume that the leads aren’t really struggling with keeping up. Moderation, despite the influx of new members, is continuing as usual, so I presume promotion is too. Keep in mind, though, that a fresh new member > member promotion system/set of requirements is apparently being worked on already.
We need to know from the lead top contributors that this is a problem before we start making solutions to it.
I don’t think something necessarily needs to be considered a problem for improvements to be made to an existing system. Anytime you can get the community involved while also making somebodies job a bit easier you should try to take a step in that direction.
However, I do agree if the top contributors don’t necessarily think the system is needed, or if a new one is in being put into place; than any updates wouldn’t be worth the time investment and hassle associated with creating them.
Nominations are currently intended to be made by Top Contributors because of how much of the forum we read. Lead Top Contributors end up being better for recommendations because they interact with a lot of the new members for moving threads.
I have suggested a reasonably low effort “temporary” solution for manual nominations to improve the system, but I still haven’t heard back from the people who would make the change.
They won’t necessarily. However, when I felt I was ready, or as I put it before “qualified”, I reached out to top contributors and was promoted before the week was through.
10 Posts Approved for Bug Reports/Feature Requests.
That was the process for being promoted formerly. Which is currently in discussion of being changed. So I’m unsure if they’re taking evaluations at this exact time if you were planning on sending one.
This is a good idea, but could be easily abused. Say if I got 10 of my friends to just come on and press this button to get me promoted, it would look as if im a really popular developer.
That would require you to have 10 close friends who were full members who were willing to help abuse the system. It’s not impossible but it is very unlikely.
Recommendation wouldn’t automatically promote somebody, just give them a heightened chance at being recognized and promoted. If somebody happened to have lots of friends with full membership and access to the system; who purposefully chose to recommend a member who doesn’t necessarily deserve promotion; the Top Contributors would easily spot this action and not promote the person.
I don’t think it causes too much of a threat considering most full members tend to be very mature and seasoned veterans in the community with respect for the rules and top contributors time.
And just to be clear I’m not trying to look down on that opinion, I just think if the system is set up without automatic promotion it wouldn’t necessarily cause too much of a problem.
