I'm late and I see you guys are working towards solutions on this already (wrt Emotional Support Staff), but I wanted to make something very important clear: Being on the forum at any given time does not mean that a person is capable of offering emotional support, for various reasons, including "I am also having a breakdown," "I am the person you are currently fighting with," "I do not know how to provide support for this situation," and "what the fuck is a spoon anyway." Making the assumption that because people are online, there is someone available to do the emotional work, is hugely messy. @Xavius linked to the I need support thread, which I think is a very good resource for the community and a very good starting place. But having the assumption that informal systems will pick up the slack is not at all a good one, for the individual users who are hurt or for the forum as a whole.
I could be a shoosh pap mod as long as I could tap out for breaks when I needed to for my mental health.
@Starcrossedsky For what it's worth, I agree with you. I was trying to offer a stopgap solution since it looked like the tide of conversation was already going to flow that way anyhow, but I didn't expect us to be getting here so quickly. Emotional support mods are a great idea and I am all for this.
i also volunteer as a tribute for the shooshpapping hat, if it's alright with folks. i'm not very well known in the forums, but i'm hard to upset and i don't do as much emotional shooshpapping as i want to because i feel like i would be intruding in a situation.
Are we signing up for emotional support mod status now? Because I feel like that's something I can and want to do, but I'm not 100% sure I have the time currently.
In the mean time, could people who would be fine with acting as emotional support regardless of modhat make a post in the I Need Help thread? As it is, offers for support there can be as situational as the supporter needs. ETA: Here is a link to that thread so you don't have to dig. Also idk who is already there, some of you may already be??
Co-signed. I think the number of emotional support mods should certainly be higher than the number of post magic mods. Not only because of time zones, but because this can be tiring position. From what I remember, in the early-ish days of the skype chats people with good moderation/support skills got rather burnt out, since there simply weren't enough of them. Forum isn't skype, but I guess the burnout is not too different.
Question because I don't know how forums work: in this scenario, would it be possible for users to toggle what mods can see their threads? I see the need for Lots of Mods in this scenario, but with that comes a greater possibility for... conflict of interest? That's not quite right, but I mean with Lots of Mods there increases the chance that someone will dislike/not trust at least one mod, and therefore not want to use that forum because of it?? Someone help me words here.
Ahh, I see. I get that - @leo gave a good example of phrasing in that situation. That's another aspect on where I'm coming from on the script thing; it gives a go-to framework for what to say that doesn't require you to have specific emotions or imply you have them, but still allows you to make a useful response. (I use a lot of scripts because of this, since my empathic response is... unreliable.) Like, for a very simplistic example, "I see X did Y to Z. What X did was not okay. I'm doing ABC about it. Z, I see and understand that you're hurt - would you like someone to talk to or comfort you directly?" Optimally it'd have more flexible phrasing and be modular - the important parts are acknowledge what happened, acknowledge that it was harmful/inappropriate/etc. (even if it seems obvious that the thing done was bad, it's very reassuring to people to see someone Official say it), and acknowledge the feelings of anyone harmed.
Sadly, I think that's probably beyond anything the software can do. The software is not great about the idea of users getting to make decisions which are binding on mods, because most forums don't work that way.
Would it be more possible for people to contact mods-with-powers to make threads that only certain users, such as one of the support mods and the people involved in the conflict, could see, or is that right out too?
unfortunately, permission-setting is pretty much admin-only, and in practice the only per-thread permission you can set for a user other than thread creator is a reply-ban, which is not a read-ban.
couldnt someone make a PM conversation with them and multiple mods if they need to contact specific mods and avoid others? like in addition to the user-and-all-mods option.
This is a good idea, but I have a question since I don't actually use the PMs a lot. I know it's possible to leave a conversation, but is it possible to turn off notifications for them without leaving/alerting others/losing access? The advantage of threads is that people don't know whether or not you in particular have looked at them yet. The idea that everyone would know I have left or am ignoring something, for whatever reason, sounds like it would be really stressful if I was supposed to be in a supportive role, even if it wasn't required of me to support everyone all the time.
Posting here just to give the heads-up: The I Need Support thread is pinned for now barring further action on appointing support mods. I say barring because we're going to need to figure out how exactly we're going to go about appointing support mods and what exactly a support mod will be. Given how drained people are this might take a little while, and I politely request that people bear with us. The train is leaving the station, this is gonna happen, but we have to fuel up first. Expect to see more on it shortly.
...I was going to ask how exactly people were envisioning the support mod thing was going to work, but in light of @Xavius's post above, would it be better to save discussion of that for later so people have a chance to recuperate a bit first?
