What Are "Staff-Applications"?
Staff-applications are made when a member of the site wishes to be apart of the staff-team on the Creepypasta Files Wiki. This may include wishing to be promoted to: rollback, thread-moderator, content-moderator, administrator and bureaucrat. Of course, these applications have certain rules regarding the accuracy and equality when being crafted, considered and accepted/denied.
What Can I Apply For?
Like many other communities, certain roles can be applied for and some cannot. All have to be earned via dedication, activity and good reputation among the site and its members. However, certain roles cannot be given simply due to one request. As you can assume, you have to prove your standard before making said request.
Edits - Of course having edits on the site you wish to moderate is important. It shows how you contribute to it with or without staff-privileges after all. So, it would only make sense to have this crucial detail (hoping it's not tampered with via edit-farming). Please remember edits to your own pages are not included as members would increase edit-farming cases to earn staff-roles.
Activity - It is hard to gain a precise answer for someone's activity as personal events or sudden changes to both a person and the site itself can lead to fluctuating attendance. Whilst it is rare to demote someone for inactivity, we do recommend having active staff-members to avoid the obvious from happening. So, to help measure this, we use the possible average for someone's attendance per week instead.
Humility - From what many can wish from a member of staff, we need a clear sense of hospitality towards newcomers, responsibility towards trolls/vandals and civility towards the site in general. Having a controversial origin/reputation among the Creepypasta Files Wiki or lacking much attendance/social-skills shortly before promoting yourself might prove challenging to gain supporting votes in the long run. After all, if people are too aware of your wrongs or lack much awareness to your existence, how will they trust in the idea of you becoming a staff-member?
Basic Writing Mechanics - It’s recommended that all members applying need to have a moderate understanding of English writing mechanics, also known as SPaG (Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar), as well as storytelling. Given that the wiki serves as a public domain for characters and stories alike, we value what we put out. Our community thrives on the creativity and imagination of its members, and by upholding a certain standard of language proficiency, we can expect something worth enjoying and engaging with.
Rollback
- Must have at least 25 edits.
- Activity ranging between once a week.
Role
- Revert vandalism
- Redo edits
Thread-Moderator
- Must have at least 50 edits.
- Activity ranging between twice a week.
Role
- Remove and restore threads and replies by any user
- Close and reopen replies
- Delete blog comments
- Edit and delete article comments
- Moderate the Discussions feature
Content-Moderator
- Must have at least 100 edits.
- Activity ranging between twice a week.
Role
- Edit and move fully protected pages
- Delete and undelete pages and files
- Edit and move protected files
- Rollback
- Protect and unprotect pages
- Patrol pages
Administrator
- Must have at least 300-500 edits
- Activity ranging between three days a week.
- Staff-member reference(s).
Role
- All privileges from both the Content Moderator and Thread Moderator groups
- Block users from editing and other actions
- Grant and revoke the Rollback and Thread Moderator rights
- Edit the community's skin and format
- Edit whitelisted MediaWiki pages
Bureaucrat
- Cannot be requested by user themselves.
- Staff-members may request for a user to be promoted if already administrator.
- Staff-members of this rank may promote another member of staff below this title upon retirement or replacement from a demotion thread against the bureaucrat.
Role
- All privileges from the Administrator groups
- Change or assign user rights
- Block and unblock users
- Promote and revoke Rollback, Content Moderator, and Administrator rights, as well as appointing new Bureaucrats
How To Make A Staff-Application
Usually, a request from the possible candidate or staff-members themselves will post via a discussion-post about the candidate to be promoted. Members of the community within a period of between 5-7 days then decide the outcome of the vote with the possible options: support, neutral or against. Depending on the sum of the votes counted, the relevant aftermath follows (e.g the majority voting for support leads to a promotion).
Similar to "Marked for deletion" pages when being terminated, users may request another possible promotion after a cooldown period of 3-5 months (as staff-privileges are considered both powerful and valued by communities). If it has been declined, when the recommended period of time has been met, staff-members or the user themselves can repeat the promotion request provided they have (slightly) updated their references to match the new date.
Using the layout below, you can create a staff-application if necessary:
Title - Promotion For [Insert Username Here]
Explanation - Using active references to their work/commitment, showcase why they should be a member of staff. Please ensure these are not excessively outdated and/or irrelevant sources (e.g other wikis, Wikipedia, or completely unique sources being referred to).
Options - Place the options that users can choose from, remotely an agreement option, a neutral option and a disagreement option.
How Not To Make A Staff-Application
As to be expected, there are some clear restrictions when crafting and managing a promotion request. This is to ensure the equality, safety and security of the community's staff-team whilst making sure that members of the Creepypasta Files Wiki do not feel threatened or oppressed by this option.
As a Member, You Cannot:
- Create duplicate/frequent promotion requests for yourself.
- Create duplicate/frequent promotion requests for possible friends, family or random users.
- Harass and/or intimidate someone requesting a promotion.
- Use harassment and/or intimidation to force others to request a promotion for yourself.
- Attempt to use alternative accounts to tamper with voting.
- Use outside resources to boost your reputation.
- Have a damageable reputation on the site whilst creating a promotion request.
If it is found that you have contributed to one or several of these reasons, your request will be consequently denied and your account may even be suspended if the action is warranted.
As a Staff-Member, You Cannot:
- Create duplicate/frequent promotion requests for yourself.
- Create duplicate/frequent promotion requests for possible friends, family or random users.
- Harass and/or intimidate someone requesting a promotion.
- Use harassment and/or intimidation to force others to request a promotion for yourself.
- Attempt to use alternative accounts to tamper with voting.
- Use outside resources to boost your reputation.
- Have a damageable reputation on the site whilst creating a promotion request.
- Using your staff-privileges to deny, accept or leave pending particular promotions against what a community has voted towards.
- Terminating particular promotion requests without reason.
- Blocking accounts associated with particular promotion requests without reason.
If it is found that you have contributed to one or several of these reasons, your request will be consequently denied and your account may even be suspended if the action is warranted. Another consequence might be a demotion request made on your user due to potential power-abuse, intimidation/harassment, excessive edit-farming, etc. An immediate demotion will be set if the request is tampered with in any way by the user mentioned.
Reasons For Permanent Demotions
Some staff-members might be deemed unavailable to retain their rights under certain circumstances. These may included affected members, edit-count or a damageable reputation both on this site and the Discord server associated with the Creepypasta Files Wiki. Some of these reasons might be:
- Using your staff-privileges to deny, accept or leave pending particular promotions against what a community has voted towards.
- Inactivity without notice past 3 months after being prompted for a response at least once a month.
- Abuse of staff-privileges via discussion-posts, blog-posts and pages (e.g terminating random pages without reason, locking random posts without reason, etc).
- Blocking/restricting accounts without reason.
- Allowing sockpuppetry, harassment/intimidation or false/irrelevant advertisement.
- Randomly promoting/demoting members of the site (most likely due to bias).
- Using off-topic and/or irrelevant sources to promote hatred/drama against a user/source.
- Abuse of staff-privileges via the Discord server.
Depending on the severity of the offense, a user caught using their staff-privileges maliciously might be permanently excluded from receiving any and all staff-rights back. This may also include blocking the associated user to prevent further conflict.
Q & A
Q: Do my Creepypastas affect my chances of succeeding in getting a promotion?
A: Technically, yes. Contributing to the site by improving your own and others' pages would most likely increase your chances of being promoted to your preferred staff-role. There's no guarantee that this will be the case for everyone wishing to become a member of staff. However, it is to be advised that having creations on this site does allow others to view how you are both as a writer, as an editor and as a person understanding literature/language.
By presenting your own top quality Creepypastas and assisting others here, you better your chances to be recognised and appreciated. Essentially, first impressions do count and if you've planned on uploading your own concepts, we'd recommend making sure to heed any reviews/advice from others before applying.
Q: How do "previous offenses" work? What is considered "the past" compared to "the present"?
A: Any previous matters (usually ranging from 3-6 months ago or longer) might not be considered when reviewing someone's requests for a promotion. Although, the severity and type of offense might cause some disruption. Some users - despite their supposed redemption - have attempted to gain back staff-privileges for similar intimidating/negative reasons. And, we wish to avoid this repeat from years ago.
Q: What if I know someone apart of the staff-team? Does that mean I'll have a higher chance to get promoted?
A: Whether it's personal or not, of course...NOT. From experience, witnessing others without the strong emotional connection formed by brotherhood, sisterhood, and other relations helps to better someone's chances to remain and work effectively in the staff-team from my perspective. Usually, bonds like these lead to biased ruling/lenience among members, strange encounters/interactions and personal disputes inducing last-minute alterations for staff-members. That doesn't mean you shouldn't connect with members of the site, staff included. Just...don't use your friendships with them as leverage against others.
Q: Is it recommended that I use Discord to join the server linked to the site? Will there be meetings happening there or...?
A: We would personally recommend joining the site's associated Discord server. It's not mandatory but it would possibly help boost activity and plan out certain announcements with easily shared contact between the members of staff. And, yes, it is also recommended to use your main account linked to your Fandom account if you have one to avoid any confusion.