As a community member, you aren’t able to see much of what we do daily. Some of it is public facing in the form of discord interactions with users, much more of it is behind the scenes. Its understandable that you can only go based on what you can see. I certainly respect your view based on what you are exposed to. Let me give you just a bit of an idea of the other things.
In regards to Sifugate much of what mods did was public-facing. Mods were the only line of defense from the complete self implosion of the protocol. Each of us (even some that are no longer with us), stood their ground when there was no leadership available (because they too were freaking out, receiving death threats etc), we fielded all questions, concerns, and hate. Everything that community members threw at us. If we had packed up our bags and thrown our hands up, giving up, the likelihood that Wonderland would’ve unwound the treasury, would have been high. Post-Sifugate, these problems are still prevalent, just not to the same degree. After the RQ, things are slowly cooling down a bit more. These things were the part you can see mods doing… our outward messages. Though that’s one of the most important parts of the job, it’s what you don’t see that is the majority of the job.
Just a shortlist of tasks that don’t require us to type a message to anyone that we handle behind the scenes:
• Discord problem & resolution
• Compiling user feedback/problems/bugs/sentiment and passing it to the leadership team
• Bot configuration / testing / problem discovery & resolution
• Creating useful bot commands & lists to help users, mods, or devs to do their jobs
• Forum moderation/Governance initiative assistance.
• Compiling protocol information when new initiatives are started by the team
• Finding ways to display or convey that information to educate users
• Finding/creating/purchasing tools to aid us in doing the tasks that need done
• Fielding countless requests for moving from newbie chat to general chat
• Tracking down bad actors
• Combing through hundreds or thousands of messages for people who are fudding/sewing chaos/trying to break the rules
• Banning bad actors
• Reviewing bans from people who swear they aren’t a bad actor, having to make judgement calls in order to protect the community
• Event planning & execution
• When leadership says I’d like to do an AMA, mods are the people who do all the menial work that makes the event go smoothly
• Fielding requests from other teams/protocols etc that want to speak with leadership, and filtering them or setting up meetings when necessary.
• Identifying candidates for mod positions, providing our feedback to leadership
• Managing Queens Guard & Cheshire Cat mods & making sure they have everything they need to do their job
• Struggling to do all of the above due to an acute lack of information provided to us. (one of the things we are working hard to solve)
• Being available 24/7 for emergencies, providing help where needed when needed when these arise.
Much of what we do is side projects to keep the protocol running smoothly. These are things you often do not see or ever know about. These are things, that if left unchecked, would cause the community to eventually cannibalize itself. You only know about things that break or go wrong. We do most of this without much information to go on, as communication with the leadership team has largely been strained at best for us.
… There are more items that we do, and a lot of these things are random & unknown things until the problem shows up. We take on each and every duty and problem that is not covered by other mod roles, including the same work that they do themselves. The problems that don’t fit into a neat box, fall to us, because there’s nobody else after us to take care of them. The dev team & leadership team have their own entire realm of tasks that are needed done, unrelated to managing the community.