Summary: This thread is to show (and discuss) potential optimizations to the recruitment chat on this platform. Greetings fellow backers, Organizations will play a vital role in Star Citizen and a good infrastructure helps to make the search or management easier. The tools we have or get should, all in all, aid us, not be a possible headache or useless. And what we have is good, but there might be a problem on the horizon for the recruitment chat. Why's that? What problem?, you may ask. Well, some older backers may remember the recruitment chat on the website and what a headache it was. I never witnessed it myself but some stories indicate it wasn't that pleasant as there was, at times, an almost constant flow of spam and messages that would make it hard to keep up. Perhaps it was recruiters trying to out-spam each other or bots at work. It was apparently bad enough that the moderators changed the rules and heavily cracked down on "unsolicited org ads" - unless someone looking for an organization came into the channel and indicated (s)he was looking for one. That's the current ruleset for the website recruitment chat. Spectrum is a bit different at this time. There's more people and promotion going on for obvious reasons (lack of precise ruleset yet) and that is good to some extend. There's more initiative on the promoting side compared to the website chat. However, it should not escalate. Given the current setup things can get quite messy in the future. So far it's a few dozen people at best. But what if several more dozen people join this chat, if not hundreds of people? You can probably guess how chat could look like. So we started to discuss these potential long-term problems in the very channel we refer to in this thread. Some ideas were thrown around by those online at the time (among those: Dranor Zylander, Dylan Phoenix, Luke Davis). I'll loosely throw in those ideas now: How to possibly improve the recruitment chat on Spectrum 1) Consider adding categories like "Backer" and "Mod" for the users in this channel, in this case "Recruiter" or "Looking for Organization". Alternatively, add small icons or symbols to users in the channel accordingly, if not user categories 2) Consider adding a checkbox to the text window to let users mark their post as "Promotional post" (see explanation) 3) Consider a limit of (unsolicited) promotional posts in a given time (suggestion 2 factors into this) per organization or organization recruiter (single, individual user), at least 4) Apply the ruleset of the website recruitment chat (see picture above) X) Placeholder, will be added depending on suggestions made here On that note, you still need active mods to keep an eye on chat, but with some of these suggestions implemented, it could make things a bit easier. Elaborations 1) More user groups have the potential benefit of letting promoters assess whether posting an ad is even useful at the time or not. If I want to promote my organization but see that everyone in chat is a recruiter, I think I might refrain until it changes. In addition it gives other users a good overview, too. Possible downside: Non-recruiters being target specifically, resulting in potentially unsolicited private messages. Suggestion 2 and 3 are somewhat 'related'. The idea here is that organization recruiters don't try to out-spam each other when there is more traffic, making it almost useless for anyone in a worst-case scenario. Apparently this works by utilizing a post limit in regards to promotional posts. For example you can only post an ad every 20 to 60 minutes. To make it a bit easier for mods, option 2 would give a user a way of marking a post as "promotional" and the system could also track whether one was posted within the set time limit or not to block or approve a promotional posting. The post itself could, in turn, be slightly highlighted via some different color in the background or so to make it more apparent. In response, anything not marked accordingly as a promotional post could be deleted by mods if one wanted to circumvent the limits. Possible downside: If this was just based on single users and not organizations, this could be avoided by having more than 1 organization promoter of the same organization present. Mods would have to check if an organization itself was posting more than permitted within a given time. 4) Is just like the ruleset on the recruitment chat from the website. It would cut down on unsolicited ads but could basically result in a copy of the old chat. Outcome: Questionable. Option: Likely not desirable so far. That is because in my book, I find some acceptance of unsolicited ads to be okay. It gives promoters more initiative. Possible downside: (Redundant?) Copy of the 'old' recruitment chat, unused by the community besides a few users ---- Your turn now. Do you think there is room for improvements for the chat? Do you think some things may become problematic in the future or if vastly more users join? Do you disagree with anything and think it is fine the way it is? Share your thoughts.