The Volunteers Guidelines

The place for discussions and decisions about the forum
Post Reply
User avatar
Hagar Delest
Moderator
Posts: 32594
Joined: Sun Oct 07, 2007 9:07 pm
Location: France

The Volunteers Guidelines

Post by Hagar Delest »

One goal of this new Community Forum is to encourage and recognize the role of active members in the Apache OpenOffice community. To this end we have created a restricted group known as the AOO Community Forum Volunteers, or just Volunteers for short.

This will give you access to the restricted access administration forums to enable you to participate and where relevant vote in forum policy issues. You also have some elevated privileges re email.

NB: You can change your default group accessing your User Control Panel, see the Usergroups tab. Standard usernames are blue, Volunteers are gold, Moderators green and admins red (see Ranks in the forum).

Thank you for your contribution here. As you're now part of the forum team, here are some guidelines to keep in mind. We hope this will help keeping the fresh state of mind that made you stick here.
User avatar
Hagar Delest
Moderator
Posts: 32594
Joined: Sun Oct 07, 2007 9:07 pm
Location: France

General behavior

Post by Hagar Delest »

Volunteers should endeavor to create as welcoming an environment as possible for new members, actively supporting them where possible.

Be prepared to face the "Eternal September". Users used to forums know how to search a forum and won't post if they do find a relevant answer. Then, of course we'll meet users who don't know how to (efficiently) search. Instead of replying "Please search", better run a quick search yourself and give the link or at least give him some hints about the right keywords to be used.

Don't guess about the poster context. You don't have the big picture, the user may have personal reasons or specific constraints leading to a question that could seem dumb at first sight. Just give the answer or a link to it, either it will help or it will launch the real discussion.

Note that when a search is advised it may be helpful to specify that the option 'Display results as' has to be set to Topics instead of Posts. Otherwise the search results are not easily readable at all.
User avatar
Hagar Delest
Moderator
Posts: 32594
Joined: Sun Oct 07, 2007 9:07 pm
Location: France

Helping the Moderators

Post by Hagar Delest »

If you spot a topic that should be tagged solved, then don't hesitate to report one of the post so that a moderator can add the [Solved] tag and the green check mark. Very often, the original poster forget to do it.

If you spot a post breaking the rules (either the Policies and Terms of Use or the Survival Guide), use the report button, top right of the post header:
Report.png
Report.png (4.89 KiB) Viewed 14691 times
It will tag the thread and shade it with a red color so that moderators can see them immediately:
Reported.png
Reported.png (9.79 KiB) Viewed 14690 times
Have a look at the Moderators Code of Conduct.
Post Reply