Effective immediately, Omnimaga will be seeing some major changes. Some are being made on a trial basis and will be reverted or modified if they don't prove productive, while others have been pending for a while and are permanent.
 
1) The Spam section is now read-only until further notice. This change was made in order to combat the increasing number of nonproductive posts, and to promote on-topic and relevant discussion.
 
2) The unspoken bot rule is being enforced so non-approved bots are no longer allowed in legitimate discussion channels. They are welcome in #omnimaga-spam, as long as they don't crash OmnomIRC. Bot authors may petition for their bot to be approved by messaging a moderator.
The list of currently-approved bots is: New, Omnimaga, OmnomIRC, Axebot, Runer112, AtomASM, AxeBot, DoorsCS, LibBot, Lua2TNS2, TI-Bot-1, TI-Bot-3.
 
3) The Coders of Tomorrow group has been restored to its pre-nDoom status, with expanded moderation privelieges. A few inactive members have been removed from staff. alberthrocks has also been promoted to a Coder of Tomorrow position.
 
4) Anti-Riot Squad members have had their moderation privileges removed. Their power will be restored in case of a crisis situation, but stay as the ARS group.
 
5) 5 former ARS members have been given the temporary designation of "support staff." These members will moderate alongside the Coders of Tomorrow, similar to what was previously ARS. Support staff members are Art_of_camelot, Cooliojazz, Geekboy1011, Rcfreak0, and Hot_Dog.

6) lastly, and slightly less importantly, "Newser" has been renamed to "Editor" and "Manager" to "Admin".
 
We hope that these modifications will change Omnimaga for the better.

Yeah, I think a good step has been done here. Also congrats Albert ^_^

dj, the 10% is one thing we've been discussing. this is more an immediate action move until we figure out what else to do with it/how to go about it. thanks for the suggestion =)

dj, the 10% is one thing we've been discussing. this is more an immediate action move until we figure out what else to do with it/how to go about it. thanks for the suggestion =)

Ok. Yeah before I remember when the board reached more than 10% of the entire site content, it would close temporarily, but there was no way to do so automatically, so when staff got busier it sometimes reached 15% or so before being desactivated. What I thought that would be cool is if somebody could code an SMF mod that would check if the spam section is over 10% after somebody posts, then put it in read only mode automatically, then if after posting elsewhere it gets under 10, then enable it again. The other idea I had was the above, which applies to individual members rather than the entire board as a whole (so if you have like 1% spam, you could still post there, while someone else who has 20 couldn't. BUt again that could result in giant rush of spam when a newer member discovers the spam section after reaching like 780 posts or so)

As for CoT I think it is OK, but you guys will have to be careful when hiring new CoT members. Remember that one staff that tried to vandalize the site after getting into a fight with an admin. Unless that change only applies to existing CoT? For the removal of ARS I guess it's OK since it was more when Omni had 400 posts/day. You could always re-add it if we get back to those activity levels.

Do the changes apply to existing staff, then?  For me some random buttons/checkboxes have disappeared, differing by board.

Anyway glad to hear about the anti-spam measures, it's been kind of out of hand lately


Edit: made badges to match the changes
Not sure if Support Staff should be on one line or two, though.  It fits anyway.

The changes seem ok to me.

EDIT: Darn, shmibs already made a set of banners for the new membergroups, and they look almost identical to yours

lol nice
Did he use the Narkisim font as well? (end of this post)
(and mental note: gimp fails hard at small-size fonts, paint.net ftw for that)


Regarding the permissions I'll send a pm.

These are great changes I must say, especially about the ARS. I had been subtly nudging () about the ARS situation back in March-April, where half of them were inactive yet received mod powers that active CoT did not have.
The spam situation is another good move, as even a few months ago there were a lot of spam posts, that some members would be posting more in spam topics than in other boards.

I also like the name changes. Makes the titles significantly clearer and standard too.

Perhaps the Support staff could just be named Moderators?