Staff work times

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olafthecat
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Staff work times

Post by olafthecat »

Dear staff and Moderators

I have seen how many posts you guys have and how often you appear on the forum
But seriously, how much time do you spend on this forum?
I go here daily and usually comment on anything new I see, but I only check stuff I like and only go on for maybe 30 minutes at most at a time.
I know you monitor the forum for spam and trolling ect, but you also go here to move topics and reply to them, personal interests included.
So do you go here not just for work, but as a form of entertainment.
Either reason I congratulate you guys for having more posts than anyone else on the forum, myself included.
I like the dedication.
For example the destiny forum has many user but they hardly ever get replies from staff or get their bug reports even noticed.
I like that you appreciate your 40000 strong fanbase and work hard to keep them updated with news.
Thank you :)
Gonna start playing again with 0.16 build.
That's all.

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impetus maximus
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Re: Staff work times

Post by impetus maximus »

quick tip. if you want to know what time it is at the Devs base of operations.
go to your board preferences and set 'My time zone' to UTC+2
if i'm not mistaken the forum index page will show the current time at the offices of the devs. ;)

daniel34
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Re: Staff work times

Post by daniel34 »

I can't speak for the staff (Factorio/Wube employees) or other moderators, but for me personally:

I started moderating the forums 2 years ago because at that time there were a lot of bots/spammers around. It also helped that I was in-between jobs at that time and had a lot of free time and frequently (several times a day) visited the forums and could deal with spam posts very often, while I was not playing Factorio.

Shortly after I started my new job (which I still have, software programming) which allowed me to work mostly from home at my own schedule, and I continued visiting the forums often.
olafthecat wrote:So do you go here not just for work, but as a form of entertainment.
Funny that you mention that, I sometimes think of it as relaxation or entertainment when compared to my actual job, as a break so I can then return to my job with a different mindset, like when you constantly consider a problem for a long time without any solution (as it often happens in programming) only to get back to it after a break and suddenly see the answer.

Several times it even felt like a game itself, especially when I frequented the Bug Reports and Technical Help forums after a new version was released and wanted to help the people. It's kinda like playing (modded) Factorio, you're looking to find the solution to an issue and trying a lot of things, and are also learning more about Factorio on the way. I learned Factorio modding the same way, I read a lot of posts in the Modding help subforum and modified/expanded some commands, later on I wrote my own mods (although I admit that prior experience in any programming language is a big advantage).

One other big reason I'm moderating the forums is the community and the developers themselves. At the current price Factorio is very cheap for the game quality / playtime you get, and I wanted to give them something back in form of my voluntary time. I would even go so far as to say that Factorio is an educational game and inspires people from all ages to plan ahead, use their brains and teach them new and interesting concepts, as already mentioned in other "Factorio in the classroom / as an educational tool" threads. And I want to encourage that.

Spambots have been low since we introduced the rule that the first post of a user has to be approved by a moderator. And I don't mean the visible spam posts (I think they are near zero), the attempts of spambots to make posts have declined aswell. I read about it a few weeks ago and it appears that forums which don't display the attempted posts are targeted less, which helps us moderators a lot.

Although I was made a moderator for spam reasons, I now enjoy helping others who are new to Factorio or have questions/issues to which the answers are usually not found somewhere else.
olafthecat wrote:Either reason I congratulate you guys for having more posts than anyone else on the forum, myself included.
It's not about the posts, per se. It matters to some degree of course, since posts indirectly show your activity on the forums. Mods/Staff have a little advantage here since staff can make authoritative judgements others wouldn't be able to make, e.g. on the result of a bug report, and mods can make posts for topic actions (move/merge/...) others couldn't do. Very early on I did the same - posting for post count sake - but then I found that it doesn't really matter that much.

I see that I'm rambling on ... sorry about that :oops:

One closing remark:
olafthecat wrote:But seriously, how much time do you spend on this forum?
At the moment 30-60 minutes a day, although some of that time I browse the forums on my second monitor while watching youtube/netflix/... on the first monitor. It used to be more, but with experience you can filter out the "usual" stuff and only concentrate on the important stuff.
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Re: Staff work times

Post by Koub »

I realize I share a lot with daniel34.
I'll only speak for myself too. I've been moderator for maybe 2 years and a half, and also first applied as moderator because Ssilk was doing most of moderation at that time, and I wanted to help with spambots cleaning. There are no words to tell how much I hate spam and spambots, I'm literally offended when I see one. So that was a natural move for me.

As I take everything seriously, I started reading all the posts in all the topics. So with time, it took me more, and more, and more time to do my moderator job. The apex from came maybe one year ago, when I spend 5-6 hours a day moderating. Fortunately, I also have a full time job, but unfortunately, my professional workload raised exactly at the same pace as forum moderation, so my typical work day was at that time :
11-12 hours at work under pressure
5-6 hours moderation (including my meals taken in front of the computer)
7 hours (un)dressing/washing/sleeping

It took me over 6 months to realize the burnout was close, so I decided to do less, so that I could do it for a longer time. Now I work 8-9 hours a day at my job, and moderation takes me no more than 2-3 hours a day, and it's a mix between moderating and staying updated about the discussions.
I have given up trying to be useful in the bug reports and in the mods subforum : I've never been able to read a logfile properly, and there are several mod authors that can moderate their subforum, so I let go.

Also I don't read every single post now, I just run through to see if there is nothing offending, and try to keep forum tidy by merging duplicate posts, acting as an advanced human search engine (because people rarely do the effort to search before posting), things like that. Also the fact I have read or at least seen most of the posts helps in that I know I've seen something alike, so I know I should search.

And also the workload is very seasonal : after a major unstable release gets out, I know I'm in for 5-6 hours a day moderating for a few weeks. Then it's at every minor update , but every one gets less overdue activity. And the time between the last minor releases and the next major is quite calm.

As Daniel says, bot load decreased a lot. I have banned hudreds, probably thousands, spambots, and deleted several thousands spams. Now that first post has to be approved by moderators, there is a lot less incoming spam, and the best is that It won't be seen by regular forum users. It helps tremendously into giving the forum a good "tidy" feel. Also what helps is that the community itself is very mature, and compared to the ginormous amount of posting and discussions going on here, the coercitive part of the moderator job is surprisingly small. Sometimes people get hot on a subject that's important to them and tell each other names, but it's a negligible part of the job.

About the post count, I couldn't care less. Most of my moderation job goes silent : knowing what's posted, banning spambots, ... people only see the emerged tip. It's something I do because of how amazed I feel of the dev team behind Factorio. They are so dedicated into making Factorio THE very best game they can, I didn't think such game devs still existed. I couldn't do less than give a help, and moderating this forum is my small contribution :).
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

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olafthecat
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Re: Staff work times

Post by olafthecat »

Thanks for answering my questions and queries :)

As for the time zones...cheers :mrgreen:
Gonna start playing again with 0.16 build.
That's all.

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Kayanor
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Re: Staff work times

Post by Kayanor »

olafthecat wrote:As for the time zones...cheers :mrgreen:
Well as far as I have seen the core dev team and all moderators are European (I don't know about Loewchen, but the name sounds German). So the largest time difference would be 2 hours I think. But there are remote devs from the US too, this is where the real time difference knocks in.
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Re: Staff work times

Post by impetus maximus »

to all the moderators, wherever you are. thanks for your service! :)

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Re: Staff work times

Post by daniel34 »

Kajanor wrote:Well as far as I have seen the core dev team and all moderators are European (I don't know about Loewchen, but the name sounds German). So the largest time difference would be 2 hours I think. But there are remote devs from the US too, this is where the real time difference knocks in.
All moderators are from Europe (Austria/French/Germany/Netherlands, Loewchen is from Germany), most of the staff is living in the Czech Republic. Rseding91 is from the US and I've seen him active during "our" nighttime.
However Loewchen and myself are sometimes active during that time aswell.

I think most posts are made at "European" times, from my timezone most posts are made in the evening but during nighttime there are only a few posts. Spammers (before the new rule) also followed that schedule, they would start at 5-6am and over the day the number of posts would reduce.
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Re: Staff work times

Post by Jap2.0 »

Yep, Rseding91 is from the US (Michigan). We're at UTC-5 here, and I can confirm that most posts are during my nighttime.
Last edited by Jap2.0 on Sun Feb 24, 2019 9:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Staff work times

Post by olafthecat »

I am from the UK!
That means Greenwich time!
Gonna start playing again with 0.16 build.
That's all.

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