Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-4984687-20150326211251

Hello again

For a long time now, users can only have a chance to become a staff member if they are nominated into the position by an existing staff member. This applies to Chat mods, Forum mods, Patrollers, and Administrators. The two ranks exempt from this are Bots and the News Team.

This is a flawed and strict policy. For multiple reasons, though I'll just list the ones I can think of:
 * We shouldn't come to candidates, candidates should come to us. This means that staff shouldn't nominate users as this is a much slower process. Users should be able to apply whenever they choose to, so long as the follow all the requirements for their selected rank.
 * This is an uncommon system, many other wikis and websites utilize the process of having users applying by themselves.
 * In the event that there should be a short amount of staff, users should be free to apply in order to make up for the missing ranks.
 * Users can't ask to be nominated, they have to strive to prove they can to the staff which just makes it harder to gain more staff.
 * Some users may not be interested in becoming staff even if they have been nominated.

There are likely more reasons that I can't currently think of. The reason I am creating this consensus is because we have a lack of staff and the process of becoming one is slow and flawed. It is also outdated like some of the other policies and needs to be changed. In one case when the "Exodus" of staff occurred, 3 of our admins left. Sajuuk then attempted to create a Staff Application for administrator instead of receiving a nomination. He was banned for this (though later unbanned) and his application was closed for multiple reasons. With this incident, many users believed that the way of becoming a staff should be fixed. Due to the circumstances, this attempt was justified even if it violated the policies. Users should not have to violate the policies in order to become a staff member, hence the consensus.

Administrator applications should be allowed, but only restricted to existing staff members. Reason being is that users should have a sense of being a staff member and the other staff evaluating how they act with their current flags. Bureaucrat applications should be in the same place, but restricted to current admins. 