Slack Mod Handbook

So, you've become a mod of the Duckfeed Slack. Welcome. Welcome. You're here because we trust you to help build and maintain this community as it grows too big for Kole and Gary to monitor. Thank you. We're genuinely happy to have you.

Ensuring Chill

Keep an eye on your channel. We tried our best to choose trusted community members who were active in their assigned channel anyway, so hopefully this won't be a burden. We don't need 24 hour surveillance or anything. Just pop in twice a day or so to make sure everyone is following our community guidelines and being kind to one another.

If people aren't following guidelines, tell them to cool it, take a break, etc. You don't need to bring out Dark Dad, i.e. harshness or threats. Just telling people to cool it will usually work. If you're ever in doubt about a call, let Gary or Kole know. Don't ban people without checking with us.

Pop Ups

Monitor the need for pop up channels, then create them and announce them. To clarify terms, a pop up channel is a temporary channel to cover a hot new release or event. Don't get hungry for these. We're serious about not wanting a thousand channels. It fragments the conversation. It's OK for people to talk about E3 all day in the games channel. It's OK for people to talk about Eurovision in the music channel for a few days. That's what those channels are there for. Create pop up channels if:

  1. The topic is likely to dominate the conversation for more than a few days
  2. Spoilers are an issue (We'll do a pop up for the DS3 DLC, for example).
  3. A bunch of people are participating. If four people are having a talk about Dragon Quest, that probably doesn't need a pop up.

Creating a channel is easy. Hit the plus sign next to the channel list in Slack. Name it something bland or inoffensive, and then announce it in the admin channel.

Keep an eye on the channels you create and shut them down when the discussion wanes and can be reabsorbed into the general channel it was splintered off from. We will likely make periodic sweeps of the open channels to see if anything is dying down, and can be trimmed. We will consult you before archiving anything.

Book Clubs

We think the best way to handle book clubs (or game clubs, album clubs, etc) is like how we handle the chat for Duckfeed LIve. Create a channel for the duration of the discussion, announce it (in admin and the main channel), then destroy it after the talk. Try to include the date in the title of the channel.

Vacations

If you're going on vacation or need to temporarily step away from any of your duties, grab another mod to watch your channel. We're keeping #slack_mods open for this purpose.

Feedback and Questions

Just hit up Gary or Kole in DM. Our doors are always open. If it's time sensitive, like it's the middle of the night and someone has started spewing homophobic epithets in a channel, use your best judgment and check in with Gary or Kole as soon as you can.