 Greetings, comrades! I'm Manaban, current head moderator of the Harem&Ecchi club, the 4th Head Admin of the Harem&Ecchi Club, the 3rd Head Admin of Ecchi Squad, the architect of the H&E/ES Personal Union, and the 5th ranked overall Interview in MAL Interviews' history by Interview count. I'll be the head admin of MAL Interviews going forward. Since that's out of the way, let's get into something more poignant. It's another one of these announcements. I know damn well that MAL Interviews has been in this state of flux for a good few years. Staff turnover is insane. We're an 800 member club that should be an 8,000 member club, but mismanagement and a heavily biased selection system for our interview candidates have impeded the development of a solid reputation and overall success. And here we are, having another staff turnover. I know our reputation is that of a circlejerk. I know getting an interview doesn't seem like a big deal. But, well, it should. So, we're going to make this club a good fucking club. I'll avoid the façade of politesse here, since I know how many of these announcements there have been over the years and how tiring that must be if you've been here for an extended period of time. We need serious change. @Skittles handed this club to me upon his abdication from the role of head admin based on my past work done in this club specifically and my résumé in working with other MAL Clubs. Here's hoping that myself and the staff I'm inheriting can make my goals for this club become a reality. So, let's not delay any further. I'll go right into my roadmap for the rebuilding project we're going to start undertaking as of today. ------------------- Objective I: Staff Expansion I've already spoken with the staff that we'll be maintaining about the strategy that I have planned out for implementing a new interview selection process that'll hopefully break up the circlejerk - I'll go into detail about that next - but to implement that selection process, we need a larger staff. Our numbers are too small right now to be able to efficiently implement it. That's our first step. Staff expansion. We've already added a new interviewer to our ranks on a trial basis, but we don't want to stop at a single addition. We'll be taking measured steps early in my head administration to ensure that we have the right people who can conduct quality interviews that people actually want to both read and participate in, instead of living or dying by spamming out half-assed interviews that don't treat the interview candidate as an individual. If you're interested, by all means, come and talk to me and we have a test you can take. That said, though, I'm not a fan of open recruitment - I view staff hiring and organization as the most important element of club administration, so I like to look for people myself and bring them because I am convinced they're both competent and trustworthy. I am totally open to applications, mind you - I might find somebody good that way - but waiting for people to come to me isn't my style. I go to them. There's a reason it's a bit of a footnote like this. ------------------- Objective II: A New Selection System This is where the circlejerk ends. We need more staff to implement a selection system focused around balancing our attention to the six major areas of the site - Anime Discussion, Casual Discussion, Current Events, Forum Games, Reviews and Clubs - to ensure we're covering a breadth of prominent, interesting users from the main activity hubs of the site itself. The way it'll work is as follows: We'll scout out the site ourselves and find people we consider that would do us good to interview. We'll need to keep our fingertips constantly on the pulse of the community to know who's who and what's what, and the reason we're starting with a staff expansion is so we can spread ourselves thin enough to do that effectively. Historically, however, we've focused on given areas. It's always been way, way easier to get an interview if you were a regular of an area of the site that the staff at the time favored. Being an AD reg or involved with Clubs has always made it harder to get an interview than if you were a CD reg or an FG reg. We'll be taking the necessary steps to ensure we're spreading ourselves across the breadth of the site - and it's as simple as if we just interviewed a prominent FG user, we'll look to favor other areas of the site for the next few interviews. The idea is that having a staff that's more dedicated to scouting out new interview candidates by lurking and being involved with the community, we can broaden our horizon and make sure we're covering people based on their actual perceived prominence as opposed to whether or not we know them ourselves. Throw that in tandem with regulating what areas of the site we're paying attention to in order to make sure we're spreading our focus and reach as far as possible, this should, hopefully, make a more balanced and fair system for interview selection. We want readers to feel like the interviewee earned an interview by being a prominent and interesting regular. Not because they're friends with one of the staff members. This is, hopefully, going to be the solution to that. ------------------- Objective III: Quality over Quantity Lastly, nobody wants a shit interview. We don't want it because it makes our club look bad. The interviewee doesn't want it because this *might* be the only opportunity they get and if they can't express themselves like they want, it's wasted/ruined. The readers don't want it because it's a fucking slog to read. So, improve the template. Make sure we're asking interesting and on-point questions instead of devising one template and applying that to every interviewee that gets their say. Give them a platform to not only express themselves, but give them an interview that'll make it actually fucking interesting to hear them out. We'll be sticking with the traditional template for now, with some staff changes that'll be letting go of interviewers that don't meet our standard of quality to hopefully improve the quality of our overall output. We'll use that as a basis and we'll be working on questioning skills for the latter half of the interview so we can ensure we're personalizing questions appropriately. We'll also be slowing down the amount of interviews being conducted. We'll shift focus to scouting and finding the right people, then we'll use that info to be more selective in who gets interviewed, as opposed to drowning this club's members with a plethora of interviews they're likely never going to read. Slowing down our output, and shifting focus to making sure we're asking the best questions and making sure we're putting the right people on the soap box will, hopefully, improve the value of getting interviewed by this club. ------------------- There's the three-objective program. These three objectives all tie into the main goal that we're facing in the intermediate term, which is: Goal: Make Getting an Interview a Big Deal By expanding our staff, I can direct them to cover specific areas of the site and keep our ears to the ground of what's happening more effectively. Mixed with my own activity and networking ability, this should hopefully make sure we're bringing in the best people with the understanding that we're selecting people based on perceived quality instead of anything more biased and unjust. Once that's established, conducting a smaller amount of more individually-tailored interviews should lend itself into restoring some of this club's lost prestige. No more interview spam. Just good interviews, with members that are a big enough deal to warrant getting interviewed. That's it for now. I'm glad to be head admin of this place. This is where I got my start in clubs, so it's special to me. I look forward to working with everybody reading this as well as my new staff. |
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| Good shit, Mana. Congrats and hopefully we get more interesting and active people who've become noteworthy on the site rather than them being a 1 in 20 interviews kind of thing as of 2018. |
| Being wrong is just an occupational hazard. Follow me on twitter. I have an anitube channel so feel free to check it out and subscribe if you like what you see. |
| Is this some sort of joke? Marxism has no place here. |
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Seiya said: Off to the Gulags!Is this some sort of joke? Marxism has no place here. |
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I'm done with this club. I won't tolerate leftists a day longer. I quit reading the news a few months ago just so I wouldn't have to be fed that garbage. |
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Seiya said: Imagine being this livid about a dumb commie theme gag and conflating that with marxism. Sounds p righty to me.Gonzo-lewd said: Off to the Gulags! I'm done with this club. I won't tolerate leftists a day longer. I quit reading the news a few months ago just so I wouldn't have to be fed that garbage. gulag time, as Gonzo said |
| Being wrong is just an occupational hazard. Follow me on twitter. I have an anitube channel so feel free to check it out and subscribe if you like what you see. |
| viva la revolution, comrade! my question is if the re:interview initiative will continue? offering second interviews to those who weren't quite satisfied with their first... or if that'll be part of the scouting process. |
| That kind of 'ear to the ground' intuition feels good on the senses - I'll love to see what comes from it when implemented. |
| Taking into consideration what the New Selection System offers, will the Nominations system still be in-place or be phased out completely? Even though I am an avid reader myself, I do not actually read every single interview being published. The interviews I read are only a select few individuals whom have attracted my undivided attention, interest, and curiosity. |
JeForceXSep 16, 2020 7:18 PM
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| I dont really know a lot about the whole MAL Forum demographic nowadays since I dont really check it anymore than what I use to do before, if something has changed then I guess that's good? I mean rarely do we get good shitposter in MAL anyway and what are the changes that person isnt permaban or wanted to be interviewed? There's a reason as to why I dont really check the club nowadays nor do I care about its progress nor it's current situation: I do not use MAL anymore than as what its intended purpose to be, beside I'm more used to shitposting in Discord. TL;RD MALI is a niche place, I do hope this change will bring forth the outcome you're thinking... Good luck Mana |
OfDeathandLove said: viva la revolution, comrade! my question is if the re:interview initiative will continue? offering second interviews to those who weren't quite satisfied with their first... or if that'll be part of the scouting process. Yeah, we'll be continuing the re:interview initiative. I see no reason not to. Right now our focus is going to be on finishing up any current interviews, though, so we can get those up and ready before moving on to the second objective that I laid out. In the meantime, I'm going to be working on staff expansion and (hopefully) obtain permission to finish up a major interview I had inherited from Skittles. DrowsyKnight said: Yo man what happened to Skittles ? Real life got in the way. He retired from MAL staff and his activity on MAL went down across the board. Based on my history with this club and my résumé on working with MAL clubs in general, he selected me as his replacement. JeForceX said: Taking into consideration what the New Selection System offers, will the Nominations system still be in-place or be phased out completely? That's something I'm still trying to figure out. What's certain is that nominations will lose a lot of value. It doesn't sound nice, but I do think that taking a lot more direct staff control over our selection process, alongside categorizing users based on what makes them relevant enough to warrant an interview, will aid us in increasing the value of our interviews - which we really, really want right now. We want it to feel like you have to be important to get an interview, and we want to cover the breadth of the site. A nomination based system would stand in opposition to that. People tend to nominate their friends and people they personally like, instead of people they perceive as relevant enough to get an interview. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, but it doesn't mesh with what we're looking to accomplish moving forward. But, what I'm most likely to do is to wait and see just *how* much I'll let them be devalued. I want to know the staff more and get a better understanding of how they operate, since when I spoke to some of them about the nominations system before I took over, I mostly ran into disagreements. Personally, I am in favor of shutting down the thread so we wouldn't give people the wrong idea about how much nominations mattered. In contrast, the staff I've spoken to about this are opposed to the idea - while we're all on the same page with implementing the new selection system, the counterpoint they've brought up is that nominations could be a useful guide in helping us find the right people still, so many of them would like to keep it open. I can't understand them perfectly in such a short amount of time, so before pulling triggers I'd like to see how they tend to function and work so I just don't go stepping on their toes. If nobody on the staff side is paying attention to nominations, the thread'll likely be closed for honesty's sake. It'd be kind of shitty to have a place where you could nominate users that we're not even looking at. If a few of them turn out to use it decently enough (i.e. there is staff actually making use of it, and finding the kind of user we want to interview through it in doing so) I'll be more considerate to their wishes and keep it open as a forum for user feedback in our selection system. What's certain is that, yes, nominations will be devalued going forward. We're all on the same page regarding implementing a new selection system with the aim of increasing the value of interviews, and that system will inherently devalue nominations by its own design. Whether or not they become totally irrelevant, or just a place for members to pitch ideas for interviews rather than something we place heavy stake into is the question. |
ManabanSep 17, 2020 2:09 AM
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| Oh, and I should mention - @Mr_Sakata is going to be my right hand man. He has all the same privileges and access to this club that I do. If you cannot contact me for any reason, he is the person to go to. He has a significant amount of authority in this club as well. As for me, my Discord is Manaban#5076. Leave a comment on my MAL Profile before sending me a request so I know not to ignore it, and you can reach me there more easily than you could on MAL. My MAL inbox is also open if you prefer that. Anything you wouldn't want to tell me in public, you have all of these avenues to reach me at. |
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| Manaban is slowly taking control of MAL and I’m 100% for it. Manaban will lead us to prosperity! |
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Monochrosanity said: Manaban is slowly taking control of MAL and I’m 100% for it. Manaban will lead us to prosperity! "Leave the waging of wars to others! But you, happy H&E, marry; for the realms which Mars awards to others, Venus transfers to you." |
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Manaban said: Oh, and I should mention - @Mr_Sakata is going to be my right hand man. He has all the same privileges and access to this club that I do. If you cannot contact me for any reason, he is the person to go to. He has a significant amount of authority in this club as well. Hello, I'm Mr_Sakata and I'll be working on this restoration project along with Manaban. Prospective interviewers, proofreaders, interviewee and respondents can contact me on discord (ginko#5274) or MAL. I sincerely hope we can turn MAL Interviews around and turn this place into something special and worth-while for everyone involved. |
| Woken from dead just to see this. Curious to see how these changes will impact the reputation of this club.Hopefully it won't remain in the vegetable state. With that being said,wish ya good luck dude! |
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