Advice to the staff of the VS Battles wiki

==Introduction==
All newly promoted staff members are obligated to familiarize themselves with each of these guidelines to ensure the safety and well-being of the community
==General==
*You need the help of the staff and the community, so do your best to show proper respect, be polite to, and get along well with other staff members, and to foster a healthy productive atmosphere.
*If you have a problem with each other, don't undermine anybody's authority by arguing about it in public. Take it up in private messages instead.
**PMs are also useful for discussing sensitive issues, and handling potential staff interviews, so make sure to pay attention to your forum notifications to inform you when you receive new messages.
*Preferably avoid messing with rules, systems, and settings that already work reasonably well, as you might easily mess things up, make the managing work harder, or the wiki structure worse.
*Do not create policy revision threads that are open for all members to participate. They almost always spiral out of control into extremely time-consuming pure chaos, and it is up to the staff to decide such issues in the first place, so please post them in our staff forum.
*If a genuinely important calculation needs to be checked up, or performed, to properly scale a certain fictional franchise, and linking to it in the current evaluations thread gets no response, politely ask a few calculation group members via their message walls, or summon them directly via the "@Username" command, whichever is more convenient for the occasion.
*If there are any highly controversial forums threads or blog posts, regarding wiki policies, other members, public outbursts, or similar, please delete them immediately, even if they were created by another staff member, as our community cannot withstand relentless assaults on its integrity.
**If they were created by another staff member, then also take the matter to personal PM discussions.
*All staff members are encouraged to cast their votes in a clearly worded manner during decision-making processes within threads. When voting on any matter, staff members are expected to avoid ambiguous language. Instead, staff members should try to use straightforward language to express their position, in order to avoid ambiguity or misinterpretation.
==Staff Recruitment and Promotion==
New staff members need appropriate username colours, and new calculation group members, image helpers, and translation helpers also need their (not automatic) associated userpage tags.
* We have to continuously actively keep an eye out for good new potential staff members to keep the site running, as we cannot count on everybody being around forever. If you find somebody that you think is helpful, rational, reliable, and reasonable, PM the current bureaucrats about it, so they can ask the rest of the staff if they think that the nominee is suitable for the job. If the potential recruits gain strong support, a bureaucrat will interview and inform them about what they have to do as staff members, also in private.
** If the nominee is accepted, the bureaucrats should preferably carry out an interview, in which they explain what the job means, and ask if the member is interested. If that goes well, they can appoint them, with an accompanying announcement thread.
* It is usually much preferable to let a potential administrator candidate start as a thread moderator, or content moderator (depending on their wiki focus), and see how well they are doing for quite a while, before promoting them further.
==Content Moderators==
*If you find pages that feature random, entirely unmotivated, and/or illogical statistics, preferably change them to "Unknown" ratings.
*Due to their controversial nature, all tier 1 and 0 pages should be completely locked, so that only administrators and content moderators can edit them, or change their names. If tier 2 pages feature popular characters, they should be locked as well.
*Also completely lock pages that attract vandalism, or that feature very popular/controversial characters.
*If members use very bad grammar and incoherent sentence structures during edits, politely tell them to stop contributing without first using a good sentence- and spell-checking word processing program.
*Take note that each folder in the navigation bar can only display a maximum of 10 links each, so please select carefully.
*When changing the attack potency and durability of a character, keep track of if you need to modify the striking strength accordingly as well.
*In case a certain remaining external calculation link has disappeared, lost all of its images, been severely distorted, etcetera, you can then easily search for the URL in the Wayback Machine archive, and use the backup version instead. However, our rules currently demand that all of our externally hosted calculations should be copied to internal blogs and then evaluated by our calc group members.
**Important pages from external sites, that are linked to in our own wiki pages, can also be backed up via the Wayback Machine and Archive.today archives when it seems important, in case they are removed at a future date.
* Sufficiently well-written blogs that properly explain the motivations for the character tiers of a certain franchise, should preferably be linked to in the relevant verse pages.
* Check up that new profile pages have the "Characters" (or "Items") categories, along with one for the name of the series (for example, "Naruto"), as well as our standard tier templates, such as {{High 1-A}}, which automatically add the associated tier categories. Similarly, new franchise/verse pages should have the "Verses" category, along with also containing one for the name of the series.
===Enforcement===
*Keep track of the people that use the source code editor, and not the visual mode editor, as it usually messes up the page structures for other editors, and if they do not the source editor, inform them on their walls about this as a polite warning.
*If the last recommendation does not work, either forbid the members in question to make any profile edits on their own, or in worst case, block them.
===Important Pages===
*If you need to undelete a certain profile, you can visit this page.
*Please click here sometimes to clean the cache of the page that displays the recent blog posts in this wiki, so it does not get stuck. You can also bookmark the page in question.
*When monitoring for suspicious edits, use the Recent Changes page, or if you want to save time, the "hide patrolled edits" option. You can also mark the edits that you have checked as patrolled, so several staff members do not have to do the same work.
*All administrators and content moderators should learn how to use our edit-patrolling script, in order to be able to split the workload far more easily with other staff members.
*During content revisions for a specific tier of a specific franchise, you can use the Dynamic Page List category intersection search function to get all of the relevant pages listed for editing via customised personal sandbox pages.
**The DPL function can also be used for other important tasks, such as listing all links to an external site that need to be removed in a much more relevant, well-structured, and easily overviewed manner than our wiki's link searcher tool is capable of.
*Occasionally check up the double redirects page, and resolve any issues.
*Only add to the Community Messages page if it concerns something extremely important for the entire wiki, and preferably keep the old information text, if it is still relevant.
===Technical Support===
*If there are programming bugs, or other important problems within the wiki that our staff members cannot solve on their own, you can very politely inform Fandom's official staff about them, and wait a few days for a reply. Our current wiki manager listed in our staff list page will likely also be able to help out with such issues. If the rest of the staff has an interest in knowing the response, either inform them in private or via our staff forum, depending on whether or not it is sensitive information.
==Thread Moderators==
*Close discussion threads after they have been resolved.
**It is very important that you do not close or remove threads without adequate reasoning, even if it is simply due to that a topic has been discussed to exhaustion previously and/or you do not have the time available to properly deal with it at the moment due to real life concerns, and do not wish for it to get out of control until you get some free time to do so. It is also usually best to ask for confirmations before closing discussions. It reflects badly on the staff as a whole if you do not follow these instructions.
*Clarify the titles when posting new discussions, such as writing "Naruto: Statistics revision", so people know what the thread is about from the title, and those who know about the topic can help out.
*Always add the relevant, exactly worded, associated verse page tag to the top of content revision, staff, and questions and answers, forum threads, so that they are easier to find in the future. Character profile and information page tags are also preferable to add.
**For example "Dragon Ball", "Son Goku (DBS Anime)", and "Vegeta (Dragon Ball Super)" for a thread that wants to modify the statistics of those characters, or "Regeneration" for a thread that explains an important question about the topic. 
**Again, please be very careful to use the exactly worded page titles for the tags whenever possible, and correct the tags for threads that have not worded them properly. 
**Certain tags cannot be spelled right due to containing commas, so in lack of better options "Warhammer 40,000" has to turn into "Warhammer 40000" instead, for example.
Important Pages
*Bookmark the Watched Threads page in the external forum, to help you keep track of updates to discussions that you help out with far more easily.
*If a discussion thread fails to gain a sufficient response, and the topic is genuinely important, inspect the relevant verse page in this wiki for listed members who are interested in the verse in question, along with one of the knowledgeable members list pages, and use the "@Username" function to get attention from a reasonable amount of the members that are still active in our forum. If you cannot find a sufficient amount of active knowledgeable members in this manner, try to check who have edited the profile pages of the characters in question in the past, and ask them instead.
*Block rule-breakers who cause more trouble than they are worth keeping around, for long periods of time, or your unnecessary workloads will dramatically increase.
**To help with this, subscribe to the "Rule Violation Report Thread", in the wiki management forum. Given that our notification system is glitchy, preferably also bookmark the page, and check it up regularly.
Important Notes
*If a subject has been extensively debunked, it is a good idea to add a concise discussion rule explanation about that it is not allowed to bring it up again without new evidence, while linking to the threads in which it was handled previously. It saves a lot of time to simply refer to it, if the topic is brought up again.
==Administrators==
*If you notice lots of very suspicious accounts created simultaneously in the new users log, permanently block them all to be on the safe side, and to avoid much greater problems later on. Please check all of the block options, except the one for monitoring the talk page in question, while doing so.
*All of the other responsibilities listed in this page that are not blatantly for bureaucrats only also apply for administrators.
==Calculation Group Members==
All calculation group members are required to subscribe to the Calculation Evaluations and Calculation Requests forum threads.
*If a member creates a new calculation blog, but does not know about the "Calculation Evaluations" request thread, inform them about it with a provided link.
Category:Administration