Weekly Update - 5/23

Weekly Updates

Entry posted by Black Six May 23, 2008

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Intro

Tonight's update will hopefully be pretty good. I have a few topics worth discussing. We can talk about promotions, Ambassadors, and member behavior, oh my!

Updates

So, this past week we had two pretty major staff promotions (which happened to coincide with two people stepping down). First, which most of you have probably seen by now, is the ToM Dracone, or Yannick, is now part of the BZPower news team. If you've read any of his reviews on BZP, you know what a skilled writer he is. We thought we'd put his skills to good use writing more frequently than the occasional review. In his first week he's already posted two stories, so keep looking for more to come from him!

Next up, which you might not have seen, since it was only announced a few minutes ago, is that Makaru is the new Blog Leader. He came on to the staff as a Blog Assistant, and though he moved on to the forum side, he returns once again to oversee his former blog staff-mates. His experience will prove invaluable in keeping the blogs running smoothly and I know there's at least one project Toaraga was working on that Mak will continue.

Now, you might be wondering, 'But Toaraga was just promoted, is he leaving or something?' Fear not, this was all planned in advance, Toaraga took the job as Global Mod knowing Mak waqs going to replace him. It's usually better to spread out the work load among a few staff members rather than having one or two that do everything. It allows for better organization and prevents our staff from getting too stressed out (most of them, at least).

Of course that leaves Janus, who recently stepped down from being a Global Moderator and now stopped being a Reporter. Sometimes things in life get busy and reduce the time a person can spend on BZPower. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Robert decided that it would be better to let some new blood into those positions since he could no longer dedicate the amount of time he wanted to.

So that's that.

Next on the list, the applications are in, and you can now vote for the top three candidates to be nominated for Lego Ambassadors. I'd like to thank everyone so far for their support and wish the rest of the candidates good luck in the selection process. The poll closes at noon tomorrow, so get voting!

As far as the Ambassador program in general goes, I've seen many people asking for specific things to ask Lego. While I'm sure the company is open to ideas and feedback, it remains to be seen if individual requests are really considered. Whatever the case, if anyone from BZP is chosen as an Ambassador I hope they work with the members to get feedback on different issues, and bring our voice to Lego. We're a large community with a lot of opinions, and I think Lego could gain some useful insight from us. Here's to the future!

Finally, I'd like to take a quick moment to talk about something some members don't seem to understand. Staff are people too. We have lives outside of BZPower and do all the same sort of things all other members do. We hang out with friends, listen to music, go to parties, play sports, go to school or work (or both), etc. I encourage all staff to act as professionally as possible while on BZPower, setting a good example for other members to follow, and generally I think we do a pretty good job of it. Sometimes, however, something will come up that members think is inappropriate for staff to do, but if they did it it would be alright. Double standards aren't cool, and people need to understand that staff aren't perfect and have all the same sorts of flaws and strengths as everyone else.

Mailbag

Nothing this week. Send me your questions!

Want to see your questions answered? PM them to me and put 'Mailbag' in the subject line. I'll pick the few I like the best and answer them in the next update.

Conclusion

And that wraps it up for this week. Hope it was more interesting and insightful than it has been recently. I want to try to update this thing (my blog) more often with non-weekly update stuff, so keep checking back to see if I get around to doing that.