SSOA April Update

Hello #Starfam!

Star Stable Online Amino (SSOA) is home to many incredible , and for this reason the moderation team continues to ensure the well-being of everyone in the community. With the continuous growth of SSOA we, the moderation team, regularly review our duties and to the community. Sometimes amidst our reviews we discover changes that need to be made in order to continue benefiting the community in the best way we can.

The moderation team has decided on new and improved systems that we can bring to the community to continue creating a safe and fun environment. These changes may be unexpected and surprising but as we implement them we will continuously look to you, the community, for guidance on how to progress toward our goals.

These are definitely trial periods, and if it becomes noticeable that things are not going well, we will revert back and pursue other methods. Moving forward we have decided to build a stronger moderation team that will begin to be more transparent with the community. We may not be able to inform you of all the specific details but will do our best to keep you updated. Our hopes in these changes is continuing the strong connection we all have while maintaining safety for everyone.

The following topics will be broken into three sections, and there might be some hefty reading material. We encourage you to take all the time you need, divide it into parts if need be, sit back, relax, grab some popcorn and enjoy the show. If you truly do not care for all the reading, an extremely short TLDR is at the bottom of this post. If you have any questions or concerns we will be more than happy to try and clear up anything with you, just let us know!

Index

Group Submissions

The SSOA Team

The Intern Program

Closing Notes

TLDR

Credits

Group Submissions

Until further notice we are closing all group submissions!

The team has been given a surge of incredible submissions lately but most of these have been similar or exact copies of an older group. We also took in the notice that there are several older groups that have completely gone inactive, and ones struggling to get back on their feet.

We have decided to take steps in reuniting these groups back into the community either by the old owner or adopting a new concept with a new owner.

All group owners will be ed via a with a few simple questions, we will await responses and within a month's time if there is no activity or we will go ahead and remove the group from our .

If your group is currently active you can ignore this part, thank you!

If you have recently submitted an idea, it will be placed on hold until we open up again. Once doing so these ideas will be the first ones to be discussed for approval. If you no longer want to proceed please notify the you first ed with the idea.

We anticipate group submissions to be back open sooner rather than later!

The SSOA Team

You may have noticed a few s going around lately, and if you have no clue what we are saying then allow me to enlighten you. We have been pretty hush hush about this special project that we started to really tackle recently, and we are now ready to fully bring it out into the light.

From this date and on we will be utilizing the brand new SSOA Team for all informative posts, wikis, polls, updates, and messages that are important for the community to know. We will use the to help maintain organization, further help reduce bias, and work more strongly as a full team. To keep it fair and unbiased, the will not be following any , including s.

The will be promoted to a leader in the community since it was created by the moderation team, and will provide us the appropriate tools we need to immediately handle situations that occur. We did reserve an older for this purpose, which will now revert back to its original state, but have decided to create a brand new one moving forwards. The will remain active within the community but there are few reminders we would like to make note of;

This is not a replacement for duties. are still encouraged to s directly for assistance, which may lead to quicker responses. The is mainly to document important material for the community.

We also wanted to give an enormous special thanks to our friends at Animal Crossing New Horizons Amino for gracefully giving us the go ahead to fully implement this idea into the community. Some of the s have personal experience with using a separate for group posts, however, it was not until noticing the system being used within moderation purposes that we wanted to try it for ourselves, and of course we asked for permission before doing so.

The Intern Program

After careful considerations, clear minds, and multiple discussions we have decided to introduce a very fragile, *temporary* intern program into the community. You might have several questions, and we will try our best to provide accurate answers while keeping this clear and concise. If you do require more details about the program you can click here to read.

When a requires time off to handle situations outside the community it is respected and valid for them to do so. Currently, all curators have gone on hiatus for their own reasons which has prompted the leaders to discuss some situations that need immediate actions. A ’s duty can be completed within the amino itself, but the majority of the time there is behind the scenes work that is being done to present the community with fun material, for example, the challenges.

We want to continue bringing forth and encouraging growth within the community as we have a lot of ideas to come. As of right now we are working on these ideas and new systems, such as a new and improved curator application system, which will be released in due time. Unfortunately, we require more time than we expected leading to the creation of intern s.

We cannot stress enough that this program is an extremely fragile and temporary position that is not secured. There are several factors that will determine when we will no longer need these interns, but in the meantime we are taking the program week by week to determine whether to continue or not.

An intern is a selected member in the community who has shown good conduct, positive demeanour privately and publicly, to assist in maintaining the community during this time. They will not be full fledged s, and will not have access to all duties or tools. They have also signed an intern contract prior to starting. You will know who is an intern by the intern title beside their curator badge.

Interns will only be handling situations that require the disabling of minor guideline violations. Such violations include spam, off topic, lack of credit and more.

Interns will not be associated with or handle high severe cases, nor will they be actively communicating with in the community like a full fledged would.

Closing Notes

We want to give another special thanks to all of you. Thank you for reading and allowing us to learn and grow alongside you. We always attempt to do our best for the community and look forward to building a strong, transparent moderation team. We cannot do this without the help of all of you and amino on our side.

Due to this, your is extremely valuable to us and we try to keep everything in consideration. We are accepting of all , be it constructive criticism or positive. The choice is always yours and you may do so either in the comments below or within the anonymous form here.

We hope you all have a lovely rest of your day!

TLDR;

• Group submissions have been closed until further notice.

• All group owners will receive a message from a with a few questions.

• Groups owners are expected to send a response within a month’s time in order to keep their groups.

• Starting today all posts for the community will be documented via the SSOA team .

• The intern program is being introduced into the community and will be implemented starting on Monday.

Credits

Writer: Gwen

Editor: Taru

Photos: Corna

Special thanks to: ACNH Amino