Blizzy#8953

Divulging Personal Info - The Request vs. The Notice

2022-07-28T23:41:12.451Z

I was asked by a friend of mine to look further into the formalities of requests and notices in systems of breaks and resignations, and after doing my whole "well what's the point, I'm a busy developer and I already wrote about it", I caved, and here I am, indulging you further!

The request is an often overused, and possibly wrongfully used, system of staff governance - whether it be through requesting breaks, requesting resignations, requesting lateral moves, et cetera. Some of these are perfectly great scenarios for requesting - I wouldn't just notify my upper management that I'm moving departments after all! - and in those cases I see no issue. However, a rising trend, and a lasting one at that, has been that requests are being used to validate breaks and resignations. This is an incredible violation of privacy and can introduce conflicts of interest, both of which are things you definitely don't want on your server.

In comes our better friend, the notice. The notice, like most things, is made for certain situations, and thankfully it is a real help in these situations where requests feel like they're prying a little too much. The notice serves as a heads-up, rather than a sought-out approval - it allows staff to retain control of the matters that drove them to make the decision in the first place, and ensures that they don't feel there is an approval channel to go through.

Now, let's talk about two of the primary ways we need, as a community, to implement notices instead of approvals - resignations and leaves of absence.

Resignations

The resignation process in most standard, part- or full-time work, implements a notice, so this one shouldn't be too far-fetched! For example, when I left my previous job for my soon-to-be-newest job, I gave a 14 day notice of resignation, signifying my courtesy of notifying my place of employment that I was leaving for new horizons. This was accepted and gladly agreed to, but that was never a formal discussion. I withheld my reasoning in some areas - I focused more on the dates and circumstances of my leave, but not on my personal rationale. This was my choice, and at no point was I forced to give these reasons or risk losing the validity of my resignation notice.

In fact, where I'm from, this is very illegal! In my home province of Ontario, Canada, it is illegal for an employer to do any of the following:

Stop me from quitting my job, or require that my resignation be approved.
Demand a reason for resignation, or an alternate reason for resignation.
Keep records for a period exceeding three years.

Why do they mandate these preventions? Well, for employee privacy! I cannot be legally told that job satisfaction, workplace conduct issues, or even personal grudges are not a valid reason to resign. This is because my reason for resignation is privileged information - information that has no need to be divulged for privacy or personal reasons.

Now why is this something you should bring to Discord, just because it's a "real life rule?" The same higher-order ideas that I brought to the table in my last argument: it is a matter of personal, privileged information, and there is no (or should be no) reason for you to mandate that this information be shared. Beyond this, however, I recommend that you not hold the resignation against the staff member in any way either - whether that be reporting to a larger server, banning them from your staff team or server, or otherwise, there are always many ways to resolve disputes. Even to that end, if a member quits for job satisfaction-related reasons, there's no real need to ban them from anything - the odds of them retaining their role as an active member or staff member in the future can honestly diminish depending on who they feel was the catalyst for their general unenjoyment of their position.

What I recommend: If being informed is important to you - as it should be! - kindly ask that your departing staff members provide you with a date for departure in a dedicated channel or system. In my opinion, you should not provide even an anonymous or optional opportunity to add a reason to their leave - this can encourage fires to ignite, or can scare members into thinking they'll be held at a future disadvantage if they do not provide a reason.

My implementation would be just as I stated above - I'd provide a channel that asks for the date they're departing, after which they have their roles removed and are removed from all staff systems. Whether or not you want to mandate a time is up to you, and while I don't recommend it, if you feel the infrastructure or job duties have to be adequately accounted for, cleared, or passed onto the successor of the position, you may add a 48 hour or 72 hour notice requirement.

Be this as it may, I know some server owners or managers will be hesitant to add this system. My advice to you - if you're worried about the missing personnel, instead of the happiness and general retention of staff members, you may need to take a moment to critically evaluate the priorities of your management team.

Leaves of Absence (LOAs)

"Blizzy, this one makes sense to have a request! We have PTO requests in the workplace, that makes sense, right?" Well, not quite. What you are thinking of is either compensation for time off work, or earned time off as a part of a contract.

Let's head back to my home province, shall we? We also have Leave of Absence laws - for example, giving notice, not a request, of sick leave, is granted under clause 50(3) of the Employment Standards Act. Employees do not need to approach their employers, and through crusted eyes and stuffy noses, hoarsely declare "Mr. Employer, I am sick, may I have time off because of this?" Why? Again, because this is personal information! Not all sicknesses are external, and mental health struggles often incapacitate employees through means not commonly observed by a third-party.

Why should we bring this to Discord? I hope this answer is obvious to most! Mental health struggles can have a massive impact on Discord users, whether moderator or manager, occasional drop-in or omniscient owner. It is not fair for users to need to divulge their personal struggles to people they often have never met face-to-face, because most employees who work face-to-face don't have to either. It takes a lot of trust to tell someone about your mental health struggles, and this is something I wouldn't ask my staff to share with me at any point.

A similar sentiment goes for physical ailments - it's actually almost an inverse on Discord, because physical ailments are often the ones we can't see! To deny a user LOA if they're physically ill is restricting their own bodily autonomy. That's it, plain and simple. There is frankly no respectable reason for holding that against someone - they didn't plan for it, and they shouldn't be punished for playing a game of lottery against their own body.

Here are some of the complaints I've also heard from server owners regarding LOA:

"No requests means repetitive LOAs!" That's right, it does! At that point, you need to realize your role as a manager and assist your team in understanding that this could just as easily be a long-term personal battle for this user. It often follows that these users will resign from their positions - however, if they don't and their lack of involvement is becoming a worry, send them a message asking if they need anything, and whether they would like to continue contributing at your server.
"No requests means time off for unimportant matters!" This is not a territory for you to control. We all have different rationales for our decisions, and it is not our job to prove the burden of proof for a need for an LOA to any one person, anywhere. Something benign to one person can be catastrophic to another, and this is not something for you to govern with an iron fist. Remember that their provision of a reason for you is a far enough step to begin with, and realize that "different strokes for different folks" applies just as easily to LOA rationale.
"No requests means sudden outages of work!" That is okay! Ebbs and flows are natural. This likely means you need better systems of redundancy in place, or dare I say, some teams dedicated to other tasks may sometimes need to be asked to get their hands dirty somewhere else. There is nothing wrong with having a little bit of redundancy on a server.

For some reason, most server staff I come across seem to focus on the negatives surrounding LOA. LOA is very beneficial, and some staff can even come back stronger than when they were hired - believe me, I'd testify to that fact any day! We demonize taking a break for our own health, which is a little too workaholic for my liking - setting boundaries is crucial for safeguarding your mental health, which should be treated as a sanctuary. Protect your brain, and it will continue to help you develop and improve those projects you look forward to creating and innovating on daily!

So, we've addressed two chief concerns regarding the request vs notice principle; what can we take away from all of this information?

Take everything I say with a grain of salt! I am not the manager of your community, and every group and guild is different. While I implore you to take a staff-centric, servant leadership view as a manager, ultimately the buck lies with you. I hope that what I provide to you in these little articles is beneficial - maybe not as an instruction guide to running your server, but potentially as an inspiration to do good by all you meet.
Consider and prioritize collective wellbeing! A safe and healthy staff means a safe and healthy you. If systems work, and staff chip in when they are ready to do so, then you can rest easy knowing you've cultivated a team of individuals who know how to help you achieve your dreams. This is a team game, running a Discord server, and everyone should be allowed to pitch in whatever they can afford!
Communication is always key! There is never a moment, I'd argue, when communication is unhelpful and irrelevant. Make sure to keep your team informed, and ensure that they are in the loop, both during and after, the process of changing internal systems. They are the ones who use it every day, and if they agree and can easily understand the functions of each deliberate change, then the entire team can run on well-lubricated gears towards the seas of change.

I sincerely hope you learned something from this. Admitting you can do better is a trait of a fantastic leader - it's not fixing what's wrong; it's constructing on what's there!

First time here? Hi, my name is Blizzy! I am a Canadian server management advisor, independent developer, small-group facilitator, and professional developer. A lot of my professional career is designing and implementing training and development systems for small to large teams - I have certifications in various leadership programs with many more to come! I hope my readings provide you with the resources you need to grow alongside your staff team, as that falls in line with my one goal: helping you achieve your dreams!

For any info on my certifications, real life endeavors, or to just ask a question or say hi, please contact me on Discord @ Blizzy#8953, or by email at tm21cy@outlook.com. I look forward to hearing from you! All the best :)

Striking Down the Message Requirement - Other, More Organic Weekly Checks to Keep Your Staff Active

2022-05-26T00:04:45.601Z

Most of you reading this have at least some experience working for, managing, or owning a server. By association, most of you will also, then, have experience either doling out or receiving weekly checks from department leaders, management or otherwise. There is always one glaring check that seems to almost scare staff into forcing themselves to be active without any semblance of productivity - the message requirement.

You all know what I mean - whether you just have to send a measly 100 messages per week in a server, or more or less the same in a staff server, it seems to be a weird addition to a measure of productivity from a staff member that every server owner wants to adopt.

I won't for a second act like I've ever been above it myself. I've been on every side of that system - I've spent time designing what I thought were ideal systems, and I've been on the passing and failing side of checks created by other staff members. For a while, I was also an adamant supporter of the server; at the time, in my mind, there was no better way to gauge the activity of a staff member, and I was a little ignorant of the fact that this is unrealistic for most people to uphold.

You may be reading this going "but Blizzy, what on Earth can you be hinting at?" I'll tell you - there is no logical reason to encourage message requirements from your staff. In essence, what I'll be covering includes a few major points:

Message requirements, contrary to popular belief, rarely spur any organic engagement.
Message requirements impede on the ability of your staff to be creative in their pursuits.
Message requirements do not measure a staff's effective contributions to their team.

Let us break these down one by one, shall we?

Point 1 - Message requirements rarely spur organic engagement.

For our hypothetical staff team, let's assume the following requirements. Bear in mind, these numbers will exaggerated to be quite low, but the points I'm making should be scalable in nature.

Our staff team has 4 departments - the owners, the management, moderators, and community staff.

Moderators are required to send 25 messages a week in the main server chat, community team members are required to send 50 messages a week, and management are required to send 75 messages a week. Let's ignore the owners for now.

Notice that these three teams have at least 25 messages worth of overlap. Again, underexaggerated in some cases, but bear with me. Furthermore, management and community have 50 messages of overlap. What does this create? My oh-so-favorite common occurrence - staff-exclusive engagement.

What is staff-exclusive engagement? Go to the general chats of any server with sparing community engagement, and find the most recent messages. I can nearly guarantee that you'll see messages between, and solely between, staff members. Why is this? Well, these staff members are killing two birds with one stone! Both staff members meet their quota, and the community is "engaged".

Now take away this exclusive engagement. Was there any actual, new community engagement? I'll save you the time - no.

This is because, when staff members - especially those in servers with less activity - are instructed to send messages to be active, the easiest way to meet that metric is to talk to people they're working with to simulate conversation. This is similar to how MLM schemes often have fake side-chatter from hidden employees - there is supposed engagement to simulate good reception, in a desperate attempt to get at least some more organic engagement.

This phenomenon, more commonly referred to as artificial engagement, was something I discussed in a previous post. At it's core, by simulating engagement or simulating a growth towards engagement, you're very rarely going to actually discover any new engagement unless the people engaging fall into one of three groups: the one's annoyed about a ping (rightfully so), the ones actually watching the chat, or the "dead chat" preachers. This brings up my point - why force your staff to artificially engage your chat, when it evidently doesn't assist your server in any way?

To fix this: encourage your staff to host events, perpetuate organic engagement by allowing members to start the conversation (NB: if your members aren't doing this, that is a whole other systemic issue with your server), and by allowing them to feel at home in your server.

Point 2 - Message requirements impede creative potential.

Let's once more assume a situation involving our hypothetical staff team. Let's also assume the following:

Community team members are required to host events.
Moderators are required to perform open moderations.
Management members are required to create guides and other infrastructural aids.
Owners are required to check all these tasks.

As you can see, this becomes a scaling issue as we go up the ranks. Community team members can create chat events with prizes to encourage their members to be active, meeting their requirements. This is obviously up for contention, as you now create monetary-motivation engagement which is a whole other region of unethical community practices, but let's ignore that for now. Likewise, moderation members have plenty of, say, ads to moderate. Management, while otherwise motivated, can create guides and aids to meet the project side of their quota.

However, let's imagine a management member who has very little time online. They can work on their guides online, but if they are worried about spending their time on messages, the quality of their guides suffers. This affects the moderation teams, who are given inaccurate or otherwise not full instructions, and community teams, who are not motivated via a guide to be creative as they don't have a predefined region of operations for their events.

Moderators who do not clear rule breaking content, and who opt instead to desperately try to reach their quotas, spend their time letting others ruin the experience of the users they are trying to engage. This hurts the community team, who are already affected by incomplete guides, and accomplishes a net loss.

Community team members now have incomplete guides to accomplish their work, as well as a community that is filled with ads they may not have perms to delete. Now they are left to either try and clear this, or meet their message quota. Guess what they pick 9 times out of 10?

Again, this is dramatized for effect, sure, but the sentiment stands, especially with department leader and HR teams who ALSO have to establish checks. Trickle-down issues like this can easily cripple a staff team, and this all stems from a thought in management that they should meet their message quota instead. Think of things like Modmail, open mod guides, and event planning templates. These have to be done, as they are vital to keeping a consistent chain of events across all instances, and they aren't being done in favor of false messaging to meet requirements.

By establishing alternative requirements for your staff, you can have them complete otherwise relevant instructions while also working on making sure these instructions benefit the community and spur organic engagement through means other than messaging requirements. Furthermore, you prevent staff-centered interactions as well as false, meaningless, "hi" interactions.

To fix this: encourage and assign tasks that benefit the community and the staff member at the same time. Do not force work if there is no work to be done - if staff teams need to lay dormant for a while to accomplish what needs to realistically be done, then they can spend that dormancy trying to engage with members organically. Do not try to double buffer staff with dual obligations, as one side will typically end up hurting.

Point 3 - Message requirements are not a measure of contribution.

To preface this case with an example, allow me to introduce you to a server I will keep anonymous. In that server, I am a manager that handles in-house development, and attached to my role there is a message requirement. Anyone else confused yet?

In the eyes of the ownership team, my contribution is not effective if I do not send somewhere in the ballpark of 100-150 messages weekly. To summarize - I am developing a unique, in-house bot, that has commanded my attention daily for about 4 to 6 hours, and my contribution isn't appreciated because I don't send messages in a good enough quantity (NB: I do chat in this server, just when the organic situation allows.)

Let's bring this back to our theoretical staff team to lay down the rhetoric of how broken this can sound objectively. Community team members who only host events are not recognized. Moderators who only delete ads are not recognized. Managers who only create guides that help these lower departments are not recognized.

Let's finally address the hypocrisy as well - why is it typically the case that owners are not given self-imposed message requirements? The answer: "because we're too busy creating materials that benefit the server." Yeah, just like every other department! The reality of this situation is that you're assuming that hired staff exist purely to act as fake engagement to make your server look alive. We have a word for this, by the way - exploitation.

Before you assign your staff requirements, ask yourself: as server owner, would I want to assign this to myself for good reason? Furthermore, if I assigned this to myself, would it actually benefit my team? The answer should almost always be an overwhelming no with the message requirement debate. Instead, why don't we focus on the holistic nature of a staff team?

Allow me to picture my other server. I am a co-owner there, and it is a small community server. At this server, we in essence tell our staff to be members of the server. No message requirements, no additional prescribed weekly tasks, just a badge that says "I can handle issues if need be."

The resultant outcome? Our staff members are naturally engaging the team in their own time, encouraging our members to speak out about their issues related to the topic of the server, and handling inquiries as a natural process. In not being motivated by a number to hit, they engage in a way that is more sustainable for the server's stats as a whole, and we don't hire them to meet a quota in the first place.

The trade off? They are given instance tasks to handle. Create a ban list. Train some trial moderators. Check in on this member's posting habits for us. Still, we see very little artificial engagement from our members, and no artificial engagement from our staff. Our staff are treated as friends, not laborers.

To fix this: allow your staff to take up creative projects. Take a laissez-faire approach and re-evaluate your server's creative direction regularly to allow your staff to find a groove. Finally, encourage creativity and work that actually benefits the server in the long run.

Overall, we should see a recurring trend in our cases. Ownership often escapes unscathed without any requirements that they don't wish to follow, and instead pass these unrealistic and highly nullified in benefit onto staff under the pretense that it's their job. Instead, we need to learn to unify as staff teams and realize that the functional chimney benefits no one at the end of the day (NB: the functional chimney refers to the breakdown of communication and creative identity due to a lack of communication funnels, or adversely, too many necessary communication funnels. This can be an issue as well when we have way too many department hierarchy levels.)

In closing, please consider the impact that encouraging and enforcing artificial server engagement from your staff has on the team at large. Please feel free to cite this source, use the "To fix this" sections to remedy your staff woes, and reach out if you need clarification. All in all, please remind yourself: "I want my staff to be creative and organic, not robots!"

Blizzy#8953

In Defense of Server Staff - Why We Abuse The "Inadequate Staff" Moniker

2022-05-18T23:01:31.997Z

We've all been there so often that we don't even have to picture it - we go to our logs channels, and find that, to our surprise, a staff member has left our server. There's a few feelings that get tossed around for a few seconds - surprise, disappointment, and exasperation, to name a few - and then we typically go to a safety server with our proof and report them.

However, what does this actually accomplish for anyone? We get a bit of revenge satisfaction out of "giving them what they deserve", and, in return, that staff member loses all of the fun of being staff because of one disappointed server owner. It becomes exponentially worse when Inadequate Staff get bundled into the ban lists that these servers publish - now they're being banned from servers entirely!

While we're on the topic, by the way, what's with our deeming users "inadequate"? That's a power that none of us, regardless of server size or experience, have the privilege of having. We do not possess all the necessary information to deem someone inadequate, especially on a communication platform made for fun collaboration. You don't often know the reason someone leaves without resigning - what if their account got temporarily disabled? What if they were going through some private personal knowledge (NB: they are NOT required to tell you "personal reasons", regardless of staff policy), or they were needing to step back from something that had too much of a grasp on their life?

My primary point is this - no matter the argument of "well, we do it like this in real life", staff are not obligated to tell you their resignation reasoning, tell you they're resigning at all, or (worst of all) wait for you to approve of their resignation. Let's go through each of these one at a time, shall we?

(NB: "Blacklist", unless explicitly defined, implies a network blacklist or ban from multiple servers or multiple staff teams.)

Leaving Without Reason

This is perfectly logical in a lot of ways that are not typically understood by server owners who tend to make a corporation out of their server. Let's take the case of digital addiction - a phenomenon that can be read into more extensively here - where frequent internet users find that they are compulsively using the internet as a means of satisfying addiction. The best cure for some addictions? Cold turkey. Now, this gives the staff a choice with two wrong answers: be an inactive member of staff, get fired, and lose their reputation, or leave without resigning (because, once more, they are not obligated to tell you as something as simple as that may set them off) and risk being reported and, you guessed it, losing their reputation.

The simple response to someone leaving your server without reason is that of the following sequence of events:

Recognize the staff member has left.
Politely message them asking, without expecting an answer, if they're okay and if they'd like to talk about why they left.
Reassigning duties, finding new staff, and so on.

That's all there is to it folks! No need to report them, no need to blacklist them, etc. You are, of course, obligated to blacklist them from your staff team as it's your server, but remember that the internet is one large game of telephone - what was the actual reason they provided may be skewed by you when you report it. No one is ever obligated to give you a reason (unless they are paid or have signed a legally binding contract stating they must) for their resignation. It isn't a professional look, that's for sure, but it is still very valid.

Why do I recommend what you deem to be a lax course of action? Well, what if that staff member has overcome their personal issues, commitments, or otherwise and wants to return as a staff member at many servers, only to find they're completely blacklisted across the board with no appeal? You've now gone and stripped the fun out of the platform they loved, because of a desire to play God with someone's reputation - and I personally will never have any sympathy for that kind of move.

Sometimes staff members also leave without resigning to immediately escape a set of toxic management members - while this is a systemic issue that is not immediately resolvable, this can also create complications for members who wish to leave ASAP. These toxic management staff can now dictate the entire future of a staff member in a click of a Send Message button and that is in no way fair to these normal people. We all go through struggles, personal realignments, and relationship breakdowns - that should never give you the power to deem someone inadequate.

I will reinforce this idea again - it is perfectly okay to locally blacklist them from your staff team. However, it is entirely unfair to deem them a terrible and unhireable staff member because of one incident. In doing something like that, you tarnish the reputation of a staff member based on one simple view of their behavior that may have been an unlucky occurrence for them.

Leaving Without "Adequate" Reason

Preface: The validity of one's resignation reason is not yours to assess. Everyone has different reasons for what they do in life, and at least where I'm from, in the workplace there is no rule regarding this as well as that would be a blatantly obvious violation of workplace harassment rules as per Human Resources.

Users should never be required to provide what you deem an adequate reason to resign - for example, during any one of my struggles with Persistent Depressive Disorder, I would never in a million years confide in people on the internet over my mental illness. I would never come within 50 feet of Discord if someone deemed that inadequate - proof that your toxic staff policies can, in fact, drive people away from the community or platform as a whole.

Leaving the onus of an adequate reason on staff members makes the staff member feel that they are being judged persistently and are not a coworker but an underling. Instead of treating them like an equal staff member, you make them feel like you are contractually binding them to their work for you, and leaving the fate of their advancement or resignation in your hands. Even if you do get your staff members to sign a legally binding contract, they should never have a stipulation of a requirement to provide you with "valid" reasoning. If they want to leave, they can.

To remedy this? Sympathize with your staff. Allow them to take breaks - and offer them breaks as opposed to resignation - and, if they may choose to leave, ensure that they are allowed to leave for whatever reason, from "I just don't like it" to "I am experiencing conflicts with my personal commitments". This gives freedom of choice back to your staff members, and will overall increase retention instead of trashing your reputation into a state of toxicity.

Approval of Resignation

Okay, this is a non-negotiable in the eyes of every staff member - please, for the love of all things, do not make it a mandatory rule to have all resignations approved. This is not a thing in real workplaces, and if it is, I highly advise you leave your current workplace. This is something I have a zero tolerance for - no one is obligated to remain in a staff team until (assuming it ever gets approved) their resignation is approved. This implies that you have sole predatory control over their career at your server, which is highly inefficient for you and highly toxic for them to have to witness.

Let's just think about it this way - you go through a major traumatic event. You feel absolutely no motivation to do anything anymore and, while this may be a temporary incident, you are certain you want to resign to make sure you don't hold up a spot for other potential staff members. This, right here, is an honorable excuse to leave the team.

You present this to your management staff, under the guise of "personal reasons" (as you're entitled to do). Then, for some reason, your resignation gets denied with the reason "Please provide a more specific reason." You're likely left stunned as you now have to explain a traumatic event in your life to a bunch of internet people you likely have never met, to leave a volunteer position you likely aren't contractually bound to.

This can be an extremely harrowing experience for some people - a natural part of the trauma acceptance process is a long period where we deny or ignore the event that happened. As well as this, it makes you look like that manager that goes "oh, I'm so sorry xyz died - but can you still make it for 3 today?"

The remedy for this particular occurrence should be obvious - don't do it. Allow staff to resign on their own free will and accord, without a concern for the particular details that they may not want to share. They are not obligated to provide a "valid" reason, and you are not entitled to one regardless of what staff rules you write.

But why?

To be a manager or server owner is a position that comes with something that applies in all scenarios - prepare for the worst case scenario.

As far as risk management goes, there are three certainties in life - death, taxes, and the worst case. By not preparing for the worst case scenario, you are leaving your server liable to reports from staff who have felt uncomfortable, harassed into an answer, et cetera. Along with this, you cannot guarantee that the subjective interpretation of your rules will be the same with every staff manager, and as such the rules should be as easily to understand as possible and as accommodating as possible.

Along with this, most people aren't prepared to handle this the same way that people claim real workplaces handle it, because the reality is real workplaces do not handle problems this way. If I wanted to, I could resign at the drop of a hat from my workplace, without prior notice, and without approval. Now, it is not professional, but in terms of not giving notice / not having my resignations approved, I can confirm that this often doesn't matter. I resigned due to cognitive differences at two businesses, without pre-approval and with same-day departure, and I still have glowing references from my bosses.

The key to this good staff-manager connection is not the means of resignation, but rather promoting a positive work environment and cherishing your staff while they're here. Staff should not ever feel a pressure to resign because of the proverbial tightrope that their resignation balances on - there should not be a fear of resignation due to personal reasons or a wish to just leave servers for the time being.

Now, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you what to do, I'm just simply offering remedies to arguments that you may have in the future. Staff do not want to feel chained to their servers just because they are staff there - the reality is arguments happen and staff may leave your server to take a break from the conflict. They should not be added to universal ban lists just because their emotions took hold of them.

I leave you with this - next time you feel a stressor in your life that makes you want to step away from your server and pass ownership off, make sure you understand that, if the roles were reversed, your staff rules may in all likelihood make you a staff member that can be deemed "inadequate." Consider the humanity behind the screen, and understand that universally banning a staff member for leaving without resigning or other reasons may be more damaging to your than the member.