Hi everyone!
You may recently have noticed a bunch of people moving around into different positions in the month following the forum upgrade, as well as various new usergroups pop up and disappear.

Now that things are finally settling down, I think I'll take the time to explain exactly what has been going on.
We've been recently working on simultaneously implementing the prestige group as well as restructuring the staff positions.

First off, prestige groups.
These groups were created to mark those who have made significant, sincere, and helpful contributions to the community, and to set them aside as people that newcomers can approach for help.
Note that it was decided that we would not be adding old, inactive users from UTF or the early days of OTF to the user groups, as it would likely result in confusion for newcomers who were unaware of their inactivity.

While only one is shown at the moment, Wiki Documentarists, we may add more in the future as we see fit. Originally we were going to make the groups first and add people to them, but we realized it would be cleaner just to create them as we needed them.

Don't pester us to add you to a prestige usergroup; it will only decrease the likelyhood of you getting in. This is a small enough community we can keep tabs on pretty much everything; if we see your work and decide it needs recognition, we will add you in due time.

Second off, staff group restructuring.
The Community Staff group was created to encompass all users who are staff members on any of the major community locations, including the forums, IRC and xelerus. A number of these individuals are/will be moderators of specific boards on the Official Forums as well.
The Developers group encompass the individuals who are actively working with the source code; George, who is the primary developer, and Gambit who is making the linux/mac port.
The Global Moderators are now also a form of administrator, capable of performing user and group administration tasks, such as activating users, deleting bots, and the like, beyond simply moderating the entire forum.
The Administrator group is only differentiated from the global moderator group functionally in that the administrator group is also able to manage the mechanics of the forums, change board-wide settings, and create new boards. They still share the same responsibilities as the Global Moderators group.

Sounds good there Wolfy - I had noticed everyone playing Musical Staff Positions lately and now I know what's happening!

I think it's nice the way it looks right now, with the Staff seperate from Mods/Admins, and was actually surprised in the end how many people actually became Staff.

All in all, a good effort on all relevant people's part and it looks like it will set the Forum up well!

Well done! :)

Actually, they were already staff, just there was never any centralized way of distinguishing them from each other.

What about a "Xelerus moderators" group?

that would come under community staff imho

It would be great of we knew who updates/ moderates Xelerus so that modders know who to talk to about getting tags, why their mod got deleted, etc.
Maybe if an updated list of moderators and admins showed up on the wiki...

That was supposed to be the wiki and it was a division of the community staff. :/

So I guess we should start doing our jobs then?

I'd imagine so!