(02-24-2017, 04:52 AM)Shuck Wrote: On topic:
Part of me agrees with this assessment of weirdly long applications. The problem with questions is that people lie. I'm a shitty individual. I can pretend not to be, sign up for a few new accounts, and join whatever I please. So, while it's totally reasonable to want to cherry-pick who you do, and do not let in to the social circle you built, there's not a lot you can do proactively.
All of what you said is accurate to my experience and perspective, but I wanted to emphasise this part. This is what I meant when I said it wasn't always feasible to weed people out with an application process.
In my experience, there are four rough groups of applicants:
A) Well meaning and they fit in. (The ideal recruit.)
B) Well meaning but they don't fit in.
C) Don't fit in but they have another, neutral reason to want to join (E.g. friend in the guild).
D) Malicious (E.g. wants to rob guild bank, wants to "spy for another guild" (i.e. stir shit), etc etc).
Application processes only help you distinguish between types A and B. They don't help you pick out Type C or D - that's what conduct rules are for. Because both types will lie on their apps, but it's harder to keep up a lie consistently over a number of weeks or months. Your rules should, therefore, be angled towards picking out when someone is clashing with or harming the guild culture - and making it a monitorable, quantifiable thing, that everyone knows you can be kicked for and expects people to be kicked for.
Most of our applicants were type B, and as I mentioned earlier, were weeded out during the recruitment process - mostly via inactivity during the trial period (which tells us they don't really care that much about being in the guild, and we want people who care about being here). Thing is, Mr Abusive wasn't even a type D recruit - he was type C. His girlfriend had been in the guild longer, and he wanted to join her. Given the incident he was kicked during, he lied on his application in order to do this.
(I can only think of one Type D applicant we ever had, and they were kicked within 5 minutes of their joining, lol.)
I think it's folly to try and angle your application process so it'll weed out Type C as well, because this generally involves making it so much effort that someone who isn't invested for its own sake won't complete it... but... there's a certain threshold over which even people who might otherwise fit in with your guild are going to be lost. I do think the app process should be indicative of what every day life in the guild would be like - so unless you write daily prose marathons, requiring essays seems odd. And IMO once you go over 5 single-word-answer questions, you have to start asking what Shuck suggests: what are the answers to these questions even telling you about the applicant? That they can tell you what you want to hear?
Our app had a couple of single-word questions that mostly existed so we could hold people to their answers: stuff like "have you read the rules" and "will you follow the rules" less so we knew, and more so we could point to the agreement as justification if they later went back on it and we needed to make a kick. The last question was "tell us a bit about your RP character" so we could verify that they a) at least understood the principle of being an RPer and b) their character wasn't going to be stuck in "but I can't think of a reason to come~" limbo with regards to guild RP events. Everything else in terms of membership curation was done in the trial period or with the conduct infraction system.
All in all, I didn't actually have to make that many kicks of active members during my time as guild leader. But the ones I did make were justified, improved the health of the guild as a community, and I don't regret them. I think the other members of my guild understood my reasoning as well - helped by the fact that I was transparent about it - and that's why I only ever faced challenges (read: name-calling, attempted rumour-spreading) over my kicks from people who had just been kicked.
IMO if you are transparent about what you expect from people, transparent about what constitutes a kick in advance, and transparent about when someone hits those limits - and you still encounter drama... you have a bigger problem than the immediate drama, because it means your FC members don't trust your judgement, or your leadership. That's when you open a discussion with your members about how you can do better; not when you take kicking people off the table.
JESUS CHRIST WHY DO I WRITE SO MUCH