Welcome to another MAA report! Pay attention because there is actually stuff you need to know in it :P
Staff
For all intents and purposes, my Staff does not exist right now with Tarax going on vacation and Sklib being too busy graduating and moving on to college. Hell its touch and go with me right now too since I just graduated and will be moving to law school in a week or so. Still: your requests are being processed promptly regardless. Thats how awesome we are (cough I am).
Policy Updates
If You Read Nothing Else In My Report, Read This
Concerning Name Changes: As has always been my policy (and probably the policy of my predecessors), I am not at all friendly towards ridiculously long names. Therefore, I am reminding all of you that your names in the database may only consist of three parts: your first name, middle name and last name. This includes your family name if you have one (which would, in theory, be your last name). Your character is free to have as many names as youd like but thats what the wiki is for; not the database. The sole exception to this rule is the use of Clan names. I do not count Clan names against you so if you have been awarded a Clan title, you may have three names in addition to the Clan name. IMPORTANT: If you have recently been awarded a Clan title and your new title has not been added to your dossier (and I dont mean your name, I mean the special little title thing that gets added to your dossier), please email me and let me know so I can add it for you.
Concerning Competitions: When you are submitting crescents for competitions, please remember to select the competition in the drop down menu provided. I absolutely need this done so I can match the crescent to the competition and make sure everything is in order. If its not done, I cannot confirm your competition (because the list is a billion pages long and I cant readily search it) and I will remand your crescent request. A few people have forgotten to do this lately and I just wanted to remind everyone.
Concerning Transfers: This is probably the single most important part of my report. I have decided to alter the current transfer policy because A.) Ive been too lax with it; B.) Its not working; and C.) I want to? I didnt even really need the C there whatever. From here on out, if you are accepting an appointment to a position in another Clan, you must submit a regular transfer request to that Clan before I will place you in that position. I will no longer manually move members to a new Clan when they accept a position there. So, for example, say you are in Taldryan and you apply for a position as Quaestor in Plagueis (I dont know why youd want to do that but hypothetically speaking). Lets also say that Braecen appoints you the new Quaestor. Braecen still needs to send me an email telling me that hes appointed you and you need to submit a transfer request from Taldryan to Plagueis telling me that you are accepting the appointment. I will then transfer you to Plagueis and add your new position. I hope thats clear: if not, send me an email and Ill clarify it. This is being done to improve record-keeping in the database and to make sure that everyone is aware of when these transfers occur.
Secondly, I have decided to more closely monitor all direct transfers between Clans starting now. If you want to transfer from your current Clan to a new one, you absolutely must provide me with a truthful, reasonable reason to transfer. This seems rather obvious: but youd be surprised. Im willing to go with any reason you happen to have for transferring provided you justify it to me. If you are transferring because you hate your leadership, you need to tell me: you can email me privately if you dont want them to see what you have to say but I need to know why you are transferring. If you are transferring because you want to go be with a friend in another Clan, you need to tell me. I really dont have a problem obliging you if you tell me the truth. I will simply not accept vague reasons like certain people have done certain things to piss me off therefore I am leaving. No: no youre not. Not until you tell me whats up. As I said when I was first MAA, do NOT use the transfer form as a medium of argument: its juvenile. If you cant work out personal problems with someone, thats fine sometimes it happens but dont be a passive aggressive fool and think that transferring away is going to solve all your problems automatically. Or actually: you can for all I care but you need to tell me thats what youre doing so I am aware of it. So, in short: you are now requested and required to tell me the absolute truth when attempting to directly transfer between Clans. Use either the form provided or send me an email explaining why you want to transfer. And if youre not truthful, I will find out about it and I wont be very happy.
Lastly, when individuals are requesting to transfer directly from Clan to Clan, the current Clan leadership will be given two days to speak to the member asking to leave. Clan leaders may request additional time but I will not allow the transfer to sit in the queue for more than five days unless the person requesting the transfer asks for it. Clan leaders may also waive this right and the transfer will be processed immediately. This is nothing new: its been this way forever. Im just reminding everyone of the policy and how its enforced. Two days, Consuls remember it.
And End Policy Changes
Projects
Super AWOL Check: This is on hold until we finish the new Character Sheets should give some people an incentive to reactivate their account.
Updated Family Census: This is also on hold until after we finish with the Super AWOL Check. note This also includes Clan Name holders. I know a lot of people have recently been awarded the title and I have not yet bothered to update the list. However, I know who you are so relax :P
Das Uber Policy Revisions: I suppose I should slip this one in under the radar so Im putting it in under the policy changes and the other project updates. We are moving forward with a lower-level promotion system revision. Specifically, I have collected together every Clans promotion guidelines and Im now working to try to figure out their common denominators so that I can develop a universal guideline to supplant or supplement them. My goal isnt only to make the system more uniform across Clans but also to make the promotion system truly a tool for the education and preparation of the members. Im hoping that new members will learn more about how to be successful and enjoy themselves in the Brotherhood with each promotion up to Jedi Hunter or Dark Jedi Knight. Obviously, this task will be somewhat challenging: but were working on it. Thanks to Tarax for helping me get all the information I need together to start on this.
Competitions
Krav has graciously completed the grading of the Insanity event and crescents have been awarded. If you want to know who won, ask him (because quite frankly, I really didnt pay attention: it was his competition). Congratulations to everyone who placed and thank you for participating.
Other Stuff?
Congratulations to CSP on winning the Independence Games and to my old friend Alex on his promotion to Krath Pontifex. Also, Chaos still fails.
Closing Remarks
If you didnt read about the policy changes/reminders, go read about them. Theyre important.
Dark Side Adept Syn Kaek
Master At Arms
DA Syn Kaek (Sith)/MAA/Dark Council [ACC: JUD]
AK / GC-PoTP / SC-SoH / AC-ToSC / DC-SiP / SN-BL / Cr-8A-2S-3E-4T-3Q / CF-SF / DSS-BL / SI-AuL / SoL-TC / LS-BL / S:-9M-3R-1C-2D-3Do-4Dk-14P
{SA: MVN}
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If we read nothing else in your report, we still read half of a Goat-length diatribe. I was hoping it'd be, you know, a quick "Sit down, shut up, get your asses in gear." Be more succinct and Kaek-like, dammit. :P
On a side note, I've got a question for you. You've noted that members can email you privately with transfer reasons if they don't want leadership to be aware, or start an argument, or whatever. Are you going to be informing leadership that said member has provided you with a reason sufficient to you when you get their input about the transfer, are you going to be providing a summation of that member's reason, or how is that going to work?
First of all: I'm still here. :( For another week or so. But that still counts! ;P
Second of all: There really is no reason anyone from Taldryan would want to transfer to Plagueis. No reasonable reason, anyway.
Unless they're craaaaaaaaaazy. But that doesn't count as reasonable, does it? No, I guess it doesn't.
Furthermore, poop.
To answer your question, Beef, I'm going to handle it on a case by case basis. I'm hoping that situations like that don't come up too often (they rarely do) but I'll work with the requesting member to figure out how exactly we want to handle it. If someone really doesn't want me to tell their leaders what's going on, I'll most likely respect that but I still need to know about it so that we can work to avoid whatever situation happens to have arisen.
Sure. I'm just curious is all. Thanks dude.
Excellent points concerning the Transfers...not that you need my co-signage on that!
Heh heh heh, take that Plagueis. Hey...wait a second. That's my Clan. D'oh!
You'll rue the day, Kaek.
There, Simpsons and Celebrity Jeopardy references, bastardizations, what have you. My work is done here.
Quick question. I always select the competition when submitting crescents, but I submitted a crescent request earlier this week because the one running the competition was unable to award the 1st place crescent.
However, their competition was not on the drop down menu list so I had no competition to select, so I didn't and well then you posted this shortly after it was approved. lol
In cases like that, what would one do?
That shouldn't happen all too often - it happens for the ICTE and other events that we run continuously but for one-off competitions, it shouldn't occur. If the competition was approved via the database, it should exist in the competition list and therefore be an option you can select via the drop-down menu.
If for some reason it's not, email me and let me know so I can look into it. Include a copy of the original competition approval email. You can submit the crescents with a comment about how it's not appearing and you've forwarded me the information. That'll speed things up.