@Anonymous wrote:
Then do away with this thing called Oracle and hire 6 or more actual moderators (not these definitionally warped ones here) to cover 24/7 to watch over the forum and remove personal information and move threads to proper categories and slice and dice threads as they see fit.
Or re-direct the so-called moderators efforts into more forum activity. And maybe even while the real moderators are waiting around to pounce on those errors they could be answering questions too. Both of which would render all of us unnecessary.
Oh look...sorry folks but we have to remove rewards and raise rates because our moderators are costing too much.
No thanks
I know that Public Mobile wishes to place the repsonsibility of forum organazation on the incoming new Oracles, based on the information provided in the annoucement. However, that's not the same information that I agreed to when I accepted the position about 2 years ago. I was once told that Public Mobile didn't want new Oracles to be thrown in there without any direction, but that's exactly what happened. I received no advice/guidance from Public Mobile at that time, and had to learn from mistakes, learned experiences, and by asking the other Oracles.
As for forum moderation, I do believe that's the responsibility of Public Mobile and the moderators. I've even said that to Public Mobile before, although I do realize that could increase costs if they had to dedicated more resources to it.
At one point, Public Mobile did assign someone to the forum. That person's job was to keep things orgnaized and to remove old threads that Public Mobile deemed relevant. That end up making it so that each category was filled with countless old threads at the top of each category. I'm not talking about 5 or 6 either, but rather hundreds. The end result that some ending up getting their quetsions not answered because no on saw the new threads. There was also the downside of it negatively impact members' lifetime Community statistics. Eventually, Public Mobile said that they were going to stop that process for the moment, but when it comes to keeping the forum organized and a moderator doing that, this also just quietly stopped.
When it comes to the $20 Community reward, that amount doesn't even begin to cover what Public Mobile expects of the Oracles. Even if an Oracle never posts a single message in the Community for months at a time, that $20 per month doesn't even begin to cover the 2 to 3 hours of focus group sessions/conference calls that Public Mobile expects of Oracles every few months. And no, the Oracles do not get compensated for this, other than the Community reward.
Pubilc Mobile gives things such as account credits or data bonuses to other members for paticipating in simiilar activities to the above. While Oracles can sometimes participate in the activities that Public Mobile gives out credits or bonuses for and receive them for those activities, they generally receive nothing for the Oracle-specific activities. There have been a few occassions of Public Mobile does send out free clothing with the the company logo on it (swag as mentioned in the Oracle application annoucement).
Public Mobile is getting a huge bargain from the Oracles at $20 a month.
