Hidden Staff

Why have physically hidden staff to begin with? Why not an ‘inactive/vacation’ badge or flair?

@ArmadilloEater  
I was thinking more along the lines of showing who’s inactive, because most staff are active at any given time, for a UI fix to this. It’d be weird to like, put a lot of little “active” words all over the page, vs. the reverse. I suppose I can do this today since things are slowed down.
 
@aperture_tech  
I can assure you that I’ve not seen any such behavior since everything blew up with TSP; before then is another story, and I agree it to have been not good.
 
@Background Pony #6924  
As far as I know, the reasoning is that people will just PM harass staff regardless of what’s shown, but I think if inactive ones didn’t have their profile linked it would be sufficient to make people stop and think as they figure out how to send a PM anyways.

@Princess Luna  
I have, just recently as well! Despite TSP not being listed on the staff page, he made an executive threat to what we were told was the head of the site, despite not being listed on the staff page.

@Princess Luna  

You can just put them into a different category. Actual code change (unless Philomena is so stupid as to require code changes to adjust content), I’d prefer to be fully automated staff page with something like greying out the truly inactive staff.  
Actually I’d prefer something a bit different than greying out, but still.

@Barhandar  
I think another category (which I think is doable without a code change, but Booru-on-Rails would’ve needed a code change; not everything is perfect in practice on data separation) could be seen as a bit of a lie, since internally, inactive staff still have particular roles.

@Background Pony #EE67  
It’s just compulsive at this point. They can’t help themselves.

@Princess Luna  
“Particular role - Packing up for retirement”

@aperture_tech  
That’s a pretty good point actually, if he’s involved in the site to such a degree he should definitely be listed.

^ He’s been doing this on /mlp/, too.

@Background Pony #8085
 
context since it was deleted: some autist is spamming gore everywhere

@Background Pony #8085  
With exact same pictures, for the last week. He can’t even get anything new.

You know, for not having hidden staff, there are certainly a lot of hidden staff. https://derpibooru.org/profiles/Princess_2BTrixie2Bvi%2BEquestria/tag_changes
 
What’s the excuse this time?

@Princess Luna  
No, transparency from staff is one of the primary topics right now, and it looks more and more like the staff are regularly deceptive and misleading. Why would a firm policy statement even matter if it could just be more lies? Trust in staff is important, and it’s been dwindling away all month.

@Amm  
Staff is so transparent they become hidden lol

@Angius  
Regrettably, we’re not Dark Souls so those transparent staff don’t run the risk of dissolution.

I have a niggling feeling that this thread should also bring up the mod(and their spouse) issue in the context of mods voting on site rules.  
It’s difficult to assume impartiality.

@Amm  
The excuse is “Stop asking questions and believe what we tell you”.
 
Anyone else find it deeply ironic AND disturbing that in addition to labeling and marking users for harassment, having an iron-fisted dictator ignoring his staff and willing to destroy everything for not getting his way, and being caught rigging votes, they ALSO continue to lie about having secret police?
 
If the staff want to go anti-nazi full throttle they need to remove themselves first.

To give an update to this, site staff can no longer be hidden from the staff list, they are instead marked as “(Unavailable)”. [Changelog]
 
Joey is no longer Admin but now a Moderator marked unavailable. Carcer (who was apparently inactive the whole time) has been destaffed completely. Princess Trixie vi Equestria is marked as unavailable, along with a Site Assistant called “🙂”.
 
There’s currently a bug that shows wren as unavailable for having the secondary role “Site Developer”, but a fix for that should be deployed soon.

@Rene_Z  
This is actually one of the best things since the drama started, a very good move.

@Rene_Z  
Honstly though I still don’t have faith this’ll be any more accurate.

@Background Pony #2AC0  
Well, this is open source. As someone who has read the source code, I can tell you that any user with any elevated permissions will be shown on the Site Staff list, and there is no way to hide it anymore.
 
 
EDIT: To elaborate on this for any other developers who wanna follow along:
 
This is the permission controller. Permissions depend on the role field of a user. (Assistants and Moderators can get some additional specific permissions via the role_map, but they always have the role set to “admin”, “moderator” or “assistant”).
 
This is the code that lists the users for the Site Staff page. Every user with the role “admin”, “moderator” or “assistant” is listed. _{Currently, any assistant or moderator with a secondary role that’s not “Public Relations”, “Site Developer” or “System Administrator” will not be assigned to any category and thus not shown, but I’m not aware of any such user. The secondary role is always shown as a yellow tag on every post and the profile of those users, so you would notice if that were the case.}
 
This is the code that renders the Site Staff page. Every user is listed for every category, with no way to hide them. When unavailable? returns true, they are instead rendered as greyed out without a profile link.

@Rene_Z  
Ah, I should probably deploy again. I forgot to look more at this stuff while dealing with the feedback thread.
 
Anyway, sorry this took so long, I’ve been busy with things on site and the developer I had write the code in my stead had some issues that took a while to figure out.

@Rene_Z  
What happened to Carcer?  
Weren’t they the literal never able to be removed Admin?

@Background Pony #D6F0  
Carcer hasn’t been active for years.