Are all staff members donators to then? why aren't they expressing their opinons on the donation funds?
We have tried to make that argument before, however most of us just don't care anymore. If the donators/VIPs that physically donated Bitcoins rather than time want to complain about their donations, they can. Moderators weren't paid until April of 2013, and in the early days, many of those "paychecks" were like $2-50 per month. It has scaled with ad revenue, but I actually did a fairly in depth calculation proving that most moderators are indeed at the very least donators when this issue first came up mid last year. (Issue being why Staff are allowed in the donator section, where I tried to prove that Staff were also donators, but just of time rather than BTC)
There is context to it, however I don't quote other people in private sections without permission, so you will just have to infer a bit.
Well I'm going to make a quick guestimate and then address what I highlighted. I will say, that I am a fairly new moderator compared to the others, so there are some that could say far more than me, and others that are newer than me as well, but I'd just like to use myself as an example to better exemplify what I mean, because I don't know the statistics of the other Mods I can only speak about myself. The first Mod payment was in April, and I being a fairly new moderator joined the team in November of 2012. Minus about 5 days in November I joined the team, I've been a moderator for roughly 5 months before recieving payment. In that time, I put roughly 8 days of work in. I got that number based on my days logged in between then and now which came out to roughly 16 days I've spent logged on between November and now, I then divided that by 2 just for the sake of argument, because I'm sure I have not been on duty at all times when logged on. So 8 days x 24 hours means 196 hours of actual time spent moderating. I think federal minimum wage (in the U.S anyway) is around $7 per hour. So had this been a paying job, that would be at the very least $1372 (196 x $7). Between November until April, BTC prices ranged from $11 to $80 aproximately based on Bitcoincharts. Taking the integral of that chart, I found that the average BTC price between that time period is $25.40. When I take the hours donated and gave a minimum wage paycheck to it (because you are considering this a paying job) that is $1372/$25.4 BTC, and that comes out to a total of 54.0157 BTC worth of time donated. Of course like I said, this is a very very rough figure, but I wanted to put it into perspective.
As I have mentioned before and before again, I am a new moderator technically, I'm still asking the older moderators, global moderators, and theymos questions on what sort of protcol I should follow in unfamiliar cases very frequently. Now imagine those that put in far more hours than me, because they have been moderators for years, and then consider that had we backed up the timescale a few months, the average price of Bitcoins would have dropped dramatically. I'm honestly not trying to say that I haven't appreciated the time I have spent helping out, but had I not enjoyed being a moderator, and helping the community to the best of my ability, I could have worked those hours at a McDonalds and made enough $ to buy the BTC to donate to the forums for a VIP tag, and still have some left.
I'm not trying to say I feel entitled to anything, I'm just trying to quantify using a fairly rough estimate showing that I personally have donated a fairly reasonable amount of time that could be considered the BTC to become a VIP. I'm not trying to argue with you, as I don't really feel inclined to, I don't have a problem with you either Goat, I'm just trying to put past the misconception that we are paid an hourly wage for the jobs we do (Some moderators more than others get called on that very often, and it does fray at the nerves, because people don't tend to understand that it wasn't a requested thing, and no one signed up for the pay). I'm not trying to say we really do or don't deserve to have access to the donator section, as honestly this is probably the second time in all of those months that I've come here, so I'm not really that opinionated on the matter, the thread name just caught my attention while scrolling.
As for what I bolded, I can't speak much as to your deleted posts. That would have to be either a Global Moderator or an Admin, but I'm sure more or less the same rules that apply to the rest of the forums apply to the donator section as well, it just serves to get the people who are more heavily staked in Bitcoins together, so they can talk amongst themselves rather than being interupted by the people who don't need to be in the conversation. If you are talking about Psy insulting you in this thread, I don't know, I'm not Psy. If I had to take a guess, it would have to be about you and many others not fully understanding the Mod payment thing, as I said earlier, people throw that in our faces a lot and it really gets old, especially when people don't really know much about it.
My point is, we get called on the payment thing quite a bit. Its a tip, not a paycheck. We aren't employees, its a "thank you for helping out this month, get yourself a nice dinner" sort of thing.
