I have had time to simmer down and think about it and I am leaving my thoughts.
The unfortunate reality of the situation is that the development team is great (although we need a real solution to the review process), the staff team is not doing well, and the community is actually horrible.
I don't really want to put the devs in a bad spot by removing my work, because they're honestly a great team to work with, but the community, and through implication, the staff team, are not doing well, as far as the Discord goes. 3 people make it a constant negativity fest and know nothing will be done about it, which was kind funny when I made the post but seeing it unfold daily now is certainly something. There is 0 spine in a position to do anything on the staff team, all the people willing to voice opinions that weren't in-line with "follow the guidelines and don't moderate out of game unless Discord will wipe our server for not moderating it" all resigned or were removed.
All that said, I'm putting my in-progress work back, but I will continue to let the staff know that they their inaction is very obvious, and I'm probably not going to be doing much new content work until things have improved, besides for the purposes of minimizing headaches by trying to get my stuff feature flagged before Brant's stuff is ready, so it can be merged before the cache update.
Finally, something needs to be done about the staff manager situation. Just promote Jayden and make Ryan an advisor or something. I think that I would much rather see
@Patel be staff manager (it doesn't exactly need to be a hands-on position), but otherwise, there is no one else I think that would be a good fit right now. Jayden could basically have gone rogue at any point as an admin, how many more trust periods does he need?
@Mike A note for you below
Glad you're around man, and this wasn't the point of the initial post, but since you're open to taking a more distributed approach to review and releases, something needs to get done formally. I am writing it publically because I think that if I don't, things are less likely to happen.
I think the least technically difficult approach is to simply give a rank of "senior dev" to certain devs, which basically just comes with a crash course (in the form of a readme.md) on how to
- Work with the unstubbed repo (repos, credentials, etc.)
- Work with the production server (SSH, FTP, etc.)
- Apply database migrations
- Connect to databases
- Set up beta environments
- Use tooling related to cache updates
- Run release pipelines
- (Optional) Work with the forums webserver and development of its hosted webapp(s)
...along with any FAQs that come up during the initial transition period, frequently used troubleshooting steps for any of the systems, or technical details that you know about and I don't. I'm sure Rapsey can also help in creating this document, and it could probably use some documentation from his side of things as well.
Once someone is a senior dev, they should be generally trustworthy enough to not do things that would be considered immoral with the systems they have access to. I feel like people who end up with such a rank generally will know what these things are, assuming they are professionals. All code should need to be reviewed by 2 of these senior devs ideally, but 1 is more practical, and the author of the code shouldn't count.
As for granting the rank, that should either be done by the owners, or optionally by people who currently have it. The latter is more fault tolerant. And if it's the latter, there should be an unwritten rule that it's a 67% vote to grant it. Obviously there should be a mechanism for removing people, probably similar to adding them.
There are other options that involve automated pipelines, I believe Rapsey maybe even started on this a while ago, but I haven't heard about the project in a very long time. While it'd provide a lot of room for trial periods, it's an incomplete solution on its own because what do you do when the pipelines you built break. And why spend time developing something to prevent an issue that in practice never occurs because actually we have professional developers on the team, probably with access to more valuable systems. No one's doing a 3 year xz backdoor job on PkHonor.
