Returning Staff
In response to questions of whether old Staff will be reinstated, the answer is "it depends". Specialist staff members (Disputes, Operations and Procedures, Performance Committees, Talent Officers) and crucial staff members (Super Moderators, Chat Moderators) will be reinstated immediately. For everyone else, it depends on who you are and what you did.
Everyone will be considered on their individual merit (how long you were on Staff, and how good a job you did). HelpLINK Mentors will not be reinstated at the moment because we don't have a HelpLINK system, though some of you might be able to transfer to Live Help Operator.
It will likely only be a small number of people who will be re-added straight away (perhaps a third), and the rest will be asked to re-apply. The reason for this is that the Staff application questions were written a very long time ago, and some of them weren't very good at determining Staff suitability. Therefore if you were accepted based on that application, it doesn't necessarily make you suitable, and we want to make sure that you are. So if we are unable to say you're suitable on the grounds of your previous Staff life, we'll ask you to demonstrate your suitability again by reapplying. The application questions are being rewritten for this purpose.
If you were an old staff member, message me with your old username and which positions you were, and you should soon know if you are being re-added. Believe it or not, I don't know everyone's first names, locations, and avatars to be able to recognise who's an old staff member.
How to retrieve old account data
It is possible, at least for some of you! Google keeps records of many of the pages on the site, so you may be able to retrieve some profile data, blogs, posts, etc if you're lucky.
In Google type "site:forums.teenhelp.org". This will limit your search for pages on forums.teenhelp.org. Then follow it with a search term, such as your username, the title of a thread or blog post, and see what you can find. For example "site:forums.teenhelp.org rob" might return my profile (it doesn't because Google doesn't like 3 character search terms, but if I had a longer username it might.). This isn't fool proof, and not everything is stored, but you may be able to find some of your old stuff if you're lucky. Hurry, though, Google doesn't store it forever!
Old statistics
I have a record of old statistics and these can be uploaded if we want them to be. It might be a bit odd to put up old member counts, though, when those members no longer exist.
Posts displaying the wrong way around
This is a minor setting mistake on my half. This has been corrected, but existing users will have to change it manually through their
User Options.