Changes to ranks & immigration

SilverWolv on January 4, 2019

For a long period of time, applications for citizenship have only been approved by an [Admin] or higher. In addition, the performing of background checks was outsourced to the DIU which was not very consistent in ensuring all applications got processed as DIU members were not notified of new citizenship applications. This often leads to delayed processing as not all members of staff are always around to process the applications.

In an effort to improve processing time and streamline the process, we will be reorganizing the roles & responsibilities for members of staff. To summarize, Helpers will now be tasked to perform background checks and Moderators will now be given the authority to approve and promote prospective citizens.

Goodbye [Tourist], hello [Visitor]

After 5 years since its introduction, the Tourist rank has been renamed to the Visitor rank. This is mainly because Visitor sounds less demeaning and general as compared to Tourist. That’s it.

All staff on deck! Tag @Staff from now on, not @Admins!

As of 4 January 2019, Moderators are now given the authority to accept or reject citizenship applications. This means that they will also now be in charge of promoting visitors to citizens, leading to improved processing times as we clear the administrative bottleneck of having everything go through the Admins only.

In addition, helpers will now have the responsibility of conducting background checks, allowing them to pre-process the applications just in time for when a moderator or admin comes around to give the application the final approval or rejection, enabling us to have more hands on deck to assist us with processing, ultimately leading to more a more consistent and improved outcome.

As staff of all ranks are now involved in the process, we ask that you tag @staff for citizenship applications now instead of just @admins.
This ensures that all of us gets notified and allows us to kick-start the processing of the application much sooner.

What are background checks?

Introduced in 2017 after a series of spam attacks, the Background Checks Act mandates that all new members seeking citizenship within the server will have to undergo a background check. Now, if you didn’t know about this then it is a sign you didn’t read all the signs at the start of the citizen test and just blindly agreed to it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Background checks look into finding any recent offences and/or trouble which you may have caused on other servers – such as bans or warnings and we will not grant citizenship to any person who has caused a lot of trouble elsewhere within the past 2 months. Only minecraft related records are being looked at.

You are also given a chance to declare these records. If declared, these records will not be considered in our assessment of your application.

Preparation for PR rank & public consultation

We are now preparing for the future implementation of the Permanent Resident (PR) rank as part of the Permanent Residency Act (2018) (page 5). This will add a new PR rank between the existing Visitor and Citizen ranks.

As the Act was passed in early 2018, times and opinions may have changed. As such, we are therefore open to public consultation regarding