The Support Mod squad emerged organically within the ENS Discord server. After the launch of $ENS, the ENS Discord Server went from 6k members to over 30k members. In the following days and weeks after the launch, community members started helping myself and validator.eth provide support to users in Discord.
The current state of the Support Mod squad (SMS) is that users and builders can access around the clock support from the SMS by creating a ticket that opens a private chat channel. Current squad members are validator.eth, taytems.eth, serenae.eth, cthulu.eth, and zadok7.eth.
Support Mods are given a specific role within Discord and are able to respond to private support tickets that are opened by users. Support Mods are empowered to moderate the server based on the server rules, which gives them the ability to ban and timeout users, as well as delete posts.
The presence of the SMS greatly enhances and improves the experience both users and developers have with ENS. On this basis the SMS will request funding from the Community WG for the continued value provided to the community (link to Resource Request post TBC).
Open Invitation
Any community member interested in joining the SMS is welcome to join the Discord (through chat.ens.domains) and start responding and engaging with the community. There are no perquisites that need to be fulfilled in order to join the SMS, instead the responsibility falls on an individual to essentially do the task over a period of days/weeks and demonstrate they have the ability + capacity + empathy to be a Support Mod. As individuals come to the attention of existing Support Mods, a vote can be cast by existing mods on whether to add that person to the SMS.
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It’s been a pretty wild ride offering support in there. When I first joined I was looking for ways I could help the project, and I wasn’t sure where to begin. Since there wasn’t a lot of people awake on my side of the world I figured that an easy way was to just start answering some questions I knew the answers to.
After I noticed that there was a perpetual hole in the support schedule I reached out to Alisha and asked if I could help, and then I and Serenae started doing back-to-back 12 hour shifts to cover every minute of the day where I’d cover 5AM->5PM UTC+0 and Serenae would cover 5PM->5AM and together we were able to reduce hour-long windows into minutes.
It was a lot of fun that we managed to do that, and every time we handed off it felt like a victory, but it was incredibly exhausting and completely unsustainable, so when Zadok7 came on I was overjoyed, as I could go from that to 5AM->1PM.
What was really difficult initially in becoming a support mod is that we don’t have an onboarding process or any internal documentation to refer to, so there’s a lot of active research involved in any new question you encounter and you need a lot of patience.
I hope that we can improve this by creating a proper onboarding process with internal documentation in the future, and as we become more support mods it’ll be easier to ask someone as well.
However, even though it’s been challenging, I’ve had a lot of fun doing it and that’s in large part due to the users in the Discord being really great. If anyone has any questions about being a support mod, feel free to DM me on Discord and I’ll try to answer 
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Thank you for your service. I know I wouldn’t have the patience to provide support on discord. I’m too much of a boomer.
2 Likes