Hello,
In my opinion this is a risky topic of discussion that may lead to drama. However, it’s good that the whole community can give their own opinions on what they think or expect from a ticket volunteer. And since it’s been opened for public discussion, I’ll give my opinion as someone who was part of the volunteers until not so long ago;
I share Sydno’s opinion about how it feels once you’re inside. When you become one, you’re a happy new volunteer who’s willing to do anything to make the community happy, and you think you can do things to make things better and improve the xat experience, but after some time you realize you can’t make great changes and end up disappointed. When I became a volunteer I was told by another volunteer to “only enjoy doing tickets and don’t try to change things”, I of course ignored this advice because I thought otherwise until I realized they were correct. Anyway I still tried to help as much as I could and keep myself motivated when doing tickets - which is not always easy because as Sydno has said volunteers are also ignored and usually don’t receive any kind of consideration for what they do. Once I was there I heard stories about former volunteers who left because of disappointment, and some of them even ended up hating this website.
It’s also true that the communication between volunteers and developers isn’t great (almost non-existent), at least this was like that when I was still inside and from what I see it’s still like that. And this, of course, should be addressed because both groups are an important component of this website.
Yes, you help users with tickets and that makes you happy. You can also push for small ideas to happen, or tickets to be answered, or events, but that’s it. The said above are real facts that would need to be addressed someday.
Sydno and I had our ups and downs while I was a volunteer, but I must say he’s one of the most hardworking volunteers this website has had and is one of the people I owe my addition to the volunteers team because he believed in me, so for me it’s sad to see he’s feeling like that, but as I said it’s not the first time this is happening to a volunteer.
Also, as Crow said, everyone’s paths are different on their way to the volunteers team, so if you’ve never been inside, you should try to avoid judging what a volunteer did or didn’t do because only the ones who are and were inside know the truth. People sometimes think volunteers are only there holding their titles and their purple names on the forum but that’s not true, many volunteers have pushed for changes that are still live until this day - like the verified pawn idea that was pushed by me when talking to admins about a contributor’s suggestion (I guess I can say this since it’s been a long time since then).
I’m not going to say how a volunteer should look like or what do I expect from them because I don’t want to repeat other people’s comments. And while I know the “goal” is that people express their feelings according to the questions given in the main post, I think everyone’s opinions and feelings should be respected even if they differ from others.
Thank you.