I'll try and address this in sections.
Biased: The proxy should point towards issues that they believe to be important, send links to threads and such like and ask questions pertaining to them, you're never going to get an unbiased set from it but at least you're going to get something - without them, there are too many people trying to chase things up, which the developers will just close down to.
Circumventing the proxy - Then you should be ignored, the support people, I do not believe, shouldn't be dealing with technical problems to begin with anyway, they should be helping with getting peoples accounts back and what not and not developing, so that's a different thing entirely. If you're trying to contact the developers directly, you'll probably get much the same "nothingness" that you get these days, so it would be fruitless.
Developers "likes & dislikes" - The proxy will be able to target things specifically, making things more manageable. There won't just be a torrent of rubbish.
I'm now confused on your usage of "head of support" - the system that was set out already (people having already applied for positions) had the a community proxy and the support as totally different things, which is what I have been running on throughout this conversation.
Trying to remove some of the issues will always allow for a clearer view of what happens so that we can improve, I see it personally as a television, there is just a load of white noise currently, static, nothing discernible, as we strip away the rubbish there is a picture behind it, we need someone to sift through the signals to unearth that picture. Then things can be sorted, categorised and eventually improved upon. One clear voice will help us do that.
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This is wrong. You should never treat the issues and should always try to find the cause of the problems and fix that. If you treat issues then you will never know if you have actually fixed the problem and it is more than likely to come back later and often worse. You also end up with layer upon layer of fixes, complicating the process and making it inefficient.
chadz' system was almost the same as what I described except that he had a community proxy between the crpg workers (admins, devs, mods, etc) and the community. To me this just encourages workers not to interact with the community, isolating them further and creating even more of a "boys club" image which the community proxy has no power to change. Yes the devs, etc will almost certainly ignore anybody trying to contact them directly, but even choosing to ignore something takes time unless you automatically ignore everything and in this case you could be ignoring important stuff.
We've effectively had an empowered but unofficial community proxy for ages with Meow and look what happens when he goes afk. Where Meow had authority things seem to have worked well. People would go to Meow with an issues and Meow would get somebody to deal with it. Where Meow had powers things worked but they did not work well because Meow was the only one with these powers so without him things didn't happen. Where Meow had no power and no authority, things were a mess but people would still ask him about it. Now we want someone to do what Meow did but with no authority or power at all?
My change is to remove the community proxy, which straight away keeps the community and workers closer together, and instead use a Head of Support role between chadz and the Day to Day support workers. However the Head of Support doesn't actually do the day to day stuff (although they will have access to the powers) they just oversee it, make strategic decisions and provide a link between admins and the devs. It achieves the same aim as the proxy which is to create a buffer between the devs/chadz and day to day community issues but it doesn't remove all the direct links.
