You can read the official announcement in full from AltspaceVR here regarding this update.

The announcement echoed the previous e-mail sent out to Community Helpers regarding the pausing of the Community Helper program.

“Finally, we will be pausing our Community Helper program for the time being as we figure out what the future of moderation, support, and volunteers looks like on AltspaceVR. CH badges, related Discord channels, and AltspaceVR 101 events will no longer be accessible after May 25, 2022.”

What is notable from this specific extract is an explanation that the pausing of the Community Helper Program is being actioned in the hope that a better process is in place.

[Speculation] This might mean a different tag, different logo or maybe it could mean that event staff will have a specific tag to toggle to show your host/mod status. This partly was experimented during the Town Hall Meeting event earlier this year. It was noted at the time that both staff and non-AltspaceVR staff did receive the abnormal ‘official’ status too above their name during this event, however, this was done through an MRE I believe.

Other announcements

Some further notable announcements were announced to be rolled out on the 31st May 2022.

  • New reporting features on the People tab provide additional ways to flag users/events/worlds, and include a dialogue box to add context to a report.
  • Age-Gating: new features allow adult event Creators to mark their events as mature with an orange tag, add warnings before entering, and block underage users from joining.
  • Various other fixes, including one for adding friends via Nametags. 

[Extract from official news post]

Mandatory MSA account login

You are required from the 31st May 2022 to login using your Microsoft account into AltspaceVR. This has been echoed for the last year in preparation. This change will make age enforcement possible and will certainly make it difficult for young children to accidentally or intentionally bypass moderation.

Reaction within the community

There has always been a sense of reluctance to link Microsoft accounts due to some issues that occurred to a portion of users when it was first rolled out. I was one of them, I also had to unlink my MS account at the time but since this year I re-migrated my account back over and I haven’t had any issues of concern. However, there was a mixed reaction on Discord. But it is hard to analyse which specific change users are upset with (CH-helper badge removal or the mandatory MSA login).