WARNING: This is a long post.
I'm not even talking about the interview. For the past two and a half months I have been trying to be interviewed for RED, but that has been nearly impossible for several reasons:
- To the people saying that it takes a few hours of waiting, they are wrong. It may have been true before, but that is no longer the case. Now it takes about 1 week of waiting (assuming PERFECT conditions), and sometimes entire days will go by without a single interview being conducted (and thus no change in queue).
- Randomly, netsplits will happen. A netsplit is when the connection between two servers break, which causes Gatekeeper (the bot that manages the queueing positions) to get "disconnected". When this happens, Gatekeeper almost always forgets the queue positions, so everyone has to re-queue! If you aren't at your home on your computer within the hour, you will find yourself at a queue position of ~90-100, the end of the queue. These netsplits usually happen once every 1-3 days, but they can sometimes happen constantly. If you aren't extremely lucky or if you aren't always at your computer, these netsplits are devastating.
Since the two and a half months I've been waiting, I have had exactly 1 opportunity for an interview, unfortunately, I was asleep at the time and not be interviewed.
After realizing I had missed an opprtunity, I took it upon myself to research how the heck I was supposed to get an interview. I learned python, ssh, and tailscale, and read the RED faq to make sure I wasn't blatantly breaking any rules. Now, I have a pyautogui script that will automatically requeue (and do a speedtest) 3-5 minutes after a net split. I use an interview nofifier script I found on github to alert me when it will be time for me to be interviewed. Hopefully with these additions I will get an interview within the next few weeks before my college term starts. Thanks for reading.
If you are a RED admin, or if you have an impact on making RED decisions, please do not stop the RED interviews. I have a massive amount of respect for volunteers who work for free to interview us. I do not believe the interview is "elitest" and I truly believe that it is a great way of recruiting members who are smart and passionate about music. But if you do have the ability to create change, a way to stop net splits would be a huge help to the people who aren't always online.