MCOSI Meeting Briefing – February 29th 2020
February 29th saw the Minds Community Open Source Initiative (MCOSI) hold its recent meeting, which was attended by Medworthy, Realmindschan, Mindsgaming, Censorshipsucks (members of the MCOSI core team), Nick (Minds administrator), Nemofin (Minds developer) and Xander (Minds quality assurance director), as well as being viewed by Chesschats and several other members of the Minds community.
During this meeting several topics were discussed, these include issues surrounding the recently introduced social media share-bar, the analytics console, the Help and Support group, as well as a discussion regarding the recent banning of several community members.
The meeting opened with Xander mentioning the recent publication of the Sprint report. These reports are intended to be released every two weeks, in which Brianhatchet (Minds developer) provides a review of improvements and changes to the Minds platform. Xander also provided examples of the new platform design. These design ideas are intended be implemented into both the mobile application (mobile app) and browser interface within the near future.
We then moved onto a discussion regarding the social media share-bar. The inclusion of this share-bar has been one of Minds more controversial decisions, which various community members have disagreed with. The purpose of the social media share-bar is to help to further market Minds based content to other social media platforms and to attract new community members. Due to community feedback, the staff at Minds have introduced a new option within the settings page, which allows for the hiding of the share-bar from individuals views (note that this option hides the share-bar from your own view but the share-bar is still available to other community members and non-logged-in / non-registered individuals).
Currently the share-bar has buttons for posts and blog articles to be linked to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit and also to e-mails. Due to the this, we have agreed that there should be additional buttons for other social media platforms within the share-bar and therefore, the MCOSI has published a blog article within the MCOSI group and are asking community members to suggest nominations for other social media platforms within the comment section of the Social Media Share-Bar Nominations blog article.
After a passionate and constructive discussion regarding the social media share-bar, we had a discussion regarding the analytics console. Currently within the engagement section there is a chart which displays upvotes (which is currently displayed as “Votes up”). We discussed the idea of having unifying terminology being provided throughout the platform, we also had a discussion regarding replacing the “votes up” / upvotes graph with a graph which also accounts for downvotes as well (considering that downvotes are a form of engagement, there was an opinion that the “votes up” chart should be modified to display a “votes” based charts, which makes no distinction between upvotes and downvotes).
There was also a short discussion regarding possible improvements to the official Help and Support group. There are a number of issues which makes the current Help and Support group less effective then this group could possibly be. The MCOSI has published a blog article, which highlights the issues and provide possible solutions.
Within this discussion, Xander mentioned that there is a possibility that there could be a new staff moderated group being provided within the near future, which is intended to promote existing channels and groups to new community members (similar to the Help and Support group, new and existing community members may, once the group has been implemented, be automatically subscribed to this new group).
Nemofin also mentioned that there will be an option for group administrators to have the to the ability to disable the sidebar chat function from their own groups which is expected to be implemented within an upcoming update.
We also had a discussion regarding a recent issue of banning users and having Not Suitable For Work (NSFW) tags being added to channels without applying the rules that are provided within the existing content policy. Unfortunately there have been mistakes made when applying the bans and channel based NSFW. However, the staff are considering both administration and technical solutions to try to eliminate these issues. As well as reversing previous decisions where it has been deemed appropriate to do so. Hopefully these new solutions will help to eliminate any future errors. If you are believe that any community members may have been affected by these issues then the MCOSI recommends that you or the affected individual sends an e-mail to [email protected] and include information regarding the specific case.
Minds Community Open Source Initiative continues to work with both the wider community and the Minds staff members. Both the MCOSI and Minds Inc. welcomes constructive comments, suggestion and opinions from the wider community, as well as encouraging members to actively participate within the development, support and usage of the open source Minds social media platform.
References & Other Resources:
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* Minds Sprint: 02/12 (Baritone Baboon) – End of Sprint Report
* Social Media Share-Bar Nominations
* Replace Existing "Votes Up" Engagement Chart With "Votes" Based Chart
(Gitlab Issue: front#2693)
* The Problem With Minds Help and Support Group
* MCOSI Meeting Agenda – February 2020
* Introducing Minds Community Open Source Initiative