MCOSI Meeting Briefing – March 28th 2020
The latest Minds Community Open Source Initiative (MCOSI) meeting was held on March 28th. This meeting was attended by Medworthy, Realmindschan, Luculent, Csharpner, Censorshipsucks (members of the MCOSI core team), Nick (Minds administrator) and Nemofin (Minds developer), as well as being viewed by several other members of the Minds.com community.
The meeting was comprised of several topics and started with a short discussion regarding recent changes to Minds. These changes include the ability to directly paste images into posts and comments (as well as being available for comments within the Conversation facility. However, the paste image function is currently not available for use within blog article content), improvements to the latest version of the mobile application (mobile app) and Nick mentioning the removal of the Conversation facility from the Help & Support group. The removal of the Conversation facility from the Help & Support group was due to the issue of spam and misleading content being posted to Help & Support, as well as issues regrading the impersonation of other community members. Group administrators also have the ability to disable and re-enable the Conversation facility within their own groups.
Nick talked about changes to the user experience (UX) / user interface (UI) design. The UX / UI design changes are currently being developed and community members can view the progress of these changes by activating the Canary mode, as well as providing suggestions and highlighting bugs regarding the changes within the official Canary (Canaries) group (for further details about the UX / UI design changes, please refer to the official Minds “the new Minds interface is here” blog article and Gitlab epic: #133).
Nick also mentioned upcoming changes to the support system. Minds staff members believe that these changes will help to provide a more focused support facility. However, the MCOSI has some concerns regarding transparency and community based review processes (these issues are intended to be discussed within an upcoming MCOSI meeting).
We also had a discussion about previous issues regarding the banning of community members without staff members following the procedure as stated within the content policy and previous problems related to unbanned community members loosing subscribers. Nick mentioned that there has not been any recurrence of mistaken banning since Februaries MCOSI meeting.
We then moved on to a discussion regarding the reduction of automated “bot” accounts (bots are scripts that are used to create new accounts / channels and have been used to automate the creation of multiple accounts). The recent addition of CAPTCHA (a function which requires users to enter a predetermined code. CAPTCHA functionality provides the ability to recognise the differences between automated scripted and human based input) and e-mail verification facilities have aided to reduce the registration of automated “bot” accounts.
We also talked about the issue of mass voting (ie. single community members inappropriately voting on content with the purpose of harassing other community members or to solely increase their awarded points), as well as the issue of using the tag function to inappropriately mass tag community members members within posts, comments and blog articles.
We finished the meeting with a short discussion about implementing functionality which allows for the viewing of video content that is hosted within other alternative video hosting social media platforms (there are a number of social media platforms which Minds already supports but there is a general opinion that this needs to be expanded to include further social media platforms) and the idea to stream live video broadcasts, as well as suggesting an idea to host bi-monthly MCOSI based Gathering sessions, which community could raise any questions and provide further feedback for the attention of the MCOSI, as well as providing suggestions for future MCOSI meetings.
The MCOSI would also like to remind community members about the social media share-bar nominations. The purpose of the nominations is to give community members the opportunity to suggest the inclusion of other social media platforms within the share-bar facility.
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, suggestions and further feedback 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
* Unbanned User Lost Subscribers
(Gitlab Ticket: Front#2652)
* The New Minds Interface Is Here
* 2020 Rollout
(Gitlab Roadmap: Epic#133)
* Help And Support Form Gitlab Integration V2
(Gitlab Ticket: Engine#1402)
* Help And Support
(Gitlab Roadmap: Epic#127)
* Social Media Share-Bar Nominations
* MCOSI Meeting Agenda – March 2020
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative Meetings
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative Calendar
* Introducing Minds Community Open Source Initiative