The Problem With Minds Help & Support Group

Currently the official Minds Help & Support group has a number of issues which needs to be fully examined. Whilst it is recognised that the general concept is a good idea, which allows community members to raise issues, report bugs and ask further questions regarding the services that Minds Inc. provides, however over the last couple years we have seen some major problems regarding this group.

These problems includes the following:

• Inadequate feedback has been provided by staff members and on several occasions, a lack of any follow-up replies by the staff (even if community members have asked to provide further information and the community members have in fact provided said information).

• Occasionally staff members have provided replies such as “we are looking into this issue” (paraphrase) and have not provided any further information, including not referencing associated Gitlab tickets.

• Staff members have selectively published community members enquires.

• On occasions, staff members have provided misleading replies.

• The current general layout of the Help & Support group provides enquires to be displayed as single posts. This allows for enquiries to be repeatedly posted by community members. This also makes it harder for the community to find, review and post feedback on previous enquires, which also makes the entire help and support process more time consuming for staff members.

• The Help & Support Conversation chat facility has been used for inappropriate and off-topic purposes.

It should be noted that things are improving within the Help & Support group, as well as a number community members volunteering their own time and experience to reply, provide further information, help to resolve issues and log issues to the Minds Gitlab facilities.

It is also worth further noting that there are several groups which are managed by volunteering community members, which have been provided to help community members to make best use of the Minds platform (such as the Minds User Group), as well as community managed groups that provide an area in which community members can give suggestions and further feedback (ie. Minds Community Open Source Initiative group).

To try to reduce the above issues, the Minds Community Open Source Initiative (MCOSI) is recommending that the current Help & Support group is replaced with a forum styled facility, as well as eliminating the Conversation from the group. This forum concept should help to reduce the amount of repeated enquiries, provide a more focused facility so that community members can review and provide further feedback on any existing issues, as well as to aid in easing the moderation process.

The removal of the Conversation facility will also eliminate any inappropriate topics being included within the Help & Support group. As a measure to provide miscellaneous community interest topics (such as important notifications, the MCOSI is also recommending that the Newsfeed notice facility is used more often and the suggested forum includes a pinned (top-most) post facility which would be administered by staff members.

This forum suggestion is intended to make the official Help & Support group easier to navigate, as well as to further encourage active community participation within the support, bug resolution and development of the Minds open source social media platform.

References & Other Resources:
* Official Minds Help & Support Group
* Minds User Group (MUG)
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative Group (MCOSI)
* Help & Support Group Improvements (Gitlab Issue: front#2692)