Daily Tildes discussion - general plans for the week
First, thanks for the great discussion yesterday about "fluff" content. There's a lot to consider, and a lot of people made great points (and are still making them), so thanks for all your thoughts in there. On a side note, that was the first topic on Tildes to get over 100 comments (and there's now already a second one). That's a pretty neat milestone to be hitting already.
For today, I want to talk a bit about my general plans for this week and see if anyone has any thoughts. Maybe this would be a good thing for me to try to do every Monday?
I'm planning to focus on a few things this week, in no particular order:
- The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect this Friday. A lot of sites and people are panicking too much about it, and I think Tildes should generally be fine, but it's still best for me to try to make sure I'm doing things properly before it comes into effect. I've definitely missed at least one thing, and want to spend some time seeing if there are any other updates I should be making in advance.
- Since you've all certainly read the Tildes Privacy Policy, I'm sure you all know that it says Tildes will delete various types of data after 30 days. Even though the site only started opening up more over the last week or so, I did originally set the server up on April 26 and that's when the earliest data is from. So this week I'll need to do some work to make sure that all of the relevant data is actually going to be getting cleaned up when it reaches 30 days old. A decent amount of this is already done, but I need to verify and finish building some other cleanup code.
- The next big priority is to try to get the site's code open-sourced. I've had a ton of offers from people to help with development, so I'd really like to start making it possible for people to contribute very soon. This shouldn't be too much work overall, a lot of it is just writing up information that will make it easier for people to get involved.
- Outside of that, I'll probably also just be doing some general fixing and tweaking of different issues that people have pointed out. Thanks for all the feedback, bug reports, and suggestions so far. If I have time, I'll try to work on some larger features that are already becoming more important with the activity increasing—things like basic search.
Finally, in the interest of trying to keep momentum up, I've also given everyone 3 invite codes, so you can invite some other people to join the site if you'd like. You can get them from the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.
Thanks again for being here, it's really exciting to see so many people using the site already.
Woohoo! Can't wait for the contribution guidelines and code to go up, I'm excited to contribute.
Sidenote, right now the only way to see what's up with total user count is to look at the groups page and see how many people are subscribed to ~tildes. While we're in small growth phase it might be cool to have a counter somewhere of total users and maybe even total submissions and comments.
Do you have any recommendation on how to find promising members to give an invite to? Like myself and many others were just given a code because we asked. Is this enough?
More importantly, thank you for this site. I love it so far, and I'm excited for its future.
That wasn't the only reason you were given an invite if it was by me (which yours was). Everyone who asked me got a quick once over. I went through the first 5-6 pages of everyone's reddit history just to make sure they weren't a bad faith user trying to get on the site early to cause trouble.
Red flags:
Green flags:
No one red or green flag was enough.. I just tried to make a judgement call on balance. There were only about 4 invite requests I denied/ignored because they were obviously bad faith users (E.g. blank history alt account called pm_me_your_flat_tits asking for an invite) out of some 150 I sent out.
While your advice is solid I wouldn't call being a mod somewhere a green flag. In my experience the mod demographic is just as diverse as your average user and has a fair share of individuals that would probably not be a good choice to invite here.
I wasn't using being a mod as a character judgement, merely a way to gauge their vested interest and passion for community on the site. That is a green flag, not a huge one, just a green flag... and as I said, "No one red or green flag was enough.. I just tried to make a judgement call on balance".
Similar to how a programmer/webdev using inline code and complicated markdown is not a way to judge that person's character but at least shows they took the time to learn how to use the site's mechanics to a higher degree than most do.
p.s. And believe me, I'm well aware that not all mods are good/well behaved people... I know plenty personally who will not be receiving an invite.
Fair enough, I did figure it could use some clarification :) As I said, I do generally agree with the checklist.
Yeah, clarifying that not everything on my checklist was a character reference is probably something I should have done. So thanks for pointing it out.
Thank you for this detailed response! Is this posted anywhere? If not, I think it could fit somewhere in the docs/required reading. I'll go get started with my invites now, thanks again.
Heh naw... that was just my own internal process. It's nothing official. @deimos just told me to use my best judgment/discretion and that's what I came up with after going through dozens of account histories and noticing patterns.
Oh, you don't have to go out of your way to specifically find people to invite. I think the guidelines other people gave you are pretty good if you want to do that, but don't feel obligated to go searching for people. It was mostly just so that people were able to invite others if they already had some people in mind.
I think I speak for a lot of us when I say I'm more than happy to seek three good people to help this site grow and succeed. An hour of my time is just a little to give back anyways. :)
I was just wondering this a bit ago myself. I don't really know anyone specifically that I would send an invite to and I'm not sure if there are any guidelines that would be ideal early on and then perhaps relaxed a bit later.
@cfabbro gave me a detailed response. I don't think you would've gotten a notice in your inbox, so here's this. :)
I think I'm going to just look through anyone asking for an invite and anyone expressing distaste with the current state of the site. As for the latter, I'll probably just send a pm asking if interested before just sending a code. Not sure if any of this will help, but here anyways.
I noticed the response after checking manually, actually, but I appreciate you pinging me! :)
505 users x 3 invites = ~ 1500 users. Let's make it happen, people! :)
Thanks for the invites. I've been on ~ nonstop the past week and I'm excited to share it with some friends.
Thanks for the invite codes, first of all.
Second, glad to see the data wipe and I hope that it goes smoothly and not many issues arise. This is one of my favorite things that were in the policies.
Hope to see basic search or other stuff like that soon, but thank you (and everyone else) for the transparency and outlines of plans and for the work you're doing. Seeing a roadmap of plans or an outline has personally always made me feel more comfortable about future changes.
We have some Trello devs on the site already and I am trying to convince @deimos to use their roadmap since it's gorgeous/highly functional/marketable and gitlab's "boards" are pretty... bleh... but it's an uphill battle since he is a fan of simplicity and we already have gitlab set up. ;)
Oh wow, that is a cool roadmap! My deal with roadmaps is just mostly a consistent update schedule/insight into what's going on. Like, I would be totally fine with just regular text posts like this as long as it's got clearly defined goals and ideas that people can understand. This post and the daily discussions so far have shown to me that that's already something under control and I look forward to it every day.
But if you could get a pretty roadmap like one of those then that would also be neat~
That's neat, how'd ya'll get trello peeps in here? I think using trello for a roadmap would work well here. I've been using it for a few side projects myself.
@rkcr knows @deimos, and i know @rkcr :D
I kinda prefer gitlabs issue tracker 😅
Oh I definitely prefer the gitlab issue tracker for sure... for tracking issues. But for providing general users with an overall picture of where the site is going, what features are in the pipeline, who is working on what, what the feature priorities are, and to help market the site to new users... I simply think Trello is by far the better option.
I think you should be the one answering this, I personally don't think having it on a schedule matters much, but keeping folks updated on what's happening "in the backend" is usually a great idea. Timing it might add an extra hurdle to your week, and/or it might end up being the now classic "bugfixes and speed improvements" kind of changelog posts that aren't really worth much.
I'm eagerly awaiting this :)