Loomio
Sat 4 Oct 2014 4:20AM

One-click "Community Spotlight" button for Admin

D Daniel Public Seen by 126

I find that I add the Community Spotlight Member role to every positively contributing member on my pod now. Before this, newcomers would post to Public but no one else could see this and most dropped off. Now, if someone posts to #NewHere or is excited about being here, I add them to the Community Spotlight role which then shares to everyone else's stream (if allowed) and there's been ten-fold the amount of conversation with newcomers. What I propose is to make a button on a user's profile for admins to add them to the Roles database as a "spotlight" user. Right now, I have to either SSH in to my Ruby server and edit the database through the Ruby console or manually edit the database through phpMyAdmin...either way manual. I find that I add so many people to this group that it would be a lot more convenient. Does anyone else use the Community Spotlight this way and think this would be beneficial? I don't think it would be terribly tough to code.

DU

Rich Sat 4 Oct 2014 7:42AM

Brilliant idea :)

Iirc, it only fires one, maybe two lines of sql off to the DB.

KAK

Karthikeyan A K Sat 4 Oct 2014 8:59AM

+1, excellent idea

G

goob Sat 4 Oct 2014 12:06PM

Hmm, a few points here.

  1. It's definitely a good idea to make it more simple for admins to add an account to the Community spotlight role, and I support this idea.
  2. I'm not sure it's such a good idea to add new users to the role, for two reasons: first, you don't know yet what sort of things they are going to post (they don't yet have form for 'contributing positively); second, it might well scare a lot of new users to find that their first posts are being promoted, without their knowledge.
  3. In any case, a related point, I think that when an admin adds an account to the Community spotlight role, it would be good to send an alert to that account asking that person if they are happy to be included in the community spotlight, thus giving them the choice whether they appear there. Some people are more private and might prefer not to be added to such a platform. If this were to happen, then of course the second of my concerns about adding newcomers to the spotlight would disappear.
D

Daniel Sat 4 Oct 2014 3:28PM

That's a very good point, Goob. I think I'm still trying to understand the point of a user posting publicly but not part of the Community Spotlight. I've had a lot of users come to me and say they posted something Publicly but no one could see it or no one was commenting on them. Then I realized no one could see it because they need the community spotlight role. So I guess my question here is...if you post publicly, you want the public (I assume the rest of the people on the pod) to see what you're saying...so why not just let that happen? Why do I have to manually add them to this role just so they can post publicly to the rest of my pod members like they expected to in the first place. I think this is where I'm confused and took this approach.

SVB

Steffen van Bergerem Sun 5 Oct 2014 1:12PM

@dannyk I don't want to see all public posts in my stream. I want to decide on my own which posts I can see there but we could think about adding a new stream which shows all public posts.

D

Daniel Sun 5 Oct 2014 2:42PM

I thought it was used more as a starting point and then people generally diasble the community spotlight from their stream once they've added who they want to interact with. The alternate stream view of all public posts is a better idea though. Thank you.

TR

[email protected] Thu 9 Oct 2014 6:25PM

My $0.02 is this:

I appreciate the thoughts of those of you who dislike the idea. But as a recent Diaspora* pod administrator/convert to the service I suggest this:

let pod administrators to do how they like we could have it as a feature and disable/enable it per your thoughts on the matter.

I know when you find something new and shiny like 'install Diaspora* on your own pod' like I did, the first few days after you do that and before you figure out things it was pretty tumble-weedy on my pod. It took a while to figure out how things work etc. Yes, it's a beta and all still so maybe as it becomes more feature complete that could change but I was wondering if I hadn't broke something for a while.