Forum Update: New mods and backup admins

Hi everyone,

Here’s the eleventh update about how our forum is doing and what’s going on in our community (read the previous one here).

New members and forum growth

First of all, we would like to welcome all new members. We’re at 3308 members right now! We are very pleased to see our community grow at its current rate (more stats).

Cybersecurity category

After an open discussion in #meta (see this topic), we decided to remove the #cybersecurity category from the front page of the forum. Topics that are directly related to the SAFE Network can still be discussed in categories such as #development, #features, etc. But if people are just posting links to general security news, it’s probably better to put them in #cybersecurity.

We think it makes sense to hide #cybersecurity from the front page because this forum is mainly about the SAFE Network. There are lots of privacy and security related news every day and we can’t possibly discuss all of them on the front page.

New moderators

We’d like to welcome Tim (@Tim87) and David (@upstate) to our team. They’re both long term and active members of our forum. They were already very helpful with flagging spam and other issues. Now they officially help us out.

New backup admins

As some of you know, David Hedqvist (@David) started this community forum in 2014. So he was the first admin around. An admin has full control over the forum and can technically appoint mods, make backups, change the look and feel of the forum (or even take it offline!) and more. No wonder every forum needs at least 1 backup admin in case the first admin can’t act.

In 2014, Francis (@frabrunelle) offered to help out and Paige (@ioptio) became a backup admin as well that same year (she worked some time for MaidSafe until she left the company in 2016). Well, things change. Francis (@frabrunelle) joined MaidSafe in 2016 and is the only active admin on our forum today.

So long story short: We contacted both David (@David) and Paige (@ioptio ) and they are fine with moving their admin roles to other community members. We would really like to thank David for starting this forum in the first place :+1:. We would also like to thank Paige for her help over the years.

So what’s the current situation?

Francis (@frabrunelle) is the main admin of this forum. He currently works for MaidSafe and started on this forum as a community member. Benjamin (@lightyear) also works for MaidSafe and from now on he’s a backup admin too. They both represent MaidSafe on this forum and are in contact with the MaidSafe Foundation. As we shared in another forum update, the MaidSafe Foundation owns this domain to keep it safe. MaidSafe (the company) pays the monthly bill for this forum to keep it up and running.

Rob (@neo) is a long-term community member and moderator and from now on he’s a backup admin as well.

We should never think too lightly about this job. As you might already know, the forum of quite a big crypto-project got hacked in the end of 2016 with 16.500 accounts exposed. We as a community had the vulnerability of not being the owner of our old domain. We managed to move to this one just to make sure to be in charge of our domain name. With the current steps, we now have 1 active admin and 2 active backup admins, while our domain is being secured by the MaidSafe Foundation.

List of admins:

List of mods:

We think we’re quite ready for the coming period with new Alpha networks and hopefully a lot of new members coming to this forum!

For questions, suggestions or complaints about moderation, please use @moderators. For general moderation discussions, feel free to create a topic in #meta. For issues related to specific topics/posts, please PM @moderators.

If you spot something that’s not in line with our Forum Guidelines, please use the Flag function. That way all online moderators will get a notification with the direct link to the topic/reply.

37 Likes

Thanks for the update @polpolrene, and to all mods and admins for keeping things tight-but-loose. Moderation’s a hard balance to get right, and often a thankless task, but I reckon you do a great job. I must say the quality of the debate and the passion on display on this forum was one of the things that originally made me think that Maidsafe is probably on to something, and having good mods is a big part of that.

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Thank you for the update @polpolrene. Congratulation on your new roles @Tim87, @upstate and @neo. I know you will all do a great job when we are flooded with newcomers. It’s gonna be a fun ride to the moon. :tent:

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Hey eveybody, just al little update here: @Tim87 is too busy at this time to help out as a mod, we asked @jpl and he was pleased (wait until he’s on the job! ;-)) to join our little mod team. So welcome John.

Would also like to share the number of daily new user with you since the beginning of this year.

Some more:

14 Likes

Great stuff @polpolrene and team. Thank you all for helping make this forum such a useful resource and welcoming community.

Good luck @JPL! You already make a great contribution and I’m glad to see you joining the mod team. I hope you enjoy it :slight_smile:

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Thanks guys - looking forward to it … I think.

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Can we get more of these? They’re great, interested to know how this community grows or shrinks

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Second that would be interesting to see how many people are dropping by

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Why was this post flagged? Doesn’t seem problematic to me…

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At the time it looked strange a very new member asking for forum stats in a topic not for that coupled with the following consideration.

Also its against the forum guidelines of resurrecting (bumping) very old topics rather than starting a new one. It would have been good to ask in new topic since the reports that the forum software provides has changed.

BTW another mod handled that, I am providing some reasons.

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Sorry if i did anything strange

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More it seemed strange. Also bumping years old topic is not the best way to do things because circumstances and things change a lot over time. In this case the reporting system of the forum has changed and we have new reports to show.

So a new topic asking rather than bumping would have been better in this case. @Dimitar has created a new topic fulfilling your request. Maybe review the forum guidelines at this time would be good Guidelines - Safe Network Forum

2 Likes