(feat): Help & Support Group Improvements

Over a fairly long period of time, the core members of the Minds Community Open Source Initiative (MCOSI) have been reviewing and discussing issues surrounding the usage of the official Minds Help and Support (H&S) group.

During this time both the MCOSI, community and Minds staff members have seen various problems with the H&S group. Therefore, the MCOSI has come up with a number of ideas regarding improvements for this specific group.

Replace the existing group layout with a nested category styled forum based layout
The 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, and aid in easing the moderation process. This forum idea may also help to further encourage community members to provide their own experience and time to aid in answering questions, provide suggestions, logging Gitlab tickets and providing possible resolutions.

Provide simpler access to appropriate offical Minds blog articles and posts
While improvements have been made within the area of providing relevant information to the community (including the on-going development update report blog articles), there are still issues with community members being able to find and review these reports. Therefore, the MCOSI is recommending that the Newsfeed notice facility displays news about any outages, updates and large scale / wide spread issues, as well as relevant staff produced posts are shown prominently (top-most pinned) within the H&S group.

Removal of the H&S group sidebar chat facility
The MCOSI is aware that there are plans to remove the sidebar chat facility from the H&S group within the near future and therefore suggests that if the forum idea is implemented then it might be sensible to allow community members to post directly to the forum based categories without any prior offical moderation procedures, and then moderate the posts and if necessary, remove inappropriate posts from this group after the posts have been published.

For further information in relation to the MCOSI recommendations, please review the following blog article.

Reference:

Edited by Mark Edworthy