Site Update #3, 2020

August 28, 2020 11:38 AM

Hello everyone! We’re coming to the end of August, and things are getting caught up around here. We have a lot of stuff in store, so stay tuned! As usual, comments are turned off. Drop us a line at the Contact Form if you have feedback, and you’re welcome to open a MetaTalk thread for any subject you want to discuss with the community.

Development:

• The big project this last two weeks was building out a system for the mods to be able to anonymize comments and posts on all subsites. Frimble’s got that up and working on the technical side.
  • We still have some internal discussion to do to figure out exactly what our policy and recommendations are going to be with this. Some things we would prefer to anonymize vs. delete, some things we will only delete. Figuring out the exact shape of this is on the agenda for this weekend’s staff meeting.
  • We’ll have an updated FAQ available as soon as we have that sorted out.
  • If you have questions or want to discuss this option, drop us a line and we can talk through the possibilities.
• Next up is another round of back-end work - necessary but makes boring headlines.
  

September:

• September will be our fundraising month! We have a whole list of fun things to play with to encourage contributions and also just blow off some steam.
• More news on this on the first and throughout the month

Advisory Board:

• The board is in the process of scheduling its first meeting!
• If you’d like to help fund honoraria for the board, you can do that via the Funding Page. Just send a message via the Contact Form or to [e-mail] and let us know to earmark your contribution for that purpose.
• If any POC are interested in participating in the board or receiving meeting notes regularly, please email [e-mail]

Documentation:

• Loup’s big project this last two weeks was the Content Policy. This is a companion to the Guidelines, and lays out in simple terms the kind of content we don’t allow.
• Next up is some of the complicated legal stuff around the GDPR and our Privacy Policy. This will likely take a while (and will involve outside consultation) so I don’t have an ETA as yet.

Moderation:

• We’ve had a couple of general MetaTalk threads discussing the impact and structure of (mostly US) politics threads on the site. If you haven’t given those a look, and you’re active in political discussions here, I recommend you do so. Politics threads remain the most contentious, difficult-to-moderate, and high-bandwidth threads on the site, and improving them is going to require the participants to be thoughtful about their own interactions.

Thank you, everyone! The next update will be on September 11, 2020. (previous updates)

posted by restless_nomad (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 11:38 AM