Recent Updates (and related wonkiness)

Partly based on recent member suggestions and partly because it's something that has been floating in the back of my mind for a while, I shuffled the member groups around a bit today, creating a Newbies group for members who have contributed fewer than 15 items of content (topics, comments, stories, articles, etc) that automatically promotes to Member once you hit 15 content. I also had the site shuffle members into two inactive groups if they haven't been around. Members who haven't logged in for 60+ days and haven't posted content for 100+ days were put in the Inactive member group. Members who haven't logged in for 100+ days and haven't posted content for 200+ days were put in the Prune member group. We'll be discussing what to do with these differentiated groups as Staff. There's the potential that those in the Prune member group might be deleted permanently, but we haven't had time to discuss that and decide yet, so we'll see. If you have any input on the matter, please let us know in a comment! Anyway, the shuffling led to some permissions gaps for a little bit, so if you couldn't access part of the forum temporarily, my bad! Should be fixed, but let me know if you run into any problems. Additionally, I added new guidelines and forms in the Feedback / Beta Reading forum (originally the Find a Beta forum) and archived the Submissions & Review forum. So here are some questions up for discussion that we could use input on. Do you think it would be good to delete the accounts of people who haven't logged in for over 100 days/posted for over 200 days? There's no member list on this software; would you be curious to see our active Members vs Newbies vs Inactive and Purge members now that they've been sorted based on activity? (I ask because I'd be curious lol) Currently Newbies cannot see inside the Brainstorming subforum and can't post their own topics (but can reply to topics) in the Feedback subforum until they're auto-promoted at 15 content items posted. Currently they can see anything posted in the Library, but we could change that. This is to provide a little buffer where new members have to participate in the community a little before they can access members' personal story ideas and before they can request specific feedback on their work. What do you think about these limitations? Would you suggest keeping them in a sort of "Guest View" of the Library until they promote to full membership? Alternatively we could add a Newbie Friendly Library category, but that might be overkill...? @Penguinball suggested that in addition to the 15 content minimum requirement, Newbies need to review something in the Library in order to gain full membership. Something like this is doable, but has downsides too; if there's no admin online for a few hours around the time a member fulfills that requirement, they'll have to wait until an admin notices to receive their promotion. What do we think? Worth it? Should there be some other requirement(s) or alternative options, such as posting a writing resource, posting an introduction, etc? If we limit Newbie access to the Library, how would this be impacted? How do the new Feedback / Beta Reading forms and guidelines look? Anything you would recommend changing or adding? @Penguinball also suggested a sort of purge of the Feedback forum at the first of the year, archiving old threads and essentially re-surveying members to see who's actively willing to be a beta reader/provide feedback. This is what we have at the moment as our best means of determining our beta reader population. What do you think? Any suggestions? As a note I'm going to try to find a way to make a page that essentially shows those search results plus a snippet of the member's Beta Reading tab on their profile, but I'm not sure yet whether I'll be able to. Any other thoughts or feedback you have are more than welcome! I was more long-winded than I intended to be; apologies!

kherezae | 1 hour ago
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