> Admin views – could you add a view for admin to show all comments (not level 1 posts) made on community posts.
I suppose the default answer to that is "you mean, other than looking at the post itself?" But that goes back to the difficulty of Steem platforms in creating a decent Notification system. In theory, what you really want is to be able to see what activity has occurred in a given Community on posts associated with that Community. You want a way to be able to keep up with what's been going on in there. Whether it be for moderation purposes or simply to keep up with interaction. In a mechanical sense, you want the Community page to actually act more like the standard account Profile page which shows Replies and Comments involving that account.
Ultimately, I think we really need to figure out a way to express more what we want to do with that information and how we need to get it to make it actionable because a Community of any real size is going to start to have way more Comments going on than any one person can really keep up with.
> Navigation – its hard to find your way back to communities once you go to someone's blog.
Absolutely, and moreover it's difficult to find Communities in the first place. Aside from your personal list of subscriptions, they just don't exist to be found.
> Admin Settings – it would be nice to be able to turn on mandatory tags/category/flares to a post and allow users to sort by the same.
In theory, the Community itself represents the "category" of a given post, and that's probably for the best. But you bring up an important question. Does the Community represent a "sixth tag" that is effectively associated with a given post alongside the tags which are given to the particular post in question, or should there be redundant tags? Moreover, shouldn't tags apply to Communities themselves in order to make searching/finding them much easier, with the implication that all posts in that Community should take them as given?
My own feeling is that the last should be the case, that Communities themselves should be searchable, discoverable, and tagable, and those tags should be considered inherent on all of the content posted into a given Community. (This is also a really good argument for only allowing a single post to be counted as within a single Community, because tag disjoint between Communities is a real issue.)
Should a Community's tags count against the set of five that non-Community posts have? From my perspective, I would think not. Content within a Community could have more specific tags which wouldn't be necessarily useful outside of that context. But now we're getting into more complicated issues of derived folksonomy (which my system originally wanted to represent as "folk sodomy") which might be beyond the scope of most people involved in the design.
> Navigation – The current tabs on a blog/profile are Blog, Posts, Replies, Notification. This is a little confusing as the term post can be a personal blog post or a community post. I propose this is changed to Blog Communities. Within both of these, you would then have posts, comments, replies, notifications.
I'm not sure that I go along with this one. The right thing to do is probably to remove the term "blog" altogether because it's no longer meaningful and instead talk about "personal posts" and "Community posts," which neatly removes the problem. As a result, you build a much simpler hierarchy to understand. Communities and personal accounts can have posts attached to them. Posts can have Comments attached to them. Comments can have Comments attached to them. Replies are just comments, and aren't really meaningful for Communities because the owning account shouldn't be post-active. And Notifications are things that are triggered by actions which can occur to accounts, Communities, posts, and comments. Navigationally, it might be better to refer to Notifications as "Activity," because it's much clearer.
> Stats – we need more stats. However, as an Excel and steem geek, I know how to get these myself and I know what I want as a community leader. Maybe Excel for All could step up here and create a third-party tool?? Maybe @roadscape would like to collaborate with us???
What kind of stats? As someone else who has been involved in managing online communities for a very long time, I've never really found much use in having numbers shaken out. They really don't help me. If I'm involved with the community, I already know what volume of activity we are experiencing because I'm reading it. Most of the other kinds of numbers that people say they want aren't really useful for administration; they are purely for marketing. And I'm not really sure I've ever seen them be particularly useful for marketing purposes, either.
So the real question is what do you need to know that interaction with the community wouldn't tell you?
> Direct messaging of some type should really be a feature of a community.
Oh God, please no.
To what end? And more importantly, to what advantage? We already have two fists full of direct messaging, semi-ephemeral communications systems, most directly represented by Discord. Anything in the world that would be implemented would need to be immediately and clearly more useful than Discord – and that is just not going to happen. It's just not.
Moreover, there is no technological or useful reason that a personal messaging system should be associated with the Steem blockchain. It is a long-term, distributed, content database and direct messaging/personal messaging/live messaging systems are completely ephemeral, generally centralized transient content.
Plus I'm not sure I trust anybody involved with development right now to put together a decent personal messaging solution that even matches the availability and functionality of IRC.
> Admin rights – allow admin/owner to set the owner account as a beneficiary on posts made to the community.
Might be useful in some cases, I suppose. Though really only in situations where the admin/owners are engaged in active classic curational activity, finding content and bringing it to the Community itself. For the general functioning of a Community, where content is created by self-motivated community members, that feels a little sketchy. You could make the argument that the Admin/Moderators should "get paid" for doing the job but I would be uncomfortable with that.
As an option available for Communities, sure. It's definitely one of those things I would want to be clear, front and center, when I went to join a Community. I don't want it stuck down in the fine print that the Admin are taking a 75% beneficiary cut of anything I post to the Community. And you know just as well as I do that somebody would try to pull that scam.
But while we're specifying that it is a Community option, we might as well give it the possibility of delegating all content posted to the Community to an arbitrary set of accounts.
> Admin rights and feature – allow admin to turn on or off guest posts (non steem account posts)
That's not what the Guest role as currently defined actually means, so there's a bit of a disconnect. Moreover, I don't think there's any way that non-Steem accounts could post to a Community anyway because you must have a Steem account in order to post to the blockchain – and as we've already said, posts to a Community are just the same as any other post. I don't think that we will ever see non-Steem account posts being allowed into the blockchain because there isn't really a mechanism for it. And if there was, it would violate the whole premise of the system.
> Admin – have the ability to search subscribers list. Add subscribers date of subscription to list of subscribers.
Add to this "about 15 more basic administrative functions that every single group/mailing list/community system has had since the 70s."
Really, what we need is some sort of timeline from the developers of at least one of the interface platforms for the Steem blockchain – or at least a Trello board – which talks about what sort of features they are looking at developing in the short term, because as it stands Communities aren't really an effective tool for anything they've been pitched for at this point.
Maybe everything is on hold until SMTs roll out because we have definitely not heard the last of some sort of tight integration between SMTs and Communities. You can count on that. A bit of a problem, but there you go.
There are a lot of issues with Communities and they need a lot of work. It would be nice to hear about concrete plans by developers regarding actual usability. I would love to hear about that.
I don't expect it.
