Proposing Community site changes
Besides plugins, and occasionally helpful support threads, the community is mostly hosting spam profiles, and in general has too many features. I'm in favor of the following changes:
Accounts are for participants. Don't create an account unless you have something to contribute to a discussion or plugin. An empty account is deleted after 24 hours. Spam accounts aren't harmless as some have suggested in the past, they're a sign of abandonment, like a broken window.
Personal pages phased out. These mainly collect spam. Probably a read-only period.
Focus discussions. The groups Performance, Feedback, Tech Support, Pro Services, and Plugin Dev are left as is. Other groups are un-featured and made read-only. Group widgets are deleted, replaced with the group's discussions listing.
Friends phased out. Want to connect with others? Be friendly, and help others.
Site notifications go away.
Activity stream focused. No group joins or avatar changes.
- iionly@iionly
iionly - 0 likes
- Nikolai Shcherbin@rivervanrain
Nikolai Shcherbin - 0 likes
You must log in to post replies.Main use (or maybe even only use as you can send PM to non-friends by now, too) I see of friending is the (email) notification on new plugin releases, i.e. less "friending" and more "following". I would miss these notifications if friending would no longer be enabled.
Agree with removal of spam accounts. "No activity at all after X days after registering" could be one deciding factor to remove possible spam accounts (NOT counting spamming as activity!).
But someone could have asked for help via PM or is just interested in email notifications on new plugin releases - no visible public activity in this case. So, I'm not sure if removal of seemingly inactive "spam" accounts won't result in deleting also perfectly valid accounts.
Maybe phasing out twitter account sign-in / stopping registering with Twitter credentials would also help to reduce spam / spam account creation.
Not sure how many contain spam. Or the other way round: how many contain useful info. Read only and possibly clean up spam pages might be enough instead of deleting them all.
Does that include language specific support groups? I'm active in the German support group and we have activity there. It would be annoying for some to no longer be able to ask for support in their native language. If closing the language specific groups would then result in an increase in non-English postings in the main support groups it wouldn't be any better either. Though I think a limitation to group disussions only would be sufficient (group blog don't work anyway for anyone else but admins...).
Okay with that.
Fully okay with that.
Please, do it for Group and User pages and bookmarks also.