Let's have a discussion about what we think the Community Platform needs in order to help users and community owners and moderators.
In a recent @Hiveio development meeting @blocktrades and @howo were discussing how they would like to hear from others about what may be the more important focuses right now for development.

Also they'd like to find some people to take these issues on for development but some requests are also pretty easy they just haven't been done yet.

1 COMMUNITY CLASSIFICATIONS BY TOPIC

The ideas is to allow each community the ability to identify X number of topics that classify their community.

Why?

• Helps when a user is doing a search
• Gives an option to view communities by topic... organizes them better.
• Helps for for connecting new users to themes they are interested in.

In general the plan is for peakd.com (and hopefully all others) to ask new users about what themes they have interest in and for us to present them with topics, communities, badges and even users of interest.
Letting the community themselves identify what themes their community cover are important.

2 COMMUNITY SORTING

When we working on communities system this was a "leave for later"... we knew it was important but we decided that we could get to it after launching communities and see how it went... well now it is later.

• Sort by recently created
• Sort by subscribers
• Sort by interactions
• Sort by posts (not including comments)
• Alphabetical sorting
• Other??

This also helps users to find communities. None of these are complicated algorithms that attempt to match a user to a community they are pretty simplistic alternatives to sort through the communities. They won't be better than thematic or search driven filters but they do help.

As a perk these sorting methods could be much faster that the one method that is presently available which is to sort by a more complex algorithm that looks at REWARDS a community has brought about in the last 7 days.

When searching through a huge list of those.

3 STATS

I used to have a longer list of stats I thought a community would benefit from. I'm willing to accept slower growth on this side if it leads to more advancements in the other areas. But I have a couple of desires I think are pretty helpful. Do you have any stats you'd like to see?

3b NUMBER OF POSTS IN LAST X

It would be nice to see how many posts have been added in the last X days so that you can identify what communities have been active recently with new content. Interactions includes comments but as a consumer in a community it does not help me because i come for content not to see someone's comments to a different creator.

3c NUMBER OF POSTS SINCE X

As an example of an easy fix the Notifications tool identifies when the last time you read your notifications. We could use that same tool to identify how many posts were posted after that time/date.

Perhaps this is a front end thing since that date/time already exists. Not sure exactly how it is to be done but seeing what is new may be helpful for many people. Thoughts?

4 MEMBER ONLY POSTING

I believe this is what @roadcape called community type 2... and he mentioned he was mostly done with the design before he changed jobs and left the blockchain.

There is already a member field which moderators can add users to. The functionality of the member field could be greatly improved if this community style existed. There may not be a ton of use case compared to open communities but it does exist and seems like it should be worth finalizing that style.

5 COMMUNITY UI SUB-CLASSIFICATIONS

This is likely a front end system. (Maybe someone has a reason for it to be inside hivemind itself... if so I'd love to hear it)

We would like to allow a community owner to select X number of topics for their community that will be treated uniquely and which their users can choose to classify their own posts with those themes. And the user experience of a community would be to have those X themes shown in separate filtered sections. Meaning you can see all posts done with that theme. This is doable with post tags and with peakd knowing and identifying to the users what tags/topics will be put into what sections.

The issue with front ends is that we have to pull ALL POSTS and then just filter based on those tags. But if we could pull ONLY the posts that qualify that would be a huge help.

As an example a photography community may have a section of the community feed for showing off pictures but others that are for news, how-to, reviews. So photography communities can be more than just about showing off pictures which will always remain the dominant theme of most photo communities. It's a difference of what do most want to READ vs what do most want to ADD. We can placate both sides.

The big question for this is what will moderation of abuse be like. Will it be a matter of muting the post if someone simply tags every topic every time? And maybe muting the user? Is there a better way of letting the user know why their post got muted if they break the community desire to properly classify? We know how often people misclassify posts simply to get more views.

6 LANGUAGE FIELD

This is something being looked into (by the main hivemind developers) already for posts in general. Putting a language field on a post and then keep track right on hivemind. This would allow for community content to be filtered by language.