After discussing this with the people most often using the mutual aid community and feedback here we will be making a single change.
Meta posts will no longer be permitted in !mutual_aid@hexbear.net critical meta posts must not be about specific users and posted in !feedback@hexbear.net at risk of removal.
We will change the mutual aid sidebar to remove the clause permitting meta posts, we will also ask that users post once a day so that everyone's post's can be seen but this is not a hard rule as it is pretty clear that removing posts is a last resort in that community. This joins the other community recommendations that users include currency, how much is needed, updating when a user has received funds, or updating/locking the post when the need has been met.
This will be unfeatured in about 12 hours
~~Hello users of hexbear:
Due to recent meta posts in our mutual aid community we wanted to open up discussion about the community !mutual_aid@hexbear.net
We will never require explanation or justification from a user asking for aid in the community, and the mod and admin team continue to commit to not featuring an individual's mutual aid request to prevent unfair exposure.
In addition, we will maintain a strict "No critical comments or meta comments" on a mutual aid post.
This post is to discuss the mutual aid community's rule of allowing meta posts: mutual aid as a community, those making posts in it and those commenting on posts.
We are considering removing the exception allowing meta posts but wanted to involve the userbase before committing to a change.
Please comment with any thoughts, feelings, or suggestions regarding this change.
Thank you~~
I don’t like the idea of setting a limit on dollar amount. That would be a huge setback for users who are asking for help with things like rent, bills, and losing your house to an IDF terror attack.
As for limiting # of posts per week, I think the problem of visibility on that comm needs to be looked at: even before I ruined it for everyone, I noticed that donations would dry up the moment my post got too old and stopped being “hot,” even with a lot of bumps.
I’ll address the other stuff after I take a nap.
because different users can set a different default post sort it is difficult to do anything on the back-end to increase post visibility. I don't think you ruined it for anyone i just think that right now so many people need help and the average person here may be more strained than before.
Is it possible to create an auto-bump bot that bumps the posts in the comm once a day or something, without users needing to trigger them?
It is possible but would require someone to develop the bot
Ah gotcha. If I knew how to code I would :/ just curious do you even think that would be helpful if it were developed? Like if it bumped until the post were locked as the goal was met or something?
Due to the particulars of the Active sort algorithm, bumping stops being very effective sometime before 12 hours after the post is made, which a bot would not counteract.
That said, I have long been planning to put together a basic bumper-bot that would, upon being triggered in a thread, reply every 10 to 30 mins (not sure what the optimal frequency is) to keep the thread bumped for a certain amount of time (also not entirely sure on this number, but overall duration would be at least a few hours).
This doesn't keep threads around longer than they can last now, but will be more consistent than human bumpers, and will allow mods to ban the other bots from the comm, since their instant replies don't really affect the ranking at all (it's based on the timestamp of the most recent comment, nothing else).
Ah I see, thanks for the explanation! If there was a "one post per day" rule I could see that being pretty helpful, especially since it is more effective than the existing bump bots