cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/6776820

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

Sincerely, The Sublinks Team

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

Sincerely, The Sublinks Team

!Sublinks@discuss.online

Did you know that Discuss.Online has a Matrix server?

If you're not familiar with Matrix you can read more here: https://matrix.org/about/

Matrix is a federated real-time chat server.

Join the community space! Go to: https://matrix.to/#/#community-channels:discuss.online.

Need a username? Contact @jgrim@discuss.online or comment on this post. A registration code will be sent to you for [yourhandle]@discus.online

Matrix Clients Discuss.Online provides two web based client options. You can find more at: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

Here are the Discuss.Online hosted ones:

• https://element.discuss.online
• https://cinny.discuss.online

See you there!

Please welcome @lazyguru@discuss.online to the discuss.online admin team.

I’ve known lazyguru for over ten years. He’s a close friend. His skills are like mine. He will be able to help contribute to all projects of the discuss.online ecosystem.

lazyguru will help with moderation, system administration, monitoring, and development of new features. Joe has already improved some monitoring and is working on some changes to the infrastructure to make it more scalable. He will soon be helping with SocialCare.cloud once the first beta is released.

Please, take some time to welcome him!

Thanks, Jason

tl;dr;

We use SendGrid to send our emails out. By default, SendGrid enables link tracking. Link tracking was causing issues with allowing users to verify their accounts. In short, I disabled link tracking, and links should work for all new emails in the future.

Contact support if you need your account activated. hello@discuss.online from the email you used to sign up.

Issue

When new users sign up or when existing users reset their password, an email is sent to verify ownership of the account. These emails are sent from us through a service called SendGrid.

SendGrid, by default, will mask all the URLs to enable what they call link tracking. It's a marketing thing to track engagement with email. I have no use for it, but I didn't disable it before.

The issue is that sometimes this link doesn't resolve. An HTTPS error is shown to the user.

Resolution

The quickest and most logical resolution was to disable link tracking. I never use it. I did just that; however, any previous emails sent will still be broken.

I will continue to investigate the issue in hopes of resolving previous links.

If you are unable to verify your account, please email hello@discuss.online from the email you used to sign up. We'll manually verify each account that hasn't been able to be activated.

The small outage from this morning was from a planned update to Lemmy 18.3. Let me know if you notice any issues!

I'm building a PHP SDK for the Lemmy API.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/jgrim/lemmy-sdk Here is the packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/jgrim/lemmy-sdk

It's still in early development. It works; however, it's missing some tests, CI/CD tooling, and examples.

Feel free to use, contribute, or ask questions.

Hello,

There is a unique problem of the fediverse. When an instance goes offline, its communities will never sync again.

Recently, vlemmy.com shutdown. Quite a few communities synced with discuss.online and other instances. Because vlemmy.com is not longer brokering communication, these communities will never be in sync again.

We have a several options:

1. Leave them there. Do nothing.
2. Leave them there but make a post that it's dead and hope people see it.
3. Purge the communities. Act like they never existed.
4. Build some elaborate system to work around vlemmy being gone. This would take a lot of work and collaboration with other instances.

Let me know what makes the most sense to you as users. Are any of you still using vlemmy communities? What about long-term planning? Maybe this isn't an issue now but what if lemmy.world vanished?

Please, let me know what you think. I'm torn on this one.

Thanks, Jason

I'm looking to get member feedback on the design of the site.

Lemmy comes with many default core themes. Some parts of these themes are broken with dark mode. For example, upload boxes might show white if your system is set to light mode.

I want to set a decent default theme. If unaware, you can change your theme in your account settings. There are 10 different themes currently.

There are 12 different theme options:

1. Browser Default
   • When this is set, it uses Darkly or Litely depending on browser settings
2. Browser Default Compact
   • When this is set, it uses Darkly Compact or Litely Compact, depending on browser settings
3. Darkly
4. Darly Red
5. Darkly Compact
6. Darkly Pure Black
7. Litely
8. Litely Red
9. Litely Compact
10. Vaporwave Dark
11. Vaporwave Light
12. i386

I currently have the default set to Browser Default Compact, which should set dark or light mode depending on whether your browser is dark or light.

I use Vaporwave Dark, personally.

What do you use? Which do you prefer?

I could make something new. I tried some new ones that broke with an update. I didn't fix them after the update, so I removed them. I could create new ones again.

Let me know what you think. This is a discussion/poll on what I should do as a default.

Thanks, Jason

I decided to provide my open tasks to a Kanban board rather than many update posts. I'll make larger announcements as I make headway, but you can view the Kanban board for due dates and progress. As I work on it, I'll add more details to the board, issues, wiki, etc.

Key takeaways from this post:

• Updates should be easier to pull than waiting for me to announce.
• Anyone can register to comment or add issues.
• This should give you an idea of what I've been doing and what's next.
• I had gotten distracted from the bots' only initial goal and added many more features.
• Everything is near completion but took longer; the first release will be bigger but more delayed.
• I think I added everything I'm doing there. It might change as I realize what I've done or plan to do. I could also add missing details on some tickets if requested.
• The code from socialcare.cloud will be closed source. The FOSS solution is coming later.

The Kanban board can be found here: https://track.gr.im/agiles/145-2/current