Welcome to this month’s blog post. If you have any ideas for improving this blog, or any questions at all, please let me know in the Community Feedback Forum, or message me on the Fediverse (the link is in my profile). Thank you!
A huge welcome to all the newcomers; do feel free to explore the site and post/comment/reply in any of the forums and groups! The Share Space, and Connect Cafe, are probably good spaces to start; your input helps build the community.
As you know, last month we requested some feedback for teams working on Moderation Tooling, and asked you to share your tips for Moderators. This month we have a wonderful post in the Moderation Tooling forum, about research regarding Fedi Moderation Tooling – go check out the post and their link; it’s really interesting stuff. It seems that tools for moderators is a really hot topic at the moment, with several people and teams working on how to make moderating an easier task.
A wonderful thing worth sharing is a post about a hashtag correcting tool – a tool designed by Austin – which automatically takes lower-case hashtags and makes them Pascal (or ‘Camel’) Case. PascalCase is when you capitalise the first letter of words in a hashtag to make them more accessible for screen-readers, which would read out ‘CamelCase’ (eg) much more readily than the alternative ‘camelcase’. This is a really useful tool, as you can imagine, for those visually impaired users who rely on screen-readers to assist them.
In other news, the fact that BBC Radio 4 (UK only I’m afraid) ran a mini-series on moderators was noted in this post encouraging moderators to take a listen. I listened to all 5 episodes back to back, and found it to be great reporting on an interesting subject close to my heart. I was appalled upon learning about the lack of support that some moderators on the larger, more mainstream social media suffered with. It made me very grateful for my small instance and its support system we have between moderators.
As more people migrate from the mainstream social media platforms, there has been an uptick in spam accounts and bad actors, as is perhaps somewhat predictable. IFTAS have done great work with their Denylists and FediBlock tools, which do help mitigate the influx. If you are suffering from spam attacks, the advised first step is to close registration – this way you can see spam accounts before they’re able to interact with your users or post on your instance. A great post based on the October’s spam wave was written up here; it’s an interesting read, and really demonstrates how working together can make a huge difference.
As always, the Library remains an amazing resource, with new articles being added all the time. If you have suggestions for articles, or feedback for existing ones, please let us know here.
So as we head deeper into Winter, all that remains for me to do is to thank you all for your suggestions, posts, and threads; keep contributing, and I’ll see you all next month!