I have been testing communities for a few weeks now with my newly formed Excel for All Community (https://beta.steemit.com/trending/hive-102332). The feedback I have today is based not only on my own experiences but also those of a few beta testers I invited from LinkedIn that have never been involved in steem before.
We all know I am not a dev. But I do think I am the perfect ‘customer’ for communities on steem. I previously ran a community on Google+ which as we all know, closed. I have been holding off on re-forming a community ever since. The reason being, as a content creator and community leader I am tried of how central organizations run. How the content creator and consumer are only just data for them to sell. Neither the content creator or the consumer gets a piece of that pie. And if you are a creator, unless you are making them money, chances are, no one will ever see your content anyway. I am eager to find an alternative solution. The steem Blockchain and decentralization provide some of the solutions to the problems currently facing web2 and I think this will be an awesome place to set up communities.
So, I guess it’s time for the feedback. I do hope it is found to be of value for the future of communities on steem.
Profile – A users need to go to the wallet to update their profile image and info. This is not very intuitive and not an obvious place to check. Maybe if you could click on the profile picture it would open a screen to update profile. Or a link placed on a person’s blog (which now seems to be called profile???)
Notifications – we need to be able to set the notification we receive. It's very daunting to be getting 50+ notification on 1 post and it would be great to be able to filter them and change the notification settings.
Posting - a number of people missed posting to the community as they selected posts to blog. This error is too easy to make, and I would suggest removing the option to post to the blog from within a community post.
Posting – Admins should be able to set if who can post to the community. At the moment anyone can post, not just a subscriber.
Posting – It would be nice to have the ability to post to more than one community, or resteem to a different community.
Admin views – could you add a view for admin to show all comments (not level 1 posts) made on community posts.
Navigation – its hard to find your way back to communities once you go to someone's blog.
Admin Settings – it would be nice to be able to turn on mandatory tags/category/flares to a post and allow users to sort by the same.
Navigation – The current tabs on a blog/profile are Blog, Posts, Replies, Notification. This is a little confusing as the term post can be a personal blog post or a community post. I propose this is changed to Blog Communities. Within both of these, you would then have posts, comments, replies, notifications.
Stats – we need more stats. However, as an Excel and steem geek, I know how to get these myself and I know what I want as a community leader. Maybe Excel for All could step up here and create a third-party tool?? Maybe @roadscape would like to collaborate with us???
Direct messaging of some type should really be a feature of a community.
Admin rights – allow admin/owner to set the owner account as a beneficiary on posts made to the community.
Admin rights and feature – allow admin to turn on or off guest posts (non steem account posts)
Admin – have the ability to search subscribers list. Add subscribers date of subscription to list of subscribers.
The UI needs a bit of sleek design work.
So that’s about it for the moment. I would like to invite a second round of beta testers before we come out of beta. However, I won’t have time to do that until the end of next week. I do hope we have another few weeks in beta.
I would like to give a special that’s to the Linkedin users that joined me and helped with the first round of beta tests. @excelguy, @diazkongming, @alanmurray, @f-wiyanto, @jkpieterse, @axilizar, @poweraccess, @xlncad, @esterbennett. Many of which are well known Excel experts and influencers and I feel very honored that they took the time to help me on this journey. If you take a look at some of the accounts, you will find some of the direct feedback they gave me on communities.