I quite like this idea in theory. The communities may intersect quite well and that may lead to a lot of useful exchanges.
However, I must give my 2 cents from the moderator perspective. As a moderator, I’m not willing to moderate such a category.
As a moderator I do two main things:
-
Cleanup
-
Title fixing - to make them actually reflect concretely the problem the user is having (such that others with the same one find it easily)
-
Category fixing - sometimes people put the post in the wrong category, so I fix that.
-
Restating the problem - sometimes people write convoluted posts and that makes it really hard for others to help. In those cases, I try to get people to restate their problem in the form of a simple question, for exampel
-
Off-topic - directing people to stay on-topic or create a separate discussion. Sometimes when I don’t get there on time, I need to then select off-topic posts and move them onto a new topic
-
Spam - I’d say we have about ~90% of misflagged posts, so I have to manually approve that. Additionally, when possible I try to notify users affect that the bot misflagged their post so they are not in the dark.
-
mark solutions - when a solution is found and nobody has flagged I usually try to mark the right one (involves actually reading)
-
-
Code of Conduct enforcement
Enforcing the code of conduct, means that I need to be up to speed on basically every discussion. Or in the very least, keep an eye to see if things escalate and intervene.
I enjoy a lot of the moderation work I do, but it is quite a bit of effort, as you can see. But when discussions go wild (even in Qubes-specific stuff) that’s what takes my energies off. Having such a broad category opens the forum up not only to genuinely interested Qubes users who want to share their interests and techniques about privacy and security but also to outsiders who are just interested in sharing FOMO and are generally really misinformed (see reddit.com/r/privacy).
My point being that for that category, it’s opening a possible can of worms which (as a moderator) will require a lot of unrewarding moderation effort. I don’t know how other moderators would feel about that, but as the most active one, I can say that that’s not very desirable.
I think we should instead focus here on Qubes discussions and direct people to more general communities like forum.PrivacyTools.io when such topics are of their interest.
Some other lessons from history:
- Whonix closes off-topic category (read the context here)