RFC: Reinstate good tooling

During the time John was admin at zatech, I think the community benefitted very well from the additional tooling. After he retired from his post, the tooling was removed. The tooling provided several benefits to the community, around administration, locking threads, visibility and other things which helped maintain a courteous and kind workplace which were lost and never replaced.

Suggestion

• Replace, reinstate or create tooling to make the site more maintainable
• Add visibility into metrics like the graphing tool

Reasoning

We have been told over the last few years that admins always step in as a last resort, at which case conversations have become extremely divisive.

Tooling and visibility helps those who want to contribute create better weighted arguments and make enforcement clearer.

I fully respect this isn't the primary responsibility right now, but I wanted to add it 'to the bag' so to speak.

[zoidyzoidzoid]

Can you elaborate more on what different tooling existed from your perspective?

The main two you are mentioning seem to be around:

• getting more visibility on monthly activity and memberships, which we can probably easily automate or manually share on a monthly or quarterly cadence
• locking threads

Are there others you had in mind?

[sixhobbits]

@JohnRoux - if you have anything lying around like a list of stuff you had running etc that you can easily share here that would be super useful!

[JohnRoux]

Hey, yeah the thread locking stuff is actually all there, it just needs an admin token.
It's part of the app mentioned here: https://communitybot.rouxtaccess.com/

That app is still in our workspace, I specifically gave it some big updates before stepping down as admin.
That community bot is basically a big wrap of all the previous things I'd built, with the exception of the guys bot ephemeral messaging stuff. Since I think that's a bot that @n1c manages currently (along with the sboj bot)

That's how the delete log, user name changes, user joined log and (one of) the channel change loggers works.

The way the thread locking stuff works is a bit siff tbh, it's using some workarounds because of slack limitations. It needs the admin user token, since deleting is only allowed by admins on ZATech.

I'm still using that bot in a bunch of other slack workspaces, so it should live for a while still (code is all OS if y'all want to self-host it rather)

There were a few features which didn't make their way into the communitybot rewrite due to various reasons. but I'm not sure if they're that helpful tbh.

If you'd like to look at re-using Slackboard, I'm not against that at all, would prefer if I didn't have to host that one though. (t3.micro is probably 4x too large for the requirements). I'm not likely going to have much/any time to iterate/maintain that one. But happy to look at opening up access a bit if it's something you'd like

I think the bigger question here, is what tooling do we want.
Slack has proven to reeeeeeally not care about communities like this one. There are a bunch of cool community apps that do exist, but most of them try upsell a bunch of stuff and I'm sure they all do a bunch of email harvesting.

A feature in Discord which is really useful for large community management is temporary bans.

Not sure if that's something you'd want to look at, but I know that almost all things slack wise come down to "can the API even support this" 😅

[sixhobbits]

So there's a pretty random array of different apps, bots, tools, workflows etc etc. We actually need to audit and remove most of them. The functionality we need is very basic and should be a single script rather than a whole app to deploy and maintain.

We're working on this. Updates coming soon.