I’ve noticed a lot of comments (and posts) from non-Australians in here recently. For sake of brevity, when I say ‘Australian’/‘Aussie’ here, I mean anyone who does live or has lived in Australia.
It defeats the whole point of having a separate comm for ‘world news from an Australian perspective’ if we have high levels of participation (votes/comments/posts) from non-Australians. It becomes just the same as any general world news comm.
I was thinking one measure we could take would be to change the display name of the comm to ‘World News for Aussies’. It’s succinct, clear, and may discourage participation by non-Australians to some degree.
Another matter is posts by non-Australians. Obviously, if we reduced voting participation by non-Aussies, it’s less of an issue if we have posts by non-Aussies - the comm would still largely be ‘from an Australian perspective’ by virtue of voting selection (although it would still be annoying if, like me, you mainly browse local by ‘new’).
That said, when 13 of the last 20 posts in the comm are from a user that appears not to be in/from Australia, maybe there’s a problem to be addressed. It doesn’t help that this poster has a clear and consistent agenda.
I’m obviously not proposing we start checking IDs or anything, but we could at least have a rule for participation only by people who do live or have lived in Australia. Then, if a problem becomes noticeable, the mods can send direct messages or take action where they judge it reasonable.
Interested to hear thoughts from users and mods (@[email protected] @[email protected])
I can throw my hat in to try and make it more of an aussie-focused comm (there are some easy wins, like missing sidebar, no deletion of clearly irrelevant posts, etc.) although ultimately, I suspect one of the big problems is a generic Lemmy news poster can type “world news” into the community field in the post form and this place shows up the same as the rest, so hopefully adjusting the comm title will help, instead of needing a full id change (e.g. /c/aussieworldnews).
I hereby dub thee “Eureka - Moderator of the World news!”
I’m open to the idea of renaming the Community. There’s no Admin tool to do that, but I expect that a couple of edits to the database will permit it to happen. I feel like we need a flow chart for this: Do we rename the community?
If yes, Rename would be preferred to abandoning it and leaving over a year of posts behind. So I’ll want to spin up a test community/rename it in the database before trying that approach on World News.
That’s a problem for future Nath - and only if we go ahead and rename the Community.
Moderator of the World, mmm I like the sounda that!
Definitely a future problem – there’s no rush and we’d want to find a good one before trying a db change. Federation could be an issue so can’t hurt to ask devs before tinkering. Honestly, I think just a title change should be enough. Seems like it works for /c/news