Mirroring groups on the MeWe network

Following my Administrator woes on Facebook post I have had a look at alternative places to run a forum. I realized that Facebook is getting pretty intrinsic in society around the world, so I know everyone won’t be interested in a new venue. But honestly, MeWe is very simple to use and have an UI experience very close to the Facebook app.

This picture was flagged as “hateful” on Facebook, which has rendered my account frozen for the next 30 days. While I agree to the strict rules that FB advocates, they really must deploy more human beings if they intend to have success in this endeavour. And that means really investigating what is flagged, reading threads in all languages etc. Because the risk of flagging the wrong guy is just too high. Admins get flagged all the time for kicking out bullies, and the use of reporting tools as a revenge strategy *must* carry a penalty.

MeWe is thankfully not like G+ which (in my personal opinion) was counter-intuitive and damn right intrusive. We all remember the G+ auto-upload feature, where some 3 million users had their family photos, vacation photos and .. ehrm, “explicitly personal” photos uploaded without consent.

Well, the MeWe app is very simple, and registration is as easy as it should be. You make a user name, a password, and type in your email; then you verify your email and that’s it!

Besides, my main use for Facebook or MeWe is to run the groups – I spend very little of my time socializing anyways. With the amount of groups and media i push on a daily basis it’s quite frankly their loss.

The MeWe group functionality is very good, and almost identical to Facebook

The alternative to MeWe is to setup a proper web forum instead. I have bought 6 domains that are now collecting dust so yes, I will look into that – but the whole purpose of a social platform is that you don’t have to do maintenance beyond daily management – so MeWe saves us some time.

So head over to MeWe and register! Here are the two main groups I manage these days. The main groups are on facebook, but i have now registered the same groups on MeWe.

• Delphi Developer on MeWe
• Amiga Disrupt on MeWe

MeWe doesn’t cost anything and takes less than 5 minutes to join. Just like G+ and Facebook, MeWe can be installed as an app for your phone (both iOS and Android). So as far as alternatives go, it’s a good alternative. One more app wont do much harm I imagine.

Note: I will naturally keep my Facebook account for the sake of the groups, but having experienced this 4 times in 9 years, my tolerance of Mr. Suckerberg is quickly reaching its limits. If I have blurted something out I have no problems standing for that and taking the penalty, but posting a picture of software development? In a group dedicated to software development? That takes some impressive mental acrobatics to accept.

Admin woes on Delphi Developer

For well over 10 years I have been running different interest groups on Facebook. While Delphi Developer is without a doubt the one that receives most attention from myself and my fellow moderators, I also run the Quartex Components group and lately, Amiga Disrupt. The latter dedicated to my favorite hobby, namely retro computing.

I have to say, it’s getting harder to operate these groups under the current Facebook regime. I applaud them for implementing a moral codex, that is both fair and good, but that also means that their code must be able to distinguish between random acts of hate and bullying, and moderator operations.

A couple of days ago I posted an update picture from Amibian.js. This is a picture of my vmware development platform, with pascal code, node.js and the HTML5 desktop running. You would  have be completely ignorant of technology to not recognize the picture as having to do with software development.

This picture was flagged as hateful, and was enough to get an admin’s account frozen for 30 days

Sadly facebook contains all sorts of people, and for some reason even grown men will get into strange, ideological debates about what constitutes retro-computing. In this case the user was a die-hard original-amiga fan, who on seeing my post about amibian.js went on a spectacular rant. Listing in alphabetical and chronological order, the depths of depravity that people have stooped to in implementing 68k as Javascript.

Well, I get 2-3 of these comments a week and the rules for the group is crystal clear: if you post comments like that, or comments that are racist, hateful or otherwise regarded as a provocative to the general group standard — you are given a single warning and then you are out.

So I gave him a warning that such comments are not welcome; He immediately came back with a even worse response – and that was the end of that.

But before I managed to kick the user, he reported a picture of Amibian as hateful. Again, we are talking about a screen-dump from VMWare with pascal code. No hate, no poor choice of images – nothing that would violate ordinary Facebook standards.

The result? Facebook has now frozen my account for 30 days (!)

Well I’m not even going to bother being upset, because this is not the first time. When people seem to willfully seek out conflict, only to use the FB’s reporting tools as weapons of revenge — well, there is not much I can do.

Anyways, Gunnar, Glenn, Peter and Dennis got you covered – and I’ll see you in a month. I think it’s time i contact FB in Oslo and establish separate management profiles.

Delphi Developer Demo Competition votes

A month ago we setup a demo competition on Delphi Developer. It’s been a few years since we did this, and demo competitions are always fun no matter what, so it was high time we set this up!

This years prizes are awesome!

Initially we had a limit of at least 10 contestants for the competition to go through, but I will make an exception this time. The prices are great and worth a good effort. I was a bit surprised by the low number of contestants since more than 60 developers signed our poll about the event. So I was hoping for at least 20 to be honest.

I think the timing was a bit off, we are closer to the end of the year and most developers are working under deadlines. So next year I think I’ll move the date to June or July.

Be that as it may – a demo competition is a tradition by now, so we proceed to the voting process!

The contestants

The contestants this year are:

• Christian Hackbart
• Mogens Lundholm
• steven Chesser
• Jens Borrisholt
• Paul Nicholls

Note: Dennis is a moderator on Delphi Developer, as such he cannot partake in the voting process.

The code

Each contestant has submitted a project to the following repositories (in the same order as the names above), so make sure you check out each one and inspect them carefully before casting your vote.

• https://github.com/TetrisSQC/Galcon
• https://github.com/mogenslundholm/MidiAndMusicXmlPlayer
• https://github.com/jdredd87/PiDuinoDroidSystem
• https://github.com/JensBorrisholt/2048
• https://bitbucket.org/paul_nicholls/petasciifier/src

Voting

We use the poll function built-into Facebook, so just visit us at Delphi Developer to cast your vote! You can only vote once and there is a 1 week deadline on this (so votes are done on the 10th this month.