Happy Sunday morning from the mountains of North Carolina! I'm visiting my dad here, sitting in a very cozy spot with a fresh, warm cup of coffee and occasionally gazing out of the window at the tall pine trees in the foreground, and the mountainous forest land off in the distance. What a beautiful moment to reflect a little on this last month of Journaly development and these weekly TL;DR weekly emails/posts.
This week, I thought it would be really nice for us to do a special little community challenge together – something that gets right to the heart of Journaly's values and culture, and gives back this wonderful community.
A Correction Marathon
A while back, we built a special little filter action called "needs feedback" which allows you to, with a single click, filter your feed to only show posts that haven't received any comments. In the future, we plan to expand the criteria for "needs feedback" a little bit, but this is a great start for easily being able to find posts that need your help. You can combine this filter with language filters so that you see only posts in a language you can review and need feedback.
As of this morning, there were 212 pages of posts that need feedback, so around 1,900 posts.
I think it would be wonderful for us to come together as a community and do a little correction marathon where we do our best to clear as many of those as possible and help our Journaly family members whose posts slipped through the feed!
I have to say, one of the coolest things about Journaly is opening the feed and seeing posts in so many different languages all next to each other. I know sometimes languages that are less commonly learned don't get as much feedback, or get no feedback at all, so I was really excited to open the feed this morning and see that a new post in Finnish already had 30 comments! Sometimes I personally reach out to friends who aren't language learners but speak a more rare language to ask if they could come onto Journaly and help our some of our users who are learning their language.
If you see posts in that need feedback in a language you don't speak – especially if it's a language that you think might not have as many speakers on the platform – and you know someone who can help, perhaps you could even share Journaly with that person and see if they'd be willing to spend 15 - 30 minutes helping out!
In the future I plan to make these community efforts more robust, providing graphs and statistics that help us break down posts needing feedback by language and help us see our progress. I can even create some special badges for those of us who participate!
But for now, please join me in giving this a try and let's see how much we can help our Journaly family members.
Wishing everyone a wonderful day of Journaling and language learning. We have some very exciting new features in the works behind the scenes... trust me, you are going to love them! Stay tuned :)
Robin
Headline image by hannahbusing on Unsplash
Great update, Robin. North Caroline is some of the most beautiful country in the States. Enjoy your time there and your dad.
Nice!!
If someone commented on a post, even if they didn't correct it, will it still show on the needing feedback? I have a Danish post that never got corrected :( I've been wondering if there were no Danish users actively here, or if it just doesn't show on the filter. I always have the European Portuguese filter on to try and help out the users, even check the older posts, that sometimes got corrections from speakers of different varieties
Thank you @CocoPop! It's been really nice so far. And thanks @Lariza!
@langdinish at the moment the criteria is very simple and it just checks if the post has any comments, but as I mentioned I definitely want to improve this and make the "needs feedback" criteria more sophisticated, but it needs some careful thought for 2 primary reasons:
I'm sorry that your Danish post never got corrected :( We do have less Danish speakers on the platform at the moment, unfortunately, but let's hope someone gets you feedback as part of this community challenge! If not I can try to find someone who can help! :)
Cool idea, Robin! I participated in the marathon two days ago. (I hadn’t known about the advanced filters until then; I thought they were just linked text for whatever reason 😅)
In the future, will we be able to tag @certain_users or search for them in the search query? That idea has been on my mind for awhile.
Awesome, I'm glad that this brought some more awareness to those filters! We definitely need to improve helping users discover all the features we have, but this is a start! 😄
Yes! This is one of the most highly-requested features among those we haven't built yet, and it's on the roadmap for sure. You'll hear about that as soon as it's ready in these update posts!
@robin maybe some sort of way (like a flag or button) users could say that a post still needed correction or doesn't require further corrections? Might be easier than very specific filters with unclear values, like number of corrections, or comments, maybe
I like @langdinish’ idea.