polymerwitch

Hi all, I wanted to let you know about an incident that happened a few days back. An individual requested to become a mod on c/Portland when they thought there was no moderators due to a federation issue. Then, an admin mistakenly made them a mod.

I reached out to the admins to let them know I was upset by such a mistake happening on their part. I also de-modded the individual, but tried to encourage them to make a post getting input from all of you about becoming a mod. I'm honestly not against them becoming a mod.

I think having more mods would actually help this place grow. If you've posted here at least a few times, and are interested in volunteering, nominate yourself below.

I doubt anyone will have any red flags to call out, but if you do contact me about it or post.

Thanks all. I hope you were able to stay cool these past few days.

** Update: I still haven't heard from any mod, but the user did get back to me though they weren't very receptive to the frustration. However, I did find out that you can remove others as mods but the option is hidden in having to click into one of their posts. So, this unique situation is resolved, but the appointing of a mod without checking if the current community is actually abandoned should still be addressed.**

A user posted on !community_requests claiming that a sub I'm a moderator of had no active mods despite the fact that I have actively been posting on there and holding a moderation discussion with the community this week. At the time of request the account was only a day old. Still, an admin proceeded to make them a mod in our community.

As far as I can tell, this was a mistake on both the user and admin's part.

Within an hour of the new mod appearing I responded to both the admin and the user politely asking them for answers about what happened. I also privately DMed the user on Matrix asking them to demod themselves and put a post up in the community petitioning to become a mod instead of just sidestepping the people who are already there.

It has now been nearly 8 hours and no admin has gotten back to me, and the user hasn't responded.

Even if this is a mistake, it gives me a lot of pause. The fact a one day old account could come and claim our community was abandoned, even though clearly it was not, and be given mod powers for hours upon hours after the mistake being reported is really scary.

Again, I think this was a mistake on both the admin and user's part, but there needs to be a better process to deal with this going forward. I'm really disappointed.___

I reserved a Deck day one within a minute and I think I might be in the initial launch (still no expected ship date listed though the payment processed and I got the confirmation email within a couple minutes). Whenever I get it, I'm hyped.

I'm not a typical user. I do enjoy handheld games, but I also am an Arch Linux user (btw), I deploy servers, I write code, blah blah blah. My current personal computer is an old T430, and I plan to use my deck as a daily driver as a desktop at home, a media center on the couch, handheld in bed, and a tablet on the go. To meet those use cases I plan to do a custom Arch install.

Is anyone else planning on doing something similar?

Some things I'm starting to plan out are:

• Some sort of custom lockscreen that can use the deck controls to unlock or an onscreen keyboard.
• E-reader mode
• Audio mode
• Kodi for media center and plex
• RetroArch for retro games
• Steam (of course)
• Removal of telemetry and possibly iptable rules to block Steam telemetry if any
• Graphical interface to do basic maintenance tasks without a keyboard (like a script launcher window). This could probably be the app launcher in gnome with some custom desktop entries