As of today the delete account feature has been re-enabled on #QOTO. You no longer need to email a moderator to have your account deleted.
As some of you know we had previously removed this account because many users complained when they could not recover their account later. Since this feature provides ample warning we feel that mistake is on the user and ultimately this is overall a good decision.
Please be careful when using this feature and be aware of the consequences.
We would like to announce Moderator nominations for June 2020!
We will be selecting a new moderator to join our team this month and we encourage all QOTO users to voice their nominations and votes.
The moderator team has collectively chosen to nominate @Sphinx for the position but as always the moderation process is an open one and any user can nominate themselves or another for the position.
We welcome users to visit the discourse forum and either lend their support to a nominated user, nominate your own, or offer criticism to an existing nomination. These are decisions that effect all of us so now is the time for your voice to be heard.
https://discourse.qoto.org/t/nomination-for-moderator-june-2020/272
Important QOTO announcement!
We are currently debating language rule changes in our Discourse forum. The current direction is that we may eforce in the next day a english-only rule for the server (though likely we will make an exception for accounts that are already established on the server that dont speak english). We havent made the decision final yet but we will be in the next day.
Please, if this topic is important to you please contribute to the conversation on our Discourse forum. So far no one has objected but if anyone does we would like to hear from you..
https://discourse.qoto.org/t/final-proposal-restricting-posts-on-qoto-to-english-only/226
QOTO has now moved to closed-registrations. Users are free to invite friends to the server whom will be given priority. All future users will be screened for acceptance.
In one month our GitLab instance will have been running for a whole year.
We just upgraded our license and activated it. We have Ultimate (usually costs 100$ per user per month) for another year, free to all our users. Enjoy!
the #QOTO ToS has been officially been updated after an in depth conversation with the community.
No policy changes occur, we have simply changed the wording to more accurately reflect the moderation policies we have always upheld.
Be kind, be respectful, and you will always have a place here!
You can see our new ToS here: https://qoto.org/about/more
All of #QOTO's services have recently been upgraded to their latest versions. Let us know if you see any problems. Below is the full list of effected services.
NextCloud - https://cloud.qoto.org
GitLab - https://git.qoto.org
GitLab pages (including user hosted pages) - https://*.qoto.io
FunkWhale - https://audio.qoto.org
PeerTube - https://video.qoto.org
Discourse - https://discourse.qoto.org
#fediverse #mastodon #gitlab #git #STEM #Science #Software #programming #CS #nextcloud #funkwhale #peertube #discourse
Did you know #QOTO has one of the highest user retention rate of any server in the fediverse?
We do not and have never deleted inactive accounts. Despite this ~25% of our registered users are still active after over 2 years of operation. Compare this to most other servers and we see typically a retention of ~10% or less.
To me this is the most important statistic to measure the health and success of a server, ultimately it tells me the people who come to QOTO ultimately enjoy it here and want to stay!
As pointed out by our moderator @design_RG There are two different ways to view Remote Timelines in QOTO and they behave very differently so its important to understand the difference.
The first way is Domain Subscription, you access this through your preferences under the follower section. Using these settings you can create special lists that pull in an instances local timeline. When you use this setting the list starts empty and it populates it as QOTO sees posts from users from that server in our federated feed. This option may not show the entire timeline.
The other way is what Rob explains in the quoted post, is to go to a user's toots and click the properties button, from there you can pull up the remote timeline as a column in your local QOTO UI. This feed uses the remote instances API to directly to pull up their local timeline. You can even pint he column if you want to keep it. This has the advantage of being a more complete timeline but if the remote server has this feature turned off you may not be able to view it all. Obviously the remote server needs to support it, most servers do however.
We updated the mascot in the lower-left corner of the web interface. Instead of using the Mastodon elephant it is now a drawing of some lab equipment.
I hope this helps remind people that everyone who comes to this instance is a STEM professional or enthusiast. We will update this from time to time with different STEM themes.
One of our moderators @design_RG wrote this excellent article on the QOTO discourse server that explains all the new features in QOTO along with screen shots and a detailed explanation of how to use it. Its worth a read if your feeling a bit confused:
https://discourse.qoto.org/t/qoto-org-new-january-2020-features-added-detailed-descriptions/192
For anyone not on the QOTO instance or doesnt use the web interface here is a screenshot of what the instance ticker looks like in the feed. Its optional and can be turned off by why would you want to!
The colors are based on what instance a user uses, red and yellow for QOTO, white and blue for mastodon, gold and grey for Pleorma. The icon is the favicon used for the server and updated every few days.
The QOTO instance ticker accidentally introduced into the other themes have been removed/fixed. Should be back to normal. Refresh your browser if needed, if your on the default theme or a ticker theme you will see the new QOTO colors otherwise things should look like the classic theme again if your not on a theme with tickers.
Enjoy!
Minor Update just went down to the instance ticker. The qoto.org instance ticker now has its own custom icon and colors. Since we are a significant fork from vanilla mastodon it made sense that we have our own unique colors to represent QOTO instance and derivatives.
Please let us know if anyone sees any unintended side effects or if anyone doesnt like the new change. We can always fix it.
We are back from a successful upgrade!
Only one new feature this time. We added Instance Ticker headers in the default theme. It is now much easier to see which server someone is from and what software that server runs beneath a persons name.
If you dont like the new default tickers and preferred the old theme you can set it in the themes to use the default theme without tickers.
Enjoy the new feature.
Sometime a bit later today we will do a minor server update. The functionality being addressed:
1) Adding instance ticker symbols below usernames to easily identify what server they come from (can be turned off)
2) Fixing the spelling from Qoto to QOTO where it occurs in the UI.
We only posts announcements here and occasionally use polls to help us make decisions that effect our user base.
We don't usually respond quickly to direct messages to this account. If you need help with anything related to the QOTO servers, including moderation, then please contact one of our administrators. They are listed out about page: