Good afternoon from Lagos.
This is the 5th Radar community update, and a rather important one, considering the circumstances. It has been a while since I’ve posted one of these. A lot – and that is putting it mildly – has happened at BCM (Radar’s parent company) since the 4th update. The good news is that we have put much of it behind us and are now in a much better place operationally. We sincerely apologise for all the time the community has spent in limbo. We are keen to restore it as soon as possible.
To that end, we are going to change a few things.
Invite Only Sign-Ups: For the time being, new signups to Radar will only be possible through invitation by a current member who has achieved invitation privileges. Any Radar member who invites someone to join is vouching for their good behaviour, and as such, the actions of new members will reflect on their “sponsors”. We hope to curb spam and low-quality interactions in this way. I hope that we can re-open signups to everyone again at some point, but for now, we are going to focus on building a high quality and supportive community, organically.
Real People, Real Names: Going forward, Radar will be host to only real people with real names. This is building on our Entities other than humans guideline, with the goal of making Radar more people friendly.
Of course, you can use any words of your choice as username. But the names in your profile have to be your real “government” names.
All accounts that do not meet this requirement will be suspended, and their owners will be contacted via email to update their profiles. Accounts that do not comply after the stipulated grace period of 1 month (30 days) will be permanently deactivated.
This deactivation also affects accounts that represent companies, organisations or groups of individuals. Please see our 1st community update for more information on company accounts.
Hands-on Moderation: One of the biggest challenges we faced as the community grew was effective moderation. We initially hoped that the forum would self-police. When that proved to be naive, we tried to hire a full-time moderator. At the time, did not succeed. But recently, Osioke Itseuwa (@sprime) has joined us as the community manager, and we are excited that he is bringing his experience with various communities not just to ensure good behaviour but also to figure out ways to improve the experience and value that members derive from being a part of the Radar community. From here on in, moderation is going to get more hands-on. But never fear, @sprime’s blaster is set to stun by default.
Anyone can start an AMA: The goal of Radar’s AMA has always been to foster intelligent conversations. In the beginning, TechCabal team curated and hosted AMAs. You might remember this one with Gbenro Ogundipe an Uber partner/driver, and that one with Tayo Oviosu, founder and CEO of Paga, or even our very first AMA with Adii Pienaar. We now believe that any member of the community should be able to start an AMA, subject to a number of guidelines, of course.
As far as we are concerned, this is a complete reboot of Radar, and some of the changes might seem jarring. I suspect that we will make a few mistakes. But we are doing all we can to learn from the lessons of Radar’s previous iterations and make the changes as easy on everyone as we can possibly can. We encourage everyone to read the updated community guidelines. I am happy to receive your feedback as well as answer any and all questions about the future of Radar.
right. I gave up on Radar because the people that created it didn’t care. They ignored the community, dribbled around questions of “what is going on with TechCabal and/or Radar?”, enabled lots of bad behaviour by turning a blind eye, and turned deaf ears to people’s offers to help out. Plus the overlords thing.
you guys just made my day.
. Let’s tone it down for a bit.