Depending where you poke around on the KivaFriends site and how you navigate here, you have probably come across an occasional thread title highlighted in the "Most Popular Topic (as of right now)" section on the main page which made you go, "Huh? I've never seen that thread, what in the world is going on?" (Like, right now there's a thread title there for a thread that only four people on KF have seen.)
I realized in the past week that it might be a good idea to explain what's going on here. What you're seeing is little tiny bits and pieces of the things that go on in the back room among the site moderators as we try to handle the requests we receive every day, and try to keep the forum a welcoming and civil place to interact.
As you all know, there is a team of volunteer moderators here (currently me, Peter S, Wolfgang (wthepoo), and Kerry (waywardcats)). Every day we receive applications to join KivaFriends, and before we approve these, we look them over and exercise some due diligence to try to minimize the number of scammers whom we end up approving. (As many of you know, there have been some who've sneaked through, and who either post or send PMs or show up in chat to ask for money. We shut them down promptly, but if we can sniff out some of them before they're approved, all the better.) Joe set up long ago a separate moderators-only board where we can hold discussions about applications, techniques, etc. In most parts of the site (including the list of "Recent Posts"), non-moderators won't see anything about those discussion threads. HOWEVER.... in ONE PLACE we know of on the site, the "Most Popular Topic" indicator, Joe either was unable to strip out moderator-only threads from that field or maybe neglected to do so. It's been on the list of things we've asked him to do for a while now, but he is not a frequent visitor here, so it hasn't been fixed (if it even can be fixed).
This past week, with the introduction of Kiva loans in the USA, the moderators had MANY applications for KivaFriends membership to consider, and quite a few of those were explicit in stating that they were joining so they could ask about how to sign up for a loan for themselves. We'd been working on how to deal with those pending memberships in the best and most tactful way and had several other issues we'd been discussing, all of which involved a lot of back-and-forth. Since we have two relatively new moderators, we've been taking extra time to discuss issues in more detail to be sure everyone is comfortable. This has made some of these threads show up in the "Most Popular Topic" field, prompting this explanation from me. We've started to put "(moderator discussion)" at the end of our thread titles so it will be clear what it's all about and why you haven't seen the threads in question, but that's only a recent development.
So in short, until Joe fixes this, you may occasionally see an unfamiliar thread title showing up on the main page as "Most Popular". We'll try to identify our threads as "(moderator discussion)" but even if that's not appended, you should probably assume that a thread you can't find to look at is a moderator-only thread where we're doing boring grunt work to keep the gears oiled around here.
And I'm not trying to be funny when I say there's usually nothing to see there, so you might as well move along.
thanks, and sorry for any confusion,
--Diane.
(for the rest of the moderating team)
