This document will provide additional explanations and reasons why things work like they do and to avoid repeating answers. The following questions and answers are related to a PHP Facebook group and some of the PHP.earth inner workings.
Facebook groups have a feature where admins can approve posts before they appear on the group timeline. Admins have already used this feature in the past and a lot of communication loss occurred.
There is no option to comment on the post before approving it. Members also soon started to ask questions why were some post approved and some not. Also, huge time delays occurred on occasion to approve posts on time.
We will definitely test future changes by Facebook in this direction and we might enable this one day though.
A very good idea would be to add custom tags to questions. For example, to categorize questions based on the skill level or context.
However, Facebook groups are not forums in the usual sense.
Admins don’t have options to edit another user’s post. Furthermore, asking every single member to add certain tag would be very time consuming and opinionated matter, what is a beginner and what is an advanced level question.
Another very good and common idea would be to split the load between multiple groups. However, managing such a large group takes a lot of volunteering time. Our quality and codex standards would also require to properly sync different teams of multiple groups properly, so for the time being, we will try to go with a single monolithic group on Facebook.
Facebook provides an automatic translation feature for some languages. In some cases, it might seem like a good idea to allow discussions in other languages as well. However, not all languages are properly supported by automatic translation tool and some words would not be translated properly. For cases, where admin actions would be required (insults, hate speech and similar), it would be impossible to properly address such situations.
People in the group are located from all over the world, so English is a standard language used for such cases.
However, PHP community provides and encourages all the support for linguistic diversity for local user groups via php.ug, where you should join, support or add your local user group with your preferred language.
Sharing private data, especially emails, phone numbers, and similar contact data is in general, a bad choice due to the fact of getting unsolicited promotion materials (spam). Group administrators take privacy very seriously, therefore the deletion of any contact details such as emails or phone numbers without research if it is for business purposes or private.
This is done for two main reasons: Avoiding spam and for educational purposes of community members to raise awareness of the privacy importance online.
Facebook has a great and secure private messaging functionality, which you should use instead of exchanging contact information publicly in comments.
Furthermore, requesting for the private data in most countries requires special handling by the law and options to opt-out.
