Steps in the right direction!

We've crossed another week off the calendar and it's time to get you all back up to date with BuddyUP. Yes, this update was meant to be published yesterday... Unfortunately, I was a little bit out of action. Nevertheless, lets not hang around any longer with the introduction, this week you are going to find out about:

• #post-finder

• #post-mark (changed & updated)

• #comic-of-the-week

Interested? Read on.

Wow, they're awesome!

Lots of people drop in and out of the BuddyUP server, which makes it difficult for us to know who is active. We already have a system in place where we de-rank members from Tetra -> Shrimp if they aren't getting involved in the community. This role has limited permissions while also putting members into a role which can be checked by our Mormyrid rank (Mormyrids approach inactive members and check in to see what took them away from the community).

So what am I getting at here?

I'm about to explain the #post-finder channel and the reason behind the creation, so I thought it would be best to address our methods for handling inactive members.

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_{snippet from our post-finder channel featuring @whack.science & @backpackingmonk}

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The channel is the first place to find the active and quality members of the BuddyUP server. We will constantly update the channel and each week we will put out a list of the active member's blogs with a short tagline stating what type of content they share.

This channel is exclusive to Gourami and above. As we stated in the last update, members who have at least achieved Gourami will be able to feature BuddyUP members posts in #the-hook so that @coachjj can select posts for our weekly feature, Hook 'Em Up. Having a channel with all the active and impressive users in it makes it easier and more efficient for us to find the members who are putting in the most effort, so we can reward them with some encouragement and exposure.

Now that's a comment!

You might have heard about our #post-mark channel from an update post a couple of weeks ago. Back then it had a focus on our members reading our BuddyUP posts then leaving a valuable comment. Although it wasn't a bad idea, it's pretty weak compared to our other powerhouse features.

#post-mark evolved

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_{source - photo by volkan olmez}

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This new idea is going to highlight members of the Steemit community who leaves incredible comments which add further value and discussion to someone elses post. We want to focus on all avenues of engagement over here at BuddyUP and the only way to do that is by focusing on posting, commenting and curating through our features.

When you find a brilliant comment on a post, you can open up the #post-mark channel where you'll find the postmark comment (with markdown included) in the pinned messages. Once you've left your comment on the post, you can paste in the postmark onto the valuable comment you've found. We will encourage you to leave a comment above the postmark so that we don't come across as mindless spammers trying to advertise our community for the wrong reasons. Below is an example of myself using the postmark comment on a fantastic comment by @johngreenfield:

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_{our post-mark on @johngreenfield's comment here}

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This channel requires a certain level of engagement that many users may not have the time for, we understand that. For this reason, we will be issuing higher levels of BUDDYUP tokens as a reward for highlighting these comments for all of us to see. The plan is to give an upvote from the BuddyUP account on the commentary and BUDDYUP tokens as a reward for the member who highlights the valuable comment.

Let's encourage the encouraging!

Time for some fun!

Some of you may be familiar with Septamus if you've been using Discord servers for a while. Septamus is an amazing bot with a mixture of different functions, but one sticks out more than all the rest...

COMICS

Septamus creates comics using the messages that have been sent into the servers channel. We have the bot restricted to #the-pond and already, we are having a lot of fun with some of the creations. It's all about timing with Septamus, so you have to be on your toes if you want to create a truly hilarious comic strip.

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_{source - photo by kyle sterk}

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What happens when you make one of this caliber?

Head on over to #comic-of-the-week and share it with us! You can do this twice a week and if the other members of the community like it, they'll leave you a reaction. The member with the most thumbs up on Sunday will receive 10 BUDDYUP tokens.

This channel will only be unlocked once you're on the BuddyUP whitelist for our BitShares token, you can find out more about that here.

Community

It's been an interesting week for us where a lot of different elements have came to light. There are a lot of fantastic communities out there in the Steemit sea which we are all part of and supporting. Before last week we had kept ourselves fairly alienated due to our focuses on growth and routine. After a shift in perspective and some different conversations with different leaders, we are going to be allocating more time each week to bring communities together.

Community is not singular.

Since this is being posted on Monday, there isn't much time to let you all know about the Drop in the Ocean show today. Our topic of the week is Context and it's already proven to be quite a difficult one to write about! If you'd like to drop by to the server and listen in to our show at 20:00 UTC, you can follow the BuddyUP SafeLink here.

To everyone who is involved and supportive of the communities growth, thank you. It makes a massive difference and gives us a considerable amount of drive to keep this place moving forward every week. We appreciate it!

We all grow together

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This has been @calumam, thanks for reading.

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All headers are credited in a reference post here

_{top image: source - photo by heidi sandstrom}