Hello everyone,
We just concluded our first ever community call (after the hackathon last year). It was great to see others again and meet a new person!
After a round of introductions we started off with some updates about the project. We discussed the progress towards the release of 2.5, where @ByteHamster also shared how he typically decides when the new version comes out of beta (in short: a mix of time availability and number/type of bugs in the latest beta). The second ‘news’ was about the release of the French version of the website which is about to happen tomorrow.
Then we moved to a discussion about the episode states from the other thread. There I believe the conclusion was that the previously proposed update to the states (renaming ‘New’ which may be misleading and introducing an ‘Ignored’ state) could be OK, but that we need to consider also the use-case of adding a new podcast. Currently, when adding a podcast, old episodes would not be all marked as New/Inbox which is problematic for serial podcasts that you want to listen from the beginning.
There was also some discussion on whether the new states (upgrade of the New screen) should be done before/after or together with tackling Autodownload improvements - no real conclusion there. In any case we’re all volunteers and working based on our interest, so we’ll have to see how it evolves 
(There already is a PR for the states & upgraded New screen, but there’s some edge cases that cause issues.)
The last 20 minutes or so we discussed about community development, and particularly (online) meetings: how they could engage existing contributors, encourage one-time contributors to come back, or activate interested regular users to become more active in some shape or form. There were ideas for different formats (like community calls, hackathons, user forums) and frequencies.
In the end we decided to give a monthly schedule a try. Some of these meetings can have a specific focus and a different name to appeal to a different audience. Given the frequency we’ll keep them to an hour. After a while we can reflect if it woks nice or if we want to try something different. The goal is that the community feels engaged and confident enough so that not all core contributors feel like they should contribute to and join all meetings. And we should announce dates & times more in advance so it’s easier for people to join.
So, to that end, we decided to already agree to pick the day for the next call, and then check in with others for the exact time. But more on that in the new forum thread that we’ll create for it!