Since some days i started to work on the Community Platform for DuckDuckGo. This platform is a huge step in the world of DuckDuckGo, cause we want to offer own interfaces for people helping to contribute to DuckDuckGo, and also want to start to make a nice user experience long time for the people using this platform. You could say we longtime plan to be kind of Facebook, Twitter, or whatever, but I think out of the community driven aspect we will see where it goes.

- Who can use the community platform?

Everybody is invited to use the community platform, when its launched. You can register your account there or via our XMPP and then login to the platform.

- Is it free?

Everything will be free and stay free for the users. The target is to build up a community portal people can rely on and also can feel safe with our not tracking policy.

- Will it offering features for the search engine itself?

Middleterm we plan to also give you the possibility to bind configuration for the search engine to your user account, so that you can customize the experience on DuckDuckGo for yourself. Still we will not bind or track any request specific to the user.

- What ways of contribution to DuckDuckGo will the community platform offer to me?

In the first "run" we will head to offering a translation interface, so that you can all start to translate DuckDuckGo and all our sites into YOUR language. I will make another post about the translation interface soon, to explain what is the plan there, but I like todo this with some screenshots, so that we can discuss this plan with all of you users! :) We also will implement a screenshot uploader so that you can help us finding bugs on the interface more easily.

Later we will offer more options to help us on the quality of the search engine, like ranking of results or tagging spam. We will see where we go from here, the plans will evolve with the platform.

- What other services you plan todo? DO WE FINALLY GET EMAIL???

No :(. So far we sadly dont have a solid plan for offering email services, but we hope we can minimum make an email redirect for @dukgo.com for you.

We also want to offer a url-shorten service at http://ddg.gg/ for the public (so not bound to being registered at dukgo.com). In addition we offer that you can bind all other services to our platform, like Facebook, Twitter and co. to directly interact with those services over our platform.

More services will come, but we want to go step by step here. Highest priority is the translation interface.

- Can I do something already now???

We are in a very very early development stage, you can see the current code here https://github.com/duckduckgo/community-platform and you can test it on our so called view-stage. The "view" is a duplicated system which is our testing environment for the new features. It's an independent XMPP server running on view.dukgo.com and additional offering under http://view.dukgo.com/ the current situation for testing. So far we are still in VERY early startup, so there is REALLY nothing much to see, and you dont need to report the problems you see so far. We will make an official launch for a public beta and then put the system live for the world :).

- Can I help contributing to the platform itself already?

Of course you can! If you can code Perl or wanna learn how to code Perl you are always invited to visit us on IRC at #duckduckgo irc.freenode.net and ask if you can help us. We also need all kind of other people like graphicans, or interface designer. We are VERY open for help here! Please contact us on IRC or email us at open@duckduckgo.com to get involved! You can also contact me of course via XMPP/Jabber on getty@duckduckgo.com or join the XMPP/Jabber conference room at duckduckgo@conference.dukgo.com! :)

PLEASE: Do not contact us if you want to translate the platform NOW, wait till we official start the platform, then you get all instructions and informations you need to just start translating the platform itself, DuckDuckGo and our other sites (donttrack.us, dontbubble.us)! It will be a very easy procedure :).