It seems like we’ve been making a nice progress in having this forum ready for announcement. I’ve gone through everything and found some final tweaks that I think could be important (or nice) to have before the launch. We also have to get a consensus on Importing qubes-users discussions.
@michael sorry to make you take a look at more settings, but I promise it’s the final look (at least from my part).
change title - It’s currently “Qubes OS”. I think it should be “Qubes Community” or “Qubes Forum” or something.
enable allow user locale - Allow users to choose their own language interface preference. Might be nice especially since the forum is welcoming localized discussions.
enable hide user profiles from public - Disable user cards, user profiles and user directory for anonymous users.
Even though the forum is public, I think user cards could require a login as a privacy concern. This would avoid anonymous crawling of user profile information.
disable log anonymizer details - Whether to keep a user’s details in the log after being anonymized. When complying to GDPR you’ll need to turn this off.
disable share anonymized statistics - even though telemetry is useful, we know anonymity is hard and so I think people in this community would me more pleased with this disabled.
Changes to categories
#documentation category may be now redundant with the #user-support. I would propose we have a pinned topic in #user-support instead referring users to the official documentation.
prevent non-admins from posting in #news - I can’t confirm if this is done
ordering - regarding the ordering, it is currently reordering the categories automatically according to the activity they have. I think that will be fine as long as the colors of the two dominant categories don’t clash.
coloring - even though this is a matter of personal opinion,
colors could be more diversified - Currently #news#user-support#documentation#website are all with the same color.
subcategories to have same color as parent category - Not all forums do this but I think it looks nicer (see signal, mozilla)
With these proposals it would look something like this
This is a minor thing, but the current theme is named “Light” and so when the user goes to the user settings to select the theme it shows two options called light. @michael could you rename it to “Qubes”?
It will also avoid confusion in case an admin wants to tweak the theme in the future.
Privacy policy
The current one is discourse’s default. I think this could be looked at.
thanks @deeplow, i’ve implemented all these recommendations! still trying to figure out how best to have the privacy policy given this is hosted by Discourse, and including the general Qubes OS website policy.
Thanks a lot @michael, for implementing these changes. I have some follow-up feedback on categories and coloring.
Categories
I forgot to mention one thing. I’d say the "#forum-feedback and #website could be merged under a “Feedback” category. What do you think? (the picture bellow has an example of that)
Coloring
Regarding colors, I don’t want to sound opinionated since it is something subjective and I know I was the one asking for more color diversity but I find the current category colors don’t sit too well with each-other (namely the purple with the green and the magenta). But I welcome feedback from others.
hey deeplow,
i’ve merged the feedback topics which is a great suggestion. i’ve also changed the colors of the topics. also you should have some new powers now if you want to explore any further tweaks
ok thanks! i actually had tried to see if we could create a dummy system account that could be the publisher of the RSS feed - is that possible? then my user can just be posting things i actually write.
For sure. The @system account already exists for that exact purpose
I went ahead and changed all the posts in News to @system instead. So now all the stuff there should not be published as you. And configured the RSS polling plugin to publish as @system for future posts.
Do you also want me to changed the ownership of all the “About the X category” posts to be made as system?
Either way would be fine with me. Website + social media announcement would probably increase uptake, but the most involved and active users are already on qubes-users. Do you have a preference?
I suppose I’m slightly leaning toward the soft launch on just qubes-users.
a bit of the issue is that Qubes users who don’t like mailing lists (and so may like the Discourse forum) are likely not going to be reading qubes-users to view such an announcement. they would more likely be on our reddit & Twitter I think.
so we could do soft launch and then a month later announcement to the other platforms (website, reddit, twitter)?
Ok. @adw@michael I have now disabled the need for manual approval.
I should also note that all new users until we’re 50 will have automatically trust level 1 (since we’re in bootstrap mode) after that new users will start from trust level 0.
. I guess it’s pretty much ready. Let’s just have some final consensus as to what we should do about 
.