Final tweaks before launch

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).

What do others think about these changes?

Changes to settings

Tweak some settings in the admin area.

  • 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

Theming

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.

qubes-theme-name

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.

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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)

qubes-feedback


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.

Image of the current version:

My color proposal would be the one on the picture in the first post:

Some of the resoning for the palette:

  • On this one the two main categories’ colors won’t clash (I think the main ones will be use support and general discussion)
  • Other categories even if their position is changed still looks fine.
  • These colors should be on the palette of predefined colors for categories
Category Color
Feedback #808281
User Support #f7941d
General Discussion #12a89d
News #0088cc
In your language #652d90

But, again, this is just a matter of preference and the above is just a suggestion.

Thanks again for all the work @michael!

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 :wink:

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Hey Michael!

Perfect :slight_smile:. I guess it’s pretty much ready. Let’s just have some final consensus as to what we should do about Importing qubes-users discussions - #9 by deeplow and then we’ll be ready to :rocket:.

Oh wow! Thanks so much Michael! This definitely makes it easier.
And with great power comes great responsibility - just enabled 2FA.

If I find additional tweaks, I’ll make sure to mention them in the staff category also, for further feedback.

@michael you must have forgotten this one. I’ve just implemented it.

  • admins: post / reply / see (the rss polling plugin is posting under your username so it should be fine)
  • everyone: reply / see

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 :slight_smile:

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?

sure that sounds good! good idea :slight_smile:

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Consider it done :slight_smile: Unless I missed something, no post should have your name if you didn’t create it explicitly.

great! I think that might be everything, no?

@adw shall we draft an announcement/news post and put on website & qubes-users/announcments and link from twitter? or soft launch just on qubes-users?

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)?

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Sounds good to me.

I forgot to ask @adw will we have the manual signup approval on the launch?

ah good question – I think new users should be automatically approved, not have to wait for manual approval.

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I agree with making it automatic! :slight_smile:

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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.