Looking good so far. Bot seems to be happy, 2FA was added OK. Categories seem pertinent.
May I suggest that on the user support section that the actual text from “discussion guidelines” and “code of conduct” are made into their own sticky posts within the forum at the top (or perhaps the actual text directly included in “read before posting”). Rather than just links to the main docs?
In terms of the user support category, depending on how busy things get you may want to consider splitting out into sub categories.
I think having a discourse instance can be quite helpful as a lot of people are not familiar with mailing-lists and the whole experience might be a bit daunting.
category for discussion - I think it could be useful to have a section where people can share best-practices, new ideas, etc. as opposed to one with just user support.
theming - I think the forum colors could be matched to the qubes website.
Also, regarding category structuring it is my experience that things often grow organically. It may be good to have some base categories, but as people make use of the forum, we’ll see what categories are needed and which ones are under-used.
… and the people who want to use it like a mailing list can do so
easily. All my concerns about Discourse are alleviated.
I do like very much that this will allow us to have categories for
different languages. This will avoid every language having their own
destination and increase discoverability for all.
I recently realized that the Whonix Forum runs Discourse and it seems to
work quite will for them.
Yes! And the signal community also uses discourse and I quite like their breakdown of categories and styling. This forum can take some inspiration from there.
hey all, thanks for your feedback! I’m sorry for being slow on implementing suggestions, I’m trying to spread the responsibility out a bit more so please let me know if you are interested in helping out.
I’ve implemented all suggestions here and in the related email thread I think, please flag anything I’ve missed. I emailed the Discourse support team and got the discourse-rss-polling plug-in enabled, it should be pushing new content to the News section. I haven’t changed the color theme because honestly I don’t know how to make them match more the website (which is white & blue) – please check out the theme options and see if you find something better.
re: other discourses, my initial understanding was that we don’t want development discussions to be happening on the forum since the dev community prefers the qubes-devel mailing list. so maybe feature requests and development discussions stay off the forum for now? they can also exist on Github.
I’m not sure if this already comes installed on the official hosting (if it is just skip to step 5.) If not it’s pretty easy to install since it is a theme component and not a plugin. All you have to do is:
i have installed it and enabled it in the theme, you can see it in use here: Read Before Posting
regarding our approach to plug-ins, since we are on free hosting from Discourse, they limit us to only using the most common plug-ins & theme components, and if we want something they don’t offer then the only solution is to self-host. so that will keep us from installing any 3rd-party plug-ins or theme components for now. obviously is there is something that we think is essential then we can re-evaluate the decision to use Discourse’s free hosting.
icon when editing a post like so: