Discourse growing pains

Haskell Foundation Working Group
#1

As I’m learning a new communications medium (Discourse), I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks. I’m posting here to see whether there are solutions and/or configuration necessary in order to make Discourse work even better.

  1. I wrote a longish post that Discourse rejected for having too many links. It seems I need more “merit” with Discourse to be able to post links. Yet I think systems of merit don’t really belong in the primary communications medium of a project such as the HF. Is there a way to disable this feature, at least within this write-restricted category? (To be clear: my post wasn’t within this write-restricted category – it was in the public HF category, but my argument remains.)

  2. Perhaps along similar lines, I was writing a post where I used the very helpful “quote” feature within Discourse: whenever I select text in a post, a button appears allowing me to quote that text in my response – this is fantastic. Yet after I had done so a few times, the button stopped appearing. Is this another feature around my lack of merit in the system?

  3. This conversation here is happening within a category of a general Haskell Discourse instance. It would be easy for a casual reader to confuse “official” HF traffic with general Haskell traffic. In particular, the HF traffic is governed by the Guildelines for Respectful Communication, while I’m not aware of a set of guidelines for non-HF traffic. This problem may be harder to solve… or perhaps it would make me happy for the whole instance to formally adopt the GRC.

Thanks!

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#2

I have been pointed to the very helpful https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/ which describes Discourse’s merit system. I see the (worthy) goal of this. Is it the right thing for the HF? Maybe. In any case, I had not known about this previously, and it’s helpful to see it spelled out.

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#3

I’d love to have a wiki page, where we can collaborate to collect guidance about how to use the Haskell Discourse.

Where would be a good place for such a wiki? Simply the one at haskell.org?

Simon

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#4

Where would be a good place for such a wiki? Simply the one at haskell.org 2?

@simonpj This has been on the back burner for a little while as several of us have been focused on HF work lately, but there was some discussion and broad community agreement around deprecating the existing haskell wiki. That decision certainly merits it’s own thread, but in light of that I would propose that we consider some alternative place to centralize documentation on how to get involved with the HF. I think either the haskell foundation website or perhaps github could be a good source for that.

I don’t want to hijack the thread here but perhaps there’s some value to figuring out what a document might look like that gives people a nice introduction to all of the different ways we communicate along with hints on how to make best use of the tools. Between the mailing lists, discourse, the working group and other public meetings, and conversations happening on github, there’s quite a big surface area to learn about for someone who is interested in getting involved.

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#5

Is it possible to increase the size of this composition window. It’s only six lines tall!

Thanks

Simon

#6

Indeed it is. You can either drag the blue “frame” above the text box (indicated by two horizontal lines to invoke the notion of a “handle”) or use the “expander” button on the right side of the pane to expand the composition window to the entire height of the browser frame.

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#7

I agree that this sounds undesirable. @jaspervdj, is there any way we can disable or even selectively override this merit mechanism? Past discussions suggest that it is possible to set the initial trust level for new users. Perhaps this is a good enough approximation. Of course, this may come at a cost: spam is a perpetual problem.

#8

I’ve set the trust level higher for members of the working group. Hopefully this will solve the issue!

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Text Maintainers: Meeting Minutes 2021-04-15
#9

Thanks Ben. Somehow I missed that.

Simon

#10

Where would be a good place for such a wiki? Simply the one at haskell.org?

This has been on the back burner for a little while as several of us have been focused on HF work lately, but there was some discussion and broad community agreement around deprecating the existing haskell wiki.

Thanks Rebecca. It’s good to hear that some active thinking is going into this.

But in the interim, would it be acceptable to start a wiki page on the existing haskell.org wiki, where we can collaborate to add info about how to use the Haskell DIscourse, and more broadly to describe the Haskell community’s communication channels? We could then transfer it to the New Thing in due course.

Would anyone else like to help?

Simon