First, I appreciate this opportunity to give feedback from a user’s perspective direct to the head of the company.
In my personal use, I would like a central console to see all the posts and unread messages from all the Discourse communities that I am a part of. This could be something like Google Mail where I switch between personal and company emails, but can stay in the same browser tab. Right now, I need to type in the URL for different communities, thus I don’t see the updates from some communities as often as I would like. This would be an even bigger need if I were to get clients that used Discourse and had to monitor multiple forums. Currently, I am in three Discourse forums that I want to monitor. One of the forums is not hosted by Discourse.
The second thing I want from a central Discourse Hub is to customize my account. There are two aspects of this:
- sharing settings similar to how I can share my settings across multiple chrome browsers with my Google account
- sharing add-ins across my Discourse communities.
The concept of a user being able to add a plug-in or extension just for themselves is new. In a browser, this exists. One of the features that I would want a user plugin for is the editor syntax highlighting. In particular, I would want to add a plugin that automatically added in line numbers.
As a user, I would also like to add in a plugin dictionary for Japanese to English language conversion.
I am also interested in tracking user threads instead of just by topic. The reason is that I think some people have more thought-provoking ideas than others. For these people, I would be interested in what they had to say across many different forums. I would like to bookmark people across multiple forums.