Learnings from setting up neighborhood community on Digital Ocean

[tobiaseigen]

It’s been a while since I created a new site on DO. Now that Yahoo Groups is shutting down completely, I thought I’d take the opportunity to move the yahoo group I created for my neighborhood 14 (!!) years ago to Discourse. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while but the time seems ripe, also because I want to citizen more. I want to do more to bring people around me together as a community. In my neighborhood, we spend more time at home because of COVID, but we still don’t connect as much as you might expect to give each other mutual support and comfort.

I set up the new site using the official 30 minute install instructions, on Digital Ocean. The site was up and working great within a few hours, with outgoing email on my mailgun account and incoming mail set up using Configure direct-delivery incoming email for self-hosted sites with Mail-Receiver. I allow signup with approval required, and require people to provide their street address via a custom field so I can verify they live here.

I sent an email to the yahoo group to inform everyone of the transition and invite early adopters to come have a look and help me seed discussions so there’s more to look at when the rest of the neighbors sign up. Next week I will invite everyone so I can chase them down individually. Hopefully I’ll get everybody before 15 December! So far the response has been fairly enthusiastic and I’ve gotten a few signups.

As shared on the yahoo group.

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 7:04 PM Tobias Eigen wrote:

Dear neighbors,

Not only is it the end of a long week from which we all deserve a break…

… but it’s the end of an era! After a 20 year run, Yahoo Groups is shutting down. This means this mailing list will soon stop working. Details are in the announcement below.

To make sure we remain connected as a neighborhood community, I have set up a new home for us at nnn. This is a completely private community on my personal server, so won’t cost us anything or expose us to annoying targeted advertising or distractions from outside our community. I think you’re going to love it.

Next week I will send out invitations to everyone currently on the yahoo group to ask you to come and join the new community. It will be a quick and easy thing for you to click a link to accept the invitation and set up your account. After that, you need not log in again - you will be able to post to nnn to reach out to everyone, or reply to emails you receive. You can also opt out of further replies to specific emails that don’t interest you.

But you can also log in if you like if you want to connect around activities, access and share resources, and share “just for fun” posts with jokes, anecdotes or photos from the neighborhood. You can also configure your notification preferences so you get just the level of engagement you want.

If you’re the early adopter type, feel free to click here to request access now! I’d be happy to welcome you to help me get the site all set up and ready for everybody. I’d appreciate it!

Happy to talk to anyone with questions or concerns about this transition - just drop me a line. Thanks!

Tobias

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Yahoo <info@service.comms.yahoo.net>
Date: Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 10:17 PM
Subject: Announcing the Shut Down of Yahoo Groups
To: nnn

Dear Yahoo Group Moderators and Members,

We launched Yahoo Groups 20 years ago to connect people around their shared interests. We helped our users navigate new towns, keep in touch with college friends, learn new skills, and most importantly, build connections they may have lost or never had in the first place. While we could not have been more proud of what we accomplished together, we are reaching out today with heavy hearts to let you know that we have decided to shut down Yahoo Groups on December 15, 2020.

Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Over that same period we’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content. To that end, we must sometimes make difficult decisions regarding products that no longer fit our long-term strategy as we hone our focus on other areas of the business.

Beginning December 15, 2020 the Yahoo Groups website will shut down and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. We’ve compiled a comprehensive FAQ here that includes alternative providers and information on how this will impact your group content.

Thank you for helping us build one of the earliest digital communities — we’re proud and honored to have forged countless connections over the last 20 years and played a small part in helping build your communities.

Sincerely,
The Yahoo Groups team
Terms of Service Privacy Policy Customer Support
©2020 Verizon Media. All Rights Reserved.
701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Here’s what my site looks like now. I chose papyrus for the logo because I am hoping an opinionated neighbor will be motivated to replace it with something slicker. Hope that happens, because… papyrus!

I’ve done some minimal setup to create a category for all neighbors that is equivalent to the yahoo group, plus additional categories to provide space for more engagement without burdening all neighbors with so many emails. Also dropped in some resources and activities that I’ve been holding (and not moving forward on) for too long and am looking forward to sharing with neighbors. Hopefully this will lead to increased engagement and progress.

Some things I noticed along the way:

1. The install instructions have only gotten better! It’s so easy to spin up a droplet and install discourse. The instructions are foolproof.

2. Along the way, I set up 2fa using google authenticator app and a personal ssh key at digital ocean. These have also become so much easier since the last time I did this, and it makes logging in more secure and easier.

3. From past experience, I prefer Configure direct-delivery incoming email for self-hosted sites with Mail-Receiver which does not require setting up a POP3 inbox somewhere for incoming email. I know the POP3 inbox is easier and is “set and forget” but it means delays and is just one more vector. Also, with direct delivery you can have email addresses for categories like justforfun@mydiscourse.mysite.com instead of mysite+justforfun@gmail.com. These instructions have also become way easier and are just about foolproof. The only two things that I found a bit confusing are:

   • you have to set MX records for the domain pointing to your discourse IP. If you already had MX records for the domain, as was the case for me with mailgun, you need to delete them. You DO need to set the SPF and DKIM records to point to mailgun, since they are sending your email and you need to tell the world that they are legit. This is not clearly explained in the instructions.
   • the ./launcher rebuild mail-receiver or ./launcher start mail-receiver commands were failing. The error included something about the server hostname. Renaming the hostname so it is short and has no hyphens resolved it.

4. In the setup wizard, there is a bug on the step to invite staff. I added two users to invite, but was unable to submit the form without adding a third email address or going back and returning to add them again. I was not immediately able to replicate this later… I think it has to do with the “add” button - once you decide to add a third email address, you can’t reverse that decision.

5. I wanted to have a default light and dark theme, which I know is possible and will work great, respecting light/dark mode on devices. It was only possible to choose one theme in the setup wizard, and then after that in the admin settings the interface for adding a theme and setting up the color scheme was confusing. It would be pretty cool if the setup wizard could facilitate the previewing and selecting of both light and dark theme.

6. By default, the title is the discourse pencil shaded logo with “Discourse”. If I am not ready to upload a logo, it seems to me the title should just default to empty so it displays the site name, with no pencil shaded logo. Also, the suggested dimensions for the logo are “greater than 3:1”. I’d suggest changing this suggestion to a min/max suggested ratio. To be safe, I went with 3:1 which makes for a too-small text. It would be nice to know the max safe dimensions recommended.

[bobbysmith]

Thanks for all of these tips. Sharing these sorts of learnings is very helpful.

I installed Discourse via DO’s 1-click app a while ago. Everything works very well so far, but I am now reading a few different topics that suggest the one-click app is not supported by the meta community. I was under the impression, mistakenly apparently, that the 1-click app thing was a Discourse ‘product’ (for lack of a better term).

I also read in the basic Discourse install instructions that if we use those instructions and install via the recommended Docker install (which is what I thought DO’s one click app was doing) then nginx was already configured. I would really like to have nginx configured but do not know if it is because I installed via the 1-click app.

My site is still in development. Is it worth creating a new droplet and installing ‘manually’ via the guide and then redoing all my settings etc. or is the DO 1-click app procedure OK? I am careful to always install the updates that Discourse tells me are available and they always seem to work (once Docker is updated).

[justinm]

@tobiaseigen I’m curious to hear if you have any more lessons to share since you’ve started your local community.
Are you still running it? Do you feel like it’s bringing you closer with your neighbors?

I’m going down the same road of starting a local community for a sports league and I’m having some trouble getting it off the ground.
I’d love to hear how you’re drawing people into your forums to contribute

[merefield (Robert)]

This might also interest you @justinm :

Any Home Owner Association Users?

I ran one for my apartment development which began as a Yahoo group and ended up on Discourse. People appreciated: the ability to search prior conversations and post media. Many appreciated the relative independence from big tech and some said they were not on Facebook and would never want to use it had it been hosted there having homeowner meeting minutes and decisions posted online. having material available for new residents so they can find their feet in their new location. …

[tobiaseigen]

Yes, I am still maintaining the site. I do think it helps alot to keep us better connected, though it’s fairly quiet most of the time. People tend to post when they need help with a lost package or a missing pet, etc, and the responsiveness in these times of “emergency” is impressive. They typically post via an “all neighbors” category set up to send an email to every member for every post. The other categories all have typical notification levels so people only get emailed when they are participating.

There are some people who log in more regularly to post but it’s fairly intermittent. One neighbor created a “free for the taking” topic, which I liked.

Chat has also been interesting for reaching out directly to people instead of calling them or sending them a text. Yesterday I saw on craigslist that someone nearby was giving away chicks and I sent a chat to a neighbor who keeps chickens (and shares eggs with me!) to let him know. He was emailed, logged in and replied.

Now that I am community manager in charge of the Discourse community I am learning new super powers that I am considering putting to work in my neighborhood forum! But for now I’ve been satisfied just keeping it running in the background with minimal effort, and responding when others take initiative.

If I were to do more, it would be to:

• meet up with some of the more active members to browse the site together and decide on how we want to set it up and use it
• try to recruit some more moderators to help manage the community and stimulate activity
• organize activities that interest me using the forum (eg block party, trash cleanup, bus shelter gardening, emergency prep, etc etc)
• look for other initiatives happening outside the forum and reach out to people organizing them, and let them know about the forum

Here’s what the site looks like to me now, on the horizon theme:

[justinm]

Thanks for the reply Tobias!

One thing I’ve learned from kickstarting a local community is that QR codes are an extremely powerful tool for sharing the forums with others.
I set up my forums so that they’re invite-only and inaccessible to users that aren’t logged in.
In order to onboard people, I just create an invite code, turn it into a QR code, and share that with people directly.
Works really great for parties and other in-person gatherings.

This also allows me to straight up bypass the problem of bots and spam accounts - the people behind these accounts (usually foreigners in other countries) are almost certainly never going to be physically present at an in-person gathering.

One other question Tobias: do most of your neighbors still check their email?
I’m facing the problem that pretty much nobody in my community really uses their email anymore. They have an email and they check it for 2FA codes, but that’s it.
They don’t see any of the notifications generated by Discourse and they’re not coming back.

I’m trying to work around this by explicitly instructing people to turn on live notifications, and this works really well for Android users but not iPhone users.

[merefield (Robert)]

Yeah QR codes are brill. I put them on business cards.

[justinm]

That’s awesome! The only thing missing is that there isn’t a way to generate a QR code straight from the invite UI.
That’d make it really easy for anyone in my forums to generate an invite code and show it to people on the spot (rather than following a tutorial and using an external QR code generator).

This plugin gets very close, but it looks like the invite UI is not extensible

[tobiaseigen]

@justinm

The only thing missing is that there isn’t a way to generate a QR code straight from the invite UI.
That’d make it really easy for anyone in my forums to generate an invite code and show it to people on the spot (rather than following a tutorial and using an external QR code generator).

@justinm that would make a great new Feature topic, where we can brainstorm together what QR codes on invites would look like and how we might implement it. I can think of a bunch of people who would be interested!

@justinm

do most of your neighbors still check their email?
I’m facing the problem that pretty much nobody in my community really uses their email anymore. They have an email and they check it for 2FA codes, but that’s it.
They don’t see any of the notifications generated by Discourse and they’re not coming back.

I’m trying to work around this by explicitly instructing people to turn on live notifications, and this works really well for Android users but not iPhone users.

This is a legit concern and I appreciate you raising it. I face this issue with many neighbors. But still we get a decent response in some cases (eg missing cats) so I am assuming people are mostly still reading their email, and those who are reading are able to pass on news to those who don’t. I just had a look at the numbers and my neighborhood forum has 60 members, and only about half have participated in the last year. Not great numbers.

I have a forum for my family too and getting my son to check discourse is like pulling teeth. He will check instagram and whatsapp and tiktok and any manner of social media apps he has on his phone, but to then also check discourse to join a conversation about whether we should get a cat door is a bridge too far, it seems.

I think the answer to that has to be incentive. As community managers, we have to offer compelling reasons for folks to regularly log in. Without that, our members will not get into the habit we will not get the regular habit of participation. That goes back to the list of things I was proposing to start doing. I think having some events on the calendar and shared activities to engage in together that are being led by somebody else will draw even the quietest people out. You just have to keep trying different things.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@justinm

The only thing missing is that there isn’t a way to generate a QR code straight from the invite UI.

I made this GitHub - literatecomputing/discourse-qrcode-theme-component: Add QRcode to composer to generate qr codes in posts. I think it should be possible to make a theme component that will generate qr codes for invites.

[Andrew_Rowe]

I love the QR code plug in and purchased a label/sticker printer to print with QR codes because it is a great bridge between the virtual world (the internet) and the IRL - (in real life) realm