Here’s a Wiki post that I started two years ago when I became a moderator on my (closed) forum. I kept bookmarking topics here on Meta and other sites that were useful, and tried to keep track of links fellow moderators sent to me, and it was a mess.
Decided to start this Wiki to keep track of and organize them, and now to share it here in case others may find it useful–either as a collection of links or an idea to collect your own useful links. I’m posting in Documentation/Moderators, please move if this isn’t the right place. (and fix tag)
Also, I love being able to add sections to the sidebar, I added links to my most referenced and of course this Wiki is at the top:
Here’s the Wiki post from my forum:
Here are bookmarks from Discourse Meta (and others) that may be useful on (our) Forum.
This is a Wiki post, please feel free to add/edit bookmarks, add/edit categories, move etc.
Because I’ve spent too much time looking for bookmarks others have sent me; hope this will be useful.
- User Guide / FAQ
- General Business/Philosophy Stuff - About Discourse
- Moderation
- Forum Features/Functions
- How To
- User states / Trust levels
- Working with Groups
- DiscourseHub - app for mobile Discourse access
User Guide / FAQ
- New User Guide from Discourse
- As modified for (link to our forum)
- Our Forum FAQ (link)
- Who is Discobot?
- How to change FAQ, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service
- Here are links to these top-level pages on our site: FAQ, Privacy, About, and Terms of Service.
- New User Tips & Tricks from Jeff Atwood
General Business/Philosophy Stuff - About Discourse
- About Discourse
- and about CDCK - the business organization which provides both the Discourse open-source software and the managed service which hosts that software.
- Discourse features
- Use cases for Discourse
- Video, Podcasts, Presentations about Discourse
- Discourse Forum beginner introduction video
- Jeff Atwood presentations
- Podcasts on history/philosophy of Discourse/CDCK
- The Discourse Blog
Moderation
- Guides / Philosophy
- Discourse Moderation Guide - the original source for our moderator’s guide
- Our Forum Moderators Guide (link)
- A decade of forum advice from a Discourse co-founder
- Kids, would you please start fighting? - a nice discussion on “Civilized Discourse”
- What are some of the hardest moments you had as a moderator?
- Recommendations for handling difficult situations
- Nuts n bolts
- Category Group Review/Moderation and Category Moderator Improvements
- Give ability for regular non-staff users to moderate and review content in specific categories. May be useful in the new Archives category. Perhaps also to allow extra Moderators generally without going over our quota of staff accounts.
- Access to Whispers for non-members of Moderators/Staff groups
- Recent update to Discourse gives ability to define groups that should have access to the Whisper feature. We can grant Community Management group this right and not go over our allowed number of Staff users.
- So what exactly happens when you “Flag?”
- User Notes - attach notes about a user to their profile.
- Category Group Review/Moderation and Category Moderator Improvements
- UserX’s list of Community Management Resources (link to another meta link in our forum)
Forum Features/Functions
- Threading
- Understanding and using Discourse’s Flat Threading model
- Why Discourse uses “Topics” rather than “Threads”
(and here for a deep dive) - What is infinite scrolling?
- Notifications
- Chat
- Effectively using Discourse together with group chat
- Overview of features in Discourse Chat
- Chat Threads
- Guidelines and moderation
- Chat - how to configure your preferences and use chat
- Tags
- It’s Time We Talked About Tags Philosophy of tags on Discourse, how they differ from Categories. Has useful links in the follow-up posts
- Admin guide to tags
- Editing tags in Discourse-short how-to video
- Interface
- Names of user interface elements in Discourse. Callouts of every user interface element in Discourse, very useful.
- Sidebar theme toggle easy theme switcher bottom left as of Discourse 3.0
- Custom Hamburger Menu Links
- Discourse Cakeday birthdays and anniversaries. Off on TIAA
- Modifying home page–some options:
- Have featured categories in the header
- Another theme to display featured categories
- Welcome link banner–meta style
- Discourse Calendar and Event plugins
- AI
- Introducing Discourse AI
- Discourse AI plugin
- Enabling the Discourse AI Bot
- Discourse AI Bot examples
- Enabling Discourse AI Search
- Discourse AI topic summarization
- Misc
- How “Likes”
work in Discourse (central to functioning) - What is the difference between Closed, Unlisted and Archived topics?
- Discourse Spoiler Alert
- How “Likes”
How To
- What is a Wiki post?
- Markdown
- Markdown syntax guide
- Markdown cheat sheet or also here
- Markdown tutorial
- StackEdit, a slick, free, browser-based, WYSIWYG Markdown editor
- How to create a poll that others can vote on
User States / Trust Levels / Group and Category Permissions
- Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
- A Table of Trust Level Permissions
- Checklist of almost 100 actions by Trust Level and Moderator Status
- Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
- Understanding groups and category permissions
- What the various user states in Discourse mean (Admin, Moderator, Staff, …)
- What is a Staff user on hosted Discourse?
Working with Groups
- What does selecting “Primary Group” for a user do?
- Create a private category with limited access for a certain group
- Understanding groups and category permissions (security settings)
- How to set / configure private / closed group access, membership and visibility
- Ability to grant access to settings by group in addition to trust level