IMO this along with careful expectation management of people above you in the project is critical at the early stages in particular.
Simply opening the doors to everyone and promoting your Discourse wildly can easily kill your project - you’ll get a wave of people posting all sorts of irrelevant/distracting content, terribly formatted questions that piss off your specialists, and a management team who are now anchored to that initial user count(which is definitely going to drop). Recovering from that is harder than preventing it.
One way we solved this was by preventing people from creating new topics until they had specifically read topics about:
- how to write a good question(the stack overflow way)
- what is illegal to share (due to confidentiality requirements of customers)
- what is legal to share and how you can modify illegal content to be legal
This achieved three things:
- The platform was easier to moderate - we outlined very clearly before you created your topic what is and isn’t ok.
- Protected our specialists from waves of low effort content
- Pissed off a bunch of people
On 3. specifically, I would estimate about 20-30% of staff who encountered our initial restrictions felt that 10 minutes of reading was beneath them, and that they already knew how to write the perfect question. In a handful cases this was true, but for the most part this actually kept away people who, in my opinion, were not a good fit for the culture we wanted to build. Namely:
- Reading is more important than writing
- Come to the platform with humility
- Ask well formatted questions so other members of staff
- a) Spend less time volunteering their time to help you
- b) Can learn from the topic 2-3 years from now
Also a very good point. We found it very helpful to create an ROI formula based on number of topics, number of views on topics, number of answers etc that ultimately resulted in how much time was saved because a specialist was asked once in Discourse instead of multiple times in different calls and email chains.