Opt-In Conference Scheme

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

The Opt-In Conference Scheme proposes a category-based system for large communities, allowing users to opt-in to specific work groups or special interest sections. This scheme aims to reduce overwhelming notifications and topics by focusing on categories rather than individual topics.

hellekin suggests implementing this as a plugin, leveraging existing functionality to adapt the UI. A similar scheme has been successfully used in other online forums, such as Brainstorms.

To set up a similar scheme on Discourse, hellekin provides a step-by-step protocol, including enabling specific settings, creating groups for each category, and using category descriptions as group descriptions. However, this approach has limitations, and hellekin proposes an alternative: using the associated category description topic as the group page.

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Let’s call conference a Category associated with a Group.

A conference has a home page, presenting the conference purpose and possibly inviting users to join, according to the group’s credentials, as in the group’s page. Technically, this home page could be the group’s home page, without the members list.

The conference scheme enables large communities to maintain opt-in work groups or special interest sections, or different language sections without overwhelming all users with notifications and a large number of topics.

This can be implemented as a plugin which I’m interested in programming. I’m proposing this to the community to see if there is traction, and if other people would like to participate. I suppose most of the functionality is already present, and it’s a matter of fixing the pipes to adapt the UI. This “category opt-in” scheme mostly moves the focus from topics to categories.

This scheme has been used in other online forums, e.g., Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms, where hundreds of users exchange daily, rendering the contents quite overwhelming when you try to follow everything – hint: you can’t. As thousands of posts accumulate in your reading list, you’re very happy to be able to focus on some parts of the community rather than playing catch-up or muting the avalanche of new categories and topics.

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Я настроил аналогичную схему, используя следующий протокол в Discourse 3.1.0.beta6:

  1. Включить mute_all_categories_by_default
  2. Включить allow_uncategorized_topics
  3. Отключить suppress_uncategorized_badge
  4. Включить default_categories_watching_first_post с категорией «без категории»
  5. Настроить default_navigation_menu_categories для основных (публичных) категорий
  6. Для каждой категории создать соответствующую группу (например, c-foo для категории с именем foo…), которая будет отслеживать связанную категорию. (свободное вступление/выход или запрос на вступление/свободный выход в зависимости от цели группы)
  7. Для каждой категории использовать описание категории как описание группы, указывая, какой уровень уведомлений будет предоставлять группа для той или иной категории.

Именно последний пункт заставляет меня задуматься, что может существовать более оптимальный способ реализации: действительно, у нас могла бы быть возможность использовать тему с описанием связанной категории в качестве страницы группы.