Documentation contribution opportunities

Discourse documentation is the primary location for administrators, moderators, users, and sysadmins to find help with using Discourse and managing their sites.

While this documentation is robust and covers a lot of ground, there are some missing areas that we do not have documented yet. This is a great opportunity for the community to get involved in helping to refine this important part of the Discourse project.

We would love to see more people getting involved in creating documentation content for Discourse, and want to make it as easy possible for anyone to do so. To that end, below is a list of Discourse features or use-cases that we have identified as requiring new or improved documentation.

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Documentation locations

Anyone of trust level 2 or above can create new documentation topics in Community wiki - this is the home for all community-contributed documentation content. If a topic in the community wiki is considered relevant or important, it may be moved to Documentation - the home for all official Discourse documentation. You can read the documentation policy for more details about that.

:gift: Badges for documentation contributors

Anyone who creates a new topic in the Community wiki category will automatically be assigned the bronze Scribe badge:

If the topic is considered valuable enough to move to the official Documentation category, someone on the Discourse team will do this manually, credit the original author in the topic content, and assign them the silver Ghostwriter badge:

:eyes: Documentation that needs to be written

While we ultimately want to see every part of Discourse thoroughly documented, these are the areas we have identified with the most pressing need (crossed out items indicate topics that have been written since this post was first published):

  • A general getting started tutorial for admins
  • Custom topic redirects
  • Explanation of what different user levels can do
  • Social login options
  • Post notices (official doc)
  • More documentation about how trust levels work
  • How to write a good feature request for Discourse (wiki topic)
  • A reference for how Discourse markdown and formatting features look when included in emails
  • User statuses
  • Explanation of dark mode, how to select it, and how to enable switching (wiki topic)
  • General documentation covering managing user preferences (wiki topic)
  • Docs explaining how categories and hierarchy work in Discourse
  • A general guide for topic settings
  • A general guide about plugins - what they are, how they work, and how to use them
  • Custom homepages
  • Changing default categories and topics
  • Using image grids in posts
  • Post approval settings (wiki topic)

Some of these may require multiple topics to be effectively documented.

:pencil2: How to write documentation

In order to ensure Discourse documentation is as effective as possible, we have a style guide for how to write this content. While it would be helpful for everyone to follow the guide, if you’re contributing to Community wiki, it’s not a problem if you don’t stick to it completely. Any topics that are moved over to Documentation will be updated by Discourse staff to match the style guide as needed.

:bulb: Interested?

Jump into Community wiki and start documenting today. If you want to discuss any of this, feel free to reply to this topic to talk about it.

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“Great presentation! How do I get assigned topics and when?”

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Welcome to the Discourse community :slight_smile:

No assigning needed - anyone can work on any topic they choose.

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Thank you for your prompt response. However, I’m still uncertain about what’s required of me. Could you kindly provide more detailed explanation?

This is an opportunity to contribute to the Discourse project - nothing is specifically required of anyone :slight_smile:

If you want to get involved, pick one of the things in the list above and document how it works in Discourse as best you can.

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What about the existing topics? Like for example

Grant Admin or Moderator Privileges to a User

Requesting new features for Discourse

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For this one:

The existing documentation talks about how to request new features, but not how to format a good request to make it more effective. We currently link to this page, but it would be good if we could have that kind of content on Meta instead.

And for this one:

Good catch! I’ll remove that from the list in this topic :slight_smile:

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There is this topic covering feature requests already

Unless it needs to look like this but for a feature request? :point_down: :eyes:

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Does this mean Staff Notice or something different?

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I assume this is a post notice since its in the title

Staff notices are basically the same I guess?

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Yeah that’s what we’re looking for there :slight_smile:

As @ondrej linked to, post notices are what are outlined in this announcement. We have that announcement topic, but not actual documentation about it.

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“What are the implications for new users?”

I don’t understand what you mean by “implications”? There are no implications for new users. A post notice just appears above their first topic/post. You can have a read over the Documentation surrounding post notices below :wink:

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I Hugh, this is great idea.

I have been meaning to present an idea for the community wiki to have some kind of tag for say forum templates.

The idea I have for this. Is often we have folks asking about using discourse for things like a Support Forum, Learning Platform etc… Even sometimes more obscure uses like a Table Top RPG.

Collecting content from topics like those & even thinking of various uses. We could create a new resource with a master Topic used as an index.

  • Support Forum Templates
  • Learning Platform Templates

These Topics can house Hosted by Discourse, Communique(so?) etc… with recommended plugins & Theme components etc . As well as a post for Self-hosted.

Hosted templates would focus on the plugins & reference what plans are needed for a particular plugin for use.

With tips & tricks and even point folks to the Marketplace if they need a custom layout, plugin, etc…

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Hi there @Cyroche_Fankwe this is a support forum for Discourse software and hosting. Do you think is it possible you were sent to this forum by mistake? Perhaps you were looking for https://outlier.trydiscourse.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/outlier_ai/comments/1enhhh8/psa_metadiscourseorg_is_not_related_to_outlier_ai/?rdt=55302

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Made:

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I saw that :smile: Great to see these coming in!

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No, I don’t think that’s the case.

Working on the one for dark mode.

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