Discouragement of the First-Time Discourse Admin

Community
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I’m posting this as a separate topic from Structuring an active support community migrating from Facebook because it feels on another level: community building starts before anybody is there, when the community builder (let’s call her that) designs the way the community will function and implements that community design in her tool of choice: adjusting settings, adding or removing functionalities, picking a theme, creating categories, thinking about the member onboarding flow, how moderation will be enforced, etc.

These design decisions are the result of an interaction, one could say a “conversation”, between the vision of the community builder and the possibilities of the tool. “We shape our tools and they shape us”, quoting liberally.

Right now, this community builder is feeling very overwhelmed and discouraged. And I’d like to share some thoughts about that.

First, a little about me. I’m not a first-time community builder, or new to web-based tools. I’ve been in this space of “humans connecting online” for over 25 years, at times professionally, at times not. I’m not a developer, but I have enough technical knowledge that I have at times administered my own server and coded a few WordPress plugins, back in the days. I’ve designed and taught courses on blogging, social media and online communities before they were a “thing”. I’m no stranger to hunkering down with the user manual to troubleshoot whatever is not working correctly.

The main community I run nowadays is going to turn eight years old and is 8-9k members strong, over three facebook groups. It is completely non-web, non-technical. It’s for people with sick cats. And veterinarians. It is very active, very healthy, and (I’m not the one who says it) extremely well-managed and moderated. There is a team of 20-30 people involved in running it. The average community member struggles digitally as soon as they are taken out of their usual activities (chatting on Messenger, creating a facebook post, or making a comment). Getting them to fill in values in a Google Sheet, stay logged in there on their phone, and share the link to the Sheet in their posts is a challenge.

This is not to toot my horn, but to state clearly that I am what one could call a non-developer web power-user. Not some random person who is thinking of setting up a “forum” or a “community”.

And although I’m super enthusiastic about the possibilities I see with Discourse, I am drowning. I’ve spent countless hours searching, reading, and posting on Meta. I’ve looked at setting checkboxes until my eyes go square. I am familiar enough with the platform to have a feel for what should be possible, but I feel as if I’m in front of the contents of the boxes my IKEA sofa was delivered in, but without the instructions or the tools. The cognitive load of all the possibilities and options is killing me. The thought of my sweet, digitally-illiterate members being faced with the multitude of functionalities of Discourse’s default settings and appearance gives me cold sweats.

So what am I doing here? Why not leave things as they are, if my Facebook community is going so well? Because I have known from day one that Facebook would work only as long as its inevitable enshittification allowed (wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, but I understood the process very clearly). For years, the balance was in Facebook’s favour. These last years, it has started to tip. Every now and again I would keep an eye open for alternatives, knowing that I could wake up one morning with the group gone. But no solution I saw seemed like a viable option to support this community.

This summer, Discourse arrived on my radar. I signed up for a trial and played around with it all I could for a week (my Facebook account suspension ate up the second week of the trial, but that’s another story). I was blown away. Here was a tool that would allow us to do everything we could only dream of on Facebook. It was powerful, endlessly configurable, modern and robust. And open-source: I could self-host it. Within a few days, I was sold. Our community’s new home would be called Discourse.

I haven’t changed my mind. I still see a future where Discourse checks all those boxes for us, and where our community thrives in its own home, free from the shackles of Big Platform. But getting there is a much more difficult road than I anticipated. I am really struggling. Yesterday one of my tech-savvier moderators hopped onto our Discourse install to come and lend me a hand, and her initial reaction was confusion with the interface and functionalities. If I needed confirmation that the default is far, far from what will work for us.

Last night, I stumbled upon this topic: Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"? – I read, read, and read some more. I could relate to a lot of the sentiment expressed in the conversation. @oshyan , in particular, makes many points that really hit home for me. I honestly consider that somebody with my background and skillset should not be having such a hard time getting Discourse into working shape for a community of “normal people”. I’ve installed and configured WordPress installations with umpteen plugins countless times without breaking a sweat – sure, WordPress is less complex, but it’s not just that: there is something about the “information architecture” of finding my way through what I need to do that makes it feel like a maze rather than a guided city tour.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong. But if I am, it is despite my best efforts to “do it right”. I am hugely appreciative of the existence of Discourse. Truly. And the responsiveness I’ve found on Meta is also heart-warming. I understand that when running a business or even “just” developing a tool, ressources are never sufficient to do everything that would need to be done and one wishes to do.

But it’s extremely frustrating, as an enthusiastic user, to feel that the interface of the tool is getting in the way rather than facilitating a crucial part of building and managing a community. And this is something that even the most helpful support community in the world (looking at you, Meta!) can’t “fix”, unfortunately.

As I see it, particularly after reading the long thread linked to above, it’s fine to have a ton of features and settings, to allow the (real) power users to have things their way if they want to. But what I see missing in Discourse is a pared-down out-of-the-box configuration that will work for the average community builder and the average non-techy community. Sometimes less is more.

When you install WordPress, you can start blogging right away as long as you have the technical skills to send an e-mail, and it will work for you, average person who has stuff to say, and your average readers who want to read you. You can tweak a few settings if you like, or go to town with plugins and themes if you’re an edge use-case or a power-user. My Mac has design choices baked in that mostly work for most people. If they don’t, it even has a command line and config files that courageous or technical users can play with.

I’m aware I’m probably not saying anything here that hasn’t been said before, and that “Discourse” is certainly aware of its shortcomings and plans to tackle them. But I’m tired and frustrated, and discouraged, and – not to take anything away of how nice and supportive people are here – I am feeling a bit alone with how difficult this all is: look, there are all these great guides, all this great information on Meta, all these settings and themes and components and plugins to solve my problems one way or another. But that does nothing to help solve the issue that exists at another level: finding my way through this unfamiliar jungle of possibilities so abundant that they refuse to find a stable place in my brain, and dealing with an interface which adds friction (not on purpose of course!) in places where I’d need it removed.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening. And I welcome your thoughts regarding my experience, whether you have been through or are going through similar trials, or think I am missing the point.

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Hello,

First of all, thank you for clearly and thoroughly expressing your situation and frustrations.

I believe it’s important to distinguish between the experience of an administrator and that of a user. In my opinion, users of Discourse don’t struggle with this platform any more than they would with similar ones. However, the experience for administrators is indeed quite different.

Discourse is an extremely powerful platform, but its complexity is undeniable. Personally, I wouldn’t generalize my experience: having used similar platforms over twenty-five years ago, I’m accustomed to this type of tool and its intricacies. That said, even as a highly experienced administrator, I must admit that in recent weeks or months, I’ve felt somewhat overwhelmed by the rapid pace of updates and the conflicts that arise, especially between extensions and plugins.

To summarize my own experience, the main challenges stem from the fast pace of updates and version conflicts between components and plugins. The complexity of Discourse and the occasionally confusing nature of its settings are, in my view, largely due to this rapid development cycle, as well as the fact that the software is open-source—a tremendous advantage, albeit with a few minor drawbacks.

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Eeps, I haven’t even been faced with those yet! :fearful:

I hope you’re right on that – though in my case, the “control” is Facebook, which people already use anyway. It’s the main reason I’ve waited so long to consider migrating away from there…

The way categories and tags are organised are also an important part of the architecture community members will be faced with, so the difficulties for the admin can indirectly impact the users, if they mean that the community “structure” is not as well-designed as it could have been.

Thanks for taking the time to read me and respond!

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It’s true that there is a fundamental difference between Facebook groups and Discourse, for example, in terms of their structure. Discourse is a forum. At least, most people use it as a forum. I also use it a little bit like a blog and a forum, because it’s possible. It all depends on your audience’s past experience. If your audience has no experience with forum structures, it can indeed be a problem when coming from Facebook, and that’s undeniable. If part of your audience already has experience with forums, I’m not just talking about Discourse, but all forums that have a forum structure, i.e., categories or sections. It’s quite different. They’ll be able to find their way around very easily.

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I would recommend not looking at most of them unless you have a specific goal in mind, and then taking it one step at a time (while asking for help here as needed!).

You’re right, there are an enormous amount of possibilities and they could be organized better… and we’re working on it, but it’s a long road. The number of configuration options is currently greater than what any single person can form a mental model of… so it’s no surprise that you’re overwhelmed by possibilities.

We can! every single post here will be read by someone working on Discourse. After reading your posts last week I started working on a feature to add tags directly via the tag page. This is feedback we’ve received a number of times so it seemed about time we try it.

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Sorry you’re frustrated. There are lots of setttings and whatnot.

And that’s true of Discourse. You can just start posting right away. Just like in WordPress, you don’t even need to create a category, just use the default ones. If that’s what you really wanted to do, then they are about the same.

The thing that I think I know you want to do is to have a cat database. That is hard. To do it in wordpress, you’d have to create a new post-type and I don’t know what else to make it so that one of those could belong to multiple users and let those users have multiple cats. I’d charge you $10,000 to do it in WordPress (but that’s just because I hate wordpress); I’d likely do it for $1000-2000 to do it in Discourse. Neither Discourse nor WordPress will do that without someone who has a bunch of skills beyond being able to send an email.

The simple cat database solution is a cat category and a template. If two people love the cat, there will be no formal mechanism for indicating that. Just add in the text @katDude also loves this cat and tell KatDude to watch the topic. Another way would be to contrive to have people create an extra account with the cats name, and then you could @mention that user, but that’s a huge PITA.

But what you really want is a whole new model for the cats, and then instead of @mention you could :cat: Mention them. It’d be really cool, but that’d add to the development costs.

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At this stage, there really is quite a lot that I need to “fix” in how things look or work. I think that one thing that isn’t helping is that as I am not familiar (enough) with Discourse, I often do not know if what I’m trying to achieve is controlled by a setting, or dealt with on theme (or component) level, or a plugin.

It’s good to hear, and really, I understand it is a big endeavour.

This! That’s exactly it. And to be honest, I’m not used to being faced with situations that resist my “mental modelling” which can also explain why I’m not dealing with this situation very well.

Wow, that’s great to hear.

After reading you and the other comments so far, I’m thinking maybe I need to post a bit more plainly about my issues on a “community member experience” level (what I’m trying to achieve) rather than work halfway through it myself and ask more “technical” questions.

I’ll also try and clarify and share (in case it’s helpful) how my mind is wrapping itself around what Discourse does (bits of my “mental model”).

Thanks a lot for stopping by and being attentive to my plight!

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Yes! I think there ARE a few individuals around who have almost all of Discourse in their mind. And they could help you exactly if you ask more general questions.

Have you tried ask.discourse.com? It’s also quite good at this.

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:slightly_smiling_face: thanks for saying that!

I don’t think that’s quite right. The comparison between the two tools has limits, and I think they make a difference here: WordPress, as a blogging tool, is primarily designed for writing blog posts. Discourse, on the other hand, is designed to house a community. Community dynamics are much more complex than the writer-reader relationship of the blog.

Of course I open up my Discourse community to my members with the default settings, but the chances that they will stick around long enough for there to actually be a community there are slim, in all honesty. Whereas I can write blog post after blog post in my vanilla WordPress install, and I’ll have a perfectly fine blog to show people after some time, even if nobody visits it much.

Actually, that’s really not one of my headaches. Having “cat files” in a category is a perfectly workable option (an extension of what we do today with Google Sheets, one per cat).

My headaches are things like:

  • not being able to play around with category structure and properties easily and “see” the result (“thinking out loud” with the tool – the visual interface mockup Canapin spun up would clearly be exactly the kind of thing needed for that)
  • not being able to easily identify what controls certain aspects of the visual layout of topics, category listings, the navigation, the various widgets and buttons that are everywhere
  • badges: there are too many of them, do I do away with them completely, or just some of them, which ones, what will be a good balance between “nudges of encouragement” and what might be perceived as “useless/confusing notifications”?
  • notifications and alerts: in app, by e-mail… again, after less than 24h in a barely hatched Discourse instance, my moderator’s first comment this morning was on the number of e-mails she had in her inbox – I see the e-mail integration/notifications as an asset, but what will be the right balance so people don’t simply flee because they feel spammed?
  • custom user fields not working as I expected: I added a handful of them, thinking I would refine later, but I didn’t manage to find where to fill in those added fields in my current profile, so that’s making me think that “refine later” is maybe a bad calculation (or maybe I didn’t manage to find those custom user fields on my profile, so how will our regular members find them?)
  • member onboarding: on Facebook we do series of posts to “nudge” new members along the “learning journey” to take care of their cat. It’s a huge timesink, very cumbersome to do. I’m certain Discourse can automate that (I’ve already looked a bit). Maybe we do this by message rather than posts? What are the steps I need to take to get a decent “autoresponder-like” thing going on? How easy (or not, cf. categories) will it be to fiddle with the onboarding process once something is in place and people are in the Discourse community?
  • user roles and permissions: on Facebook we have moderators and helpers, and the moderation team is structured in little teams with specific missions. Some triage new users and do welcome posts. Some do content moderation. Some manage the beginners group. Some coach the helpers. Some work on preparing member lists for our periodic onboarding posts. We’ve always felt limited by the very restrictive user roles on Facebook, and Discourse is going to allow us to do things differently. But how? Again, there is “design” (which roles and groups and permissions and who goes where) and “implementation in the system” (actually fiddling with groups, settings, member lists…). And how will our current organisation function or clash with built-in trust levels? Do the progression criteria make any kind of sense for our community?
  • group documents: seems they will work as Published Pages, but I need to figure out how to style the title levels properly to match the existing documents somewhat. How do I manage the import/migration? Copy-paste by hand, or is there a way to automate this? I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know, in a way. Same with videos: I need to stick the 70 or so videos in Youtube, and then create topics for each of them: is it worth looking for an automated solution or do we do it by hand? No idea.
  • …
  • this kind of stuff :face_with_peeking_eye: (and I’m not even getting started on AI integration, which is also one of the reasons I’m so excited about Discourse…)

Maybe the fact I’m migrating an already mature community also adds to the headache: it’s not at all the same thing as starting with a blank slate and having the opportunity to let community culture develop in symbiosis with the tool that houses it.

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I did, quite a lot, earlier on (when I trialed Discourse in August). Less now, I have to say. I have often found myself sent to topics on Meta for which it’s not clear if the information is still actual, or the threads are super long and I get overwhelmed before getting halfway through. I’m also wary of chatbot rabbit-holes (I tend to run down them very fast). But maybe I should give it another go.

I’ll definitely do that, thanks for the encouragement!

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That’s different. You said you could start wordpress and post something. I’m saying that you can start Discourse and post something. Making a blog that people will stick around on is also more complicated than posting something. Maybe the analogy doesn’t work.

And as someone who’s made their living with Discourse for almost a decade and can’t do the simplest of tasks in Wordpress, I might not be a good person to ask!

But yeah, everything on your list is pretty hard (figuring out how many emails a particular person wants? And if the moderator is mad about getting notifications you might need a new moderator–if they’re doing their job and being online all the time, they won’t get many because they’ll see them in their browser, but it’s pretty easy for them to adjust that and for a new forum the default is to send lots of email so that the people know the site exists, and lots of those things are hard because they are hard problems, not because Discourse makes them hard.

Automated nudges? At the right times? That’s pretty hard.

That’s my bread and butter! But even when you have access to the data (and you don’t until you figure out how to scrape it from Facebook, I’m pretty sure, and is that even legal?) it’s still complicated. I’m cleaning up a mess now from someone doing a bad job on a migration and making all the users mad.

Yes! That’s much harder. Everyone has expectations and even the things that are horrible about a given system people will be mad when they are missing!

So, while I’m likely irrationally defensive on behalf of Discourse and there are some things that could be easier, to me, much of what you’re trying to do is just plain hard, regardless of the platform you’re trying to configure.

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That wasn’t really the intent of my analogy: it was more “does the tool, out of the box, do the job you need it to do sufficiently well” (WordPress: blogging; Discourse: community). But yeah, the analogy has limits and we could go down a deep rabbit hole picking it apart!

:joy:

Of course that cannot be known. But what setting will satisfy/be tolerable to the biggest number of people, yes – that’s the information user research provides (unfortunately I don’t have the means to run it on my community, I need to guesstimate it).

She’s not mad, she pointed it out. And as you say, mentioned she needed to fix her notification settings. But our “average users” will not do that.

This is the problem: based on the initial feedback of my moderator, it’s clear that setting is going to be too “intrusive/swamping” for our user base.

I am absolutely not denying they are hard problems. But then, an interface can make dealing with a hard problem more or less easy. Discourse does not provide me (or I haven’t seen it) with a clear, understandable representation of this behaviour (sending e-mails) in my community. I see a long list of settings; I need something that looks more like user stories. I appreciate that there are descriptions under the setting names and values, but unless I already have a clear mental image of how this aspect of Discourse works (like you most certainly have given your extensive experience with it), it is very difficult for me to understand what each of these does. Tell me the story of how this affects my member’s experience of the tool, and ask me which scenario or alternative story I want: that works.

FWIW all our documents are in Google Docs and not Facebook (index here for the curious) and all the video posts from Facebook have indeed been scraped, legal or not. If I were too preoccupied by that aspect, I wouldn’t be running a community where we tell people how much insulin to give their cats :sweat_smile: – and honestly, regarding Facebook, I’m not going to have any qualms about taking off with content that should by right be ours.

No worries, I understand – I think it’s great that Discourse is a tool that people are passionate about. It’s an asset :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback!

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But once there are a few more users, it won’t be so chatty. Understanding and managing bootstrap mode – it’s actually set up to work out of the box by sending a zillion emails to the new people (who presumably are more patient like your moderator) and it’ll automatically tone it down if you don’t figure out how to change the setting yourself.

Oh, that’s a relief! Someone clever, and perhaps someone clever with a few tools and the help of https://ask.discourse.com/ might be able to coerce that into the Docs plugin.

Agreed, and they’ve mostly done a good job with that, I think. And make sure you learn how to use the search on settings–you almost never want to look at a list of them. Just blindly type stuff in the search box–it searches the names, descriptions, and values of all of those settings. It’s amazing.

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