That is true, there is no advertisement of any kind in the forum, just a ping to the Discourse Hub to check global username registration.
But there is a profile page – which you can disable – at http://www.discourse.org/users/bhaelochon
The logic here is that if you are an interesting poster here, I might want to follow your posts on other Discourse forums too.
I don’t think I am being alarmist - I am genuinely concerned about Discourse attempting to harvest the memberbase of all forums who use it under the guise of ‘it’s a needed feature’. It is not. Never has been a ‘big’ problem and I suspect it never will be. That makes me suspect there are other reasons Discourse wants to harvest users - but they are not forthcoming.
Yes we all like our usernames. But I see little point in your name being reserved on a site which you may never register. Usernames are hard to come by as it is, limiting them even further just does not make sense from an Admin’s perspective. In fact many forum admins regularly release usernames from inactive accounts.
I’m sorry that you feel my posts are not constructive. I have been a forum admin for almost a decade and would have thought my concerns might be relevant.
[quote=“codinghorror, post:21, topic:2544”]But there is a profile page – which you can disable – at http://www.discourse.org/users/bhaelochon
The logic here is that if you are an interesting poster here, I might want to follow your posts on other Discourse forums too.[/quote]
That’s what Zoints offered too - it basically promotes other forums.
From a new forum’s perspective, it’s a great idea! Easy and quick exposure, but for an established forum it’s the complete opposite - giving exposure to other (and more than likely, competing) forums.
What more can they say? You’ve been told what it’s for:
That profile page isn’t even on your website but rather discourse.org, it’s not like someone is going to click on a user in your forum and see a bunch of competing forums listed on their user account page.
I know you can turn it off.
I am questioning the reasoning behind it, why it is necessary to spend so much time on a feature that is practically a non-issue. THAT suggests there is some other reason, and if that’s true, I guess only time will tell - but it just leaves one feeling a little wary.
What else can be said, then? You don’t know how much time and effort they’re investing in the Discourse Hub. Just because it’s a non-issue to you doesn’t mean it isn’t to someone else. The lead visionary behind Discourse, @codinghorror, has stated exactly what it’s for. What makes it so hard to accept that at face value?
Because in all my years of running forums not only has it never been a problem for us, but I’ve never heard anyone else mention it has been a problem for their forum either - and I am active on a large number of Admin forums. There are a million and one things that are bigger ‘problems’, ask any admin and they’ll say ‘protecting usernames across sites that are not even theirs’ won’t even feature in the top 500 let alone top 10!
Additionally, any seasoned admin will be very wary of a new forum platform that plans to harvest a member userbase from it’s customers forums, if you can’t see the potential for misuse there then I’m afraid I can’t help you. When Zoints tried it it did not go down very well at all, it would be a shame to see Discourse go down the same route.
I don’t know what forums you’ve been a part of, but you clearly aren’t very connected with your users, or you’re users have only a single forum they use. I personally have a unique name that is thankfully free because I go through enough trouble trying to remember passwords, trying to remember a username would make me not bother trying to remember.
Have you not had users sign up under a 2nd account just because they forgot their first one? That happens quite frequently. Also you had a point about too many usernames taken, it takes a while to find one for most people, and I’ve had friends give up on forums I loved because it took a while to find a suitable username, and then they forgot it later. What would fix this is by reserving usernames globally.
Note that this does literally nothing more information stealing than gravatar. It simply lets someone reserve their user name. If you have a serious problem with this, then you must also have a serious problem with gravatar. This is nothing like Zoints, it does not provide SSO. It does not advertise new sites to users. In fact the only place where someone can see a different forum is if they go through the trouble of finding the public profile of a user that is registered on different sites. This would only happen if someone really liked someone else’s stuff, AKA that person is an avid user of your forum. The other sites would only be visited if the person is also an avid user of those sites, which by definition means those sites aren’t competitors.
If you can’t see the uses for it, then I feel sorry for your userbase, and feel free to turn the feature off, but I’ll look out for any forums you host, because clearly you don’t really connect with your users.
Enabling or disabling Discourse Hub is a site setting, there is no requirement for you to have that setting on. Its up to the community. It’s our job at Discourse to convince forums out there that the advantages of having this feature enabled outweigh the disadvantage wrt privacy and/or centralization.
I would also not tag this as naive “harvesting”, I expect many users would like a central spot to track all their Discourse activity across multiple forums, feature particularly interesting conversations and follow people across multiple forums.
Sam, my point is I am a little baffled why this was such an important thing for Discourse when it is not a big deal in the forum world, at least not from a forum admin’s perspective. This suggests the team have other plans and that makes me wary. As I’ve said previously we’ve seen it before with Zoints, and to a lessor degree with IB - but I guess only time will tell, and I hope it turns out I worried needlessly.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Discourse! I like the software so far, and I guess I need to get to know you guys and get a feel for what the company is about.
Thanks for listening.
It is a big deal to users though, and since admin’s probably want more to make users happy it should be a big deal to them by extension.
The way you discuss it it sounds like they are neglecting important features for this feature. Look around, does it look like any features are being neglected? This is the most natural and awesome forum I’ve ever used, and there’s no huge features I can see missing (just maybe some bug fixes, although I haven’t seen any bugs yet). The discourse hub is just another feature, something they can add that doesn’t destroy the simplicity that many forums lack, and discourse certainly has.
As mentioned before, the thing you should be asking for is a privacy policy. If you get that you can see that there’s nothing to worry about (as you’re being overly worried right now).
There is a privacy policy at
http://meta.discourse.org/privacy
It seems pretty obvious to me that
Users want some confidence that they can reserve their username across all Discourse instances. This came up over and over and over and over and over and over as we discussed the project.
If you as a forum admin want to put your needs over the user, or you don’t trust the Discourse Hub, you can turn this feature off with a single Boolean flip in your forum settings.
And considering this is coming from the person who designed the most successful and advanced question and answer stie in the world, I think I’d trust his judgement on a matter such as this. Read his blog and you can see the thought he puts into everything he does.
Relevant and constructive are not the same thing. Relevant means “related to the topic at hand” while constructive in this context means “creating and proposing solutions”. Just because your opinions are relevant doesn’t mean they’re constructive.
Also, just by googling your username I’ve found, in order, your blog, your twitter, your github, and your railscast profile. So are you really sure that usernames aren’t a big deal?
Getting this thread back on topic, I too would like to at least look at the Discourse Hub base code, to satisfy my curiosity if nothing else. It would also be nice for dev purposes and enterprise integration. Thoughts?
How does the promoting of other forum work exactly? If I click on @codinghorror I can see all his posts in meta.discourse.org right now. Will that eventually lists all his posts on all discourse forums (ones with their Discourse Hub setting turned on)?
And if you turn off your Discourse Hub setting, what is there to worry about?
There might eventually be a link on the user page to their discourse.org/users page, if they have a Discourse Hub registered username, but that’s it.
If you like what I’m posting here, you might think to yourself, “Self, I wonder if @stienman is purveying his magnificent knowledge elsewhere? I quite think I’d like to quench my thirst for knowledge at his well more than I can here.”
Once you’ve thought that, you might visit my userpage, which will eventually link to my discourse userpage, which is here:
http://www.discourse.org/users/stienman
And then you’d find out that I am also a member of one other discourse forum, and you’d be able to find and read all my magnum opus, rather than googling “stienman” and hoping that what you came across is also me.
You know I’ve never thought of doing that. That is, find someone with an interesting post and then try to google his/her username, hoping to find more of that. I guess in the back of my mind I just figure very few users would keep the same username across forums. But how is this a problem if there’s an option to turn it off, and how is this feature worse than google?