Discourse for Science and Academia

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Originally published at: Discourse for Science and Academia

A sizable number of Science and Research communities rely on Discourse for their discussion needs; let’s take a deeper look and figure out why. We’ve spoken to an assortment of customers and self-hosted sites to learn more about their use cases and determine the role of Discourse in the success of these remarkable communities. How…

[AstonJ]

Nice to see Discourse used in this field

@codinghorror

The biggest feature that would help us would be a category where students could post, instructors and staff could browser and read posts, but students couldn’t read each others posts. This would allow us to help students with their source code without allowing other students to see their submissions.

This has been suggested many times and has lots of different uses, one of the most universal is for a ‘Contact a Mod’ section, where uses can easily contact a moderator and whichever mod is online at the time can deal with it.

@codinghorror

We’ve seen this request a few times before but it’s not on the roadmap as of now! A perfect workaround for this is to ask students to send the assignments to the staff group through a personal message. This can be configured through the Who can message this group? setting.

This would be ok if these showed on the ‘latest’ list like normal topics, but ideal a normal category would be best.

@codinghorror

Some of our users are joining only to participate in one specified category. It could be easier to mute everything, e.g. easy access to a list of all categories where one can check the categories to mute vs follow. Similarly would it be useful to enable following of specified tags.

Yes, the default_mute_all site setting does exactly what your looking for! Besides that, users can control this in their preferences at Notifications > Categories and Notifications > Tags .

I’d love to see a more customisable experience for users too, perhaps more so as a tags based system - where people select which tags they want to follow and only topics from those show in their latest list. This would be useful (perhaps even needed) for the largest of forums.

[Ebhamen_Ighodalo]

Very inspiring thanks