Hi mates,
In one of my communities, we want to do an AMA (ask me anything). As you know, this is one of the things more interesting that you can find in Reddit, and the threaded discussions, in some way, helps to do it because is easy to detect the main author.
What would be the best way to do an AMA using discoure? The author should reply each message? The author should quote different questiosn and answer all in a new reply? What do you think is best?
Thanks!
I think replying works best, however if the AMA gets too busy quoting in bulk is probably better.
I honestly donât really know why youâre asking this question, seems pretty straightforward to me.
If the author starts to reply every message, then seems hard to follow the thread or a new party, thatâs why I asks.
But just to see if someone has a more clever approach. Thatâs it.
For a group of people answering questions, we have this:
Also donât forget that you can opt to show replies by a specific author. Makes it super easy to track down answers.
Could also make a simple plugin thatâd for instance highlight the posts of thread creator (or for teams: mentioned user names in topic post) when it fits a certain format (has AMA in title, or thereâs a special AMA post type, like Poll).
That said, I believe the threaded model does excel in this format, as it facilitates those fun side-discussions that grow out of each individual answer.
I guess, all I care about is the response from the famous person, the side discussions (if Reddit is an example) are usually of no value whatsoever. I have never seen a famous person reply to an extended side discussion in any AMA I have looked at.
It is true that topic creator gets no special styling in the topic. I think that is generally correct, though in some rare topic types it might help to have the topic creator replies or username highlighted in some way. (Note there is special CSS to support optional author styling now, if needed, it is present in the page.)
Hi there. Iâm the founder of a site for writing groups called Inked Voices and we use Discourse for our forum. Itâs been great so far, but tonight, I hosted our first AMA with an author on the forumâŚAbout 30 minutes after the discussion got started, he got blocked and received the message that he couldnât post again for another 23 hours. Iâm wondering what is the way to prevent this from happening in the future. I ended up posting his stuff under my name and just saying From [Author Name] before each reply. I believe the issue is driven by trust level. However, I tried changing his trust level when this happened, and he remained unable to reply. What do you suggest to avoid this issue?
Sorry about that â I am guessing this was a new user created in the last 24 hours? For safety reasons, new users have absolute limits on the number of posts they can create in a day; this can be adjusted in your site settings.
There are also absolute limits on the total number of posts non-new users can create per day, but they are much higher. All this can be adjusted in the rate limits area of admin, site settings.
Thanks for this note, especially since I know I put this on an old thread. 
Yes, he was new to the forum in the past 24 hours (though not new to our site). I will take a look at our admin settings for future and have any future speakers log in to the forum at least a couple of days before an event.
I am pretty sure that if you manually push trust level up to level 1 or 2 for these AMA users (which can be done in the admin dashboard) they will be immune to this check. (need to confirm)
What site is this by the way, can you link to the topic?
No, new users are not immune, there is a 24 hour check on users that is an independent setting. To prevent trust level shenanigans and filling the site with noise posts.
TL2 and up really should be immune, no way to get to it without mod intervention.
I did try bumping up the trust level mid-AMA. It didnât work. Here are the two threads. Our author Brendan thought creating a new thread might solve it (but this was incorrect and now we have 2 threadsâŚ) Our forum is accessible to Inked Voices folks only, but perhaps your super Discourse co-founder privileges allow you to see these? If not, and if itâs helpful, I could make you a user. http://forum.inkedvoices.com/t/ama-with-brendan-halpin/255/20
http://forum.inkedvoices.com/t/ama-with-brendan-halpin-2/283
Thanks for your responses, Sam and Jeff.
If that was your natural reaction then I agree with @sam it is probably ok to make trust level 2 (which requires days of activity to reach naturally) and above immune to this check.
Just want to voice this as well, we will want this too. We are trying to do Q&A sessions live on Discourse to bring in new venues of discussions, and I see us potentially hitting this limit too (if the spokesperson decides to sign up on the day of the event).
The particular concern is now fixed, anyone TL2 and above is immune to newuser checks after this update:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/9834d1150300de26ffc35cb6af9a3ac91666e216
For all AMA sessions I recommend setting trust level to TL2 for all new users. Additionally for private forums I would recommend dropping down rate_limit_new_user_create_post back to 5 seconds, cause really you trust your newusers to post so the limiting here is uneeded.
Curious to hear if anyone has any more real-world experience to share with attempting to do AMA-style discussions using Discourse.
Howâd it go? Would you do it again? Any links to example threads I could check out?
Not sure how similar this is, but weâve done some live Q&Aâs using Discourse
They seemed to go well. Sometimes a question had to be repeated or the host would specifically re-iterate a question to the guest to ensured it got answered.
Thanks @cpradio. Those examples are exactly the kind of thing Iâm looking for. If anyone on your team feels like sharing more about tips and tricks for running a successful live Q&A session with Discourse at some point, Iâd love to hear it. Could make a good topic here (or a good blog post).