Extend Existing Controller?

[petermarkley]

If the owners are who decides, what happens when someone sells the unit? Who would decide then?

The new owner becomes the authority. If they aren’t on the website or don’t respond quickly to requests, website staff will fill in as needed, until or unless the owner gets involved.

At least in the beginning, I plan to automatically grant users access so they don’t have to wait for a person to review their signup or whatever. If a problem is discovered, it can be dealt with retroactively. I doubt we’ll have a wave of fraudsters at the beginning, claiming to own property they don’t.

We’ll see how it plays out after that.

What about an owner who doesn’t care of their tenant can be a member of the forum?

Again, if owners are derelict in moderating then website staff/admins will fill in. We’ll first assume the user is truthful about where they live, and grant them access as a resident – but if possible, reach out to the owner for confirmation.

I guess if they never confirm, the user can just go on using the site. They just won’t get a checkmark next to their resident status I guess. I’m undecided if that’ll display to everyone, or just to admins, but that’s the basic idea.

I think leaving it to the manager of the complex would make much more sense and likely not require a plugin.

The whole reason for my website to exist is to avoid exactly that type of scenario. If you want to hear about the politics, here you go … The property manager is outsourced to a company who treats us like gum on their shoe. If they knew about my website, they probably wouldn’t even look at it, let alone use it, let alone provide effective moderation.

The only other centralized authority is the elected board, and oh boy don’t get me started on them. We already have a Facebook Group, where they have been abusing their powers. I am part of a grassroots effort. My Discourse website is secret, unauthorized, and will need to replace their Facebook Group with as little friction as possible to be successful.

Suffice it to say, our community is in desperate need of a forum moderated by separate parties free from conflicts of interest. That’s the goal here.

If you think that landlords will start abusing their power, then I guess I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

@petermarkley

Can 200 groups all display identically to users, so it just says “Owner” instead of “Owner 187” or something?

With a bit of CSS hacking, yes.

@petermarkley

This is more of a nitty-gritty question, but does an internal group ID get exposed to end users anywhere, e.g. in a URL? If a user has their unit number set to private, could someone figure it out by checking the group ID against other users?

Not if you configure it like this

@petermarkley

I’m talking about approving or removing access to the forum per user. So no, your landlord can’t change your words, but they’re the ones with authority to confirm your signup as a resident, and if you become a troll they can mute or ban you

Who’s “they” in that sentence? The landlords?
Are those the ones that are going to decide whether their residents are trolling?

To me it just sounds like you’ll have owners and residents.

• Put the owners in a group.
• Give everyone a custom field that identifies the property.
• When someones signs up, look up the owner of the property by finding the person in the owners group with the same property, and ask them to confirm. Once they have confirmed, put the resident in the residents group.
• Make sure to have a good procedure to cater for when someone leaves.
• Forget about the moderation by owners (if I understood you correctly) and leave that to staff.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@petermarkley

The new owner becomes the authority

How? I suggest that whoever it is that would do that should just manage all of the users. You said you’re dealing with old people. It seems highly improbable that you’ll manage to make that happen. It sounds more like you’ll need to go to the house of each person and show them how to log in to get them to sign up of you want anyone to adopt discourse. Who is going to train every single owner in the whole complex to use this plugin that exists only on one discourse install on the world? You’ll be the sole source of support. It’ll be much easier for you to just manage the users than to pretend that the owners will do it. Or wait a year until everyone is begging for the ability to do it themselves and it’s willing to pay to have the plugin developed.

@petermarkley

At least in the beginning, I plan to automatically grant users access so they don’t have to wait for a person to review their signup or whatever.

Yeah. Just do that.

@petermarkley

My Discourse website is secret, unauthorized, and will need to replace their Facebook Group with as little friction as possible to be successful.

I see. You’ll just have to get your own cabal to manage it. You’d really need some system like b next door has where you mail postcards or get people to vouch for the others. So just using invites might help. Facebook logins could help too.

It’s hard to imagine a plugin that could solve the problems you describe.

Good luck!

[petermarkley]

@RGJ

Forget about the moderation by owners (if I understood you correctly) and leave that to staff.

@pfaffman

I suggest that whoever it is that would do that should just manage all of the users.

Honestly I’m starting to think you guys are right about this. If I remove that requirement from the project, suddenly the burden of the system shrinks pretty much to existing/core functionality in Discourse.

For the sake of anyone who searches about my original specific issue, I suspect this comment is technically the solution: Extend Existing Controller? - #21 by petermarkley

But for the sake of my real project … The more I actually explored the Groups (thanks to RGJ here & here) and Custom User Fields features (thanks to Moin & RGJ), the more comfortable I became with them. I especially appreciate the “avatar flair” part of Groups, honestly I did not expect that to exist and it’s basically what I was picturing with the SVG icon stuff that I mentioned here. It’s very classy, I must confess.

The only remaining thing I am still considering, since I’ve already started plugin development anyway, is to extend the signup modal controller so that a user’s selection in the “building number” field can filter the options in the “unit number” field–down from 200 to about 6. I guess I have to weigh how much nicer that will be for users against the time it would take to develop. But at this point I’m thinking that I can start accepting users anyway and start getting content on the site …

Thanks everyone!

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@petermarkley

I’ve already started plugin development anyway, is to extend the signup modal controller so that a user’s selection in the “building number” field can filter the options in the “unit number” field–down from 200 to about 6.

That’s a great idea. There should be some good examples of how to do that, but I’m not aware of any offhand. I’ve got at least one client that really needs a plugin or theme component that will do something like that.

[Lilly]

@petermarkley

what is it you want to do with this data? i’m under the impression you want store it for some other functionality rather than just display it somewhere on the forum.

Well, my ultimate hope/vision was:

wow, interesting discussion. i’m glad i asked this!

[merefield (Robert)]

imho I wouldn’t go overboard unless you are using it as an excuse for learning Discourse extension (which is a completely reasonable goal!).

I had a similar Discourse for several years, covering a HOA community (known as “Leaseholders” in the UK). The Leaseholders all shared Freehold so there was much to discuss. Residents were also invited and we did not split access areas, there seemed to be no need. There were Categories for Directors of the Freehold companies (made up of volunteers within the Leaseholder shareholders), but they didn’t gain traction.

What I found was:

• that several bullies emerged, upset people, forced me to (with good reason!) moderate their language upon which they took the hump and never logged in again, so the community ended up only the nice reasonable ones who could keep their cool and handle disagreement, but then didn’t represent the community as a whole anymore. I imagine most online residents groups have the same problem, whatever the platform.
• Facebook had a group and that was tough competition which again reduced engagement and reduced sign-ups.

It’s very hard getting people off of Facebook, but you should definitely have a go. Perhaps it’s an easier convince now we are over “Peak Facebook” (I personally haven’t been on Facebook in several years).

I appreciate that building bespoke features might help win people over, but then again it was like herding cats.

And now we are well and truly off topic from the original technical request …

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@merefield

And now we are well and truly off topic from the original technical request …

Seems to me that this was the best answer.

[petermarkley]

@merefield

It’s very hard getting people off of Facebook, but you should definitely have a go.

It definitely helps that our motive for creating the website in the first place has been one that’s affecting everyone, as the Board has been so tyrannical on Facebook. Not to mention how poorly equipped Facebook is for the unique needs of a community forum in the first place.

We have an ally who is amazing at networking door to door, and we’re about to find out just how strong this grassroots movement is.

[Lilly]

good luck in your endeavour