Global Discourse Site Directory - mockups

[codinghorror]

Here are some mockups from the amazing @rewphus on basic design ideas for a public, global Discourse site directory.

• The goal is to publicize Discourse sites and get people going to your instance and increasing traffic.

• The idea is that you would automatically be pulled into the directory (based on us crawling you) unless you specifically opted out in your site settings.

[watchmanmonitor]

Looks great… two questions:

would you indicate if approvals were required?

would/how/who you notify a site owner that their site got listed?

[riking]

There should probably be an activity floor - e.g. minimum 10 posts in the last 7 days, or 100 pageviews, or something - to avoid people’s sites showing up when they aren’t quite ready to publicize it yet.

[tobiaseigen]

I love this! Also love that it is inspired by the discourse design.

Three bits of feedback from my end:

• Please add an admin setting for listing in the directory. This should be an opt-in thing, not opt-out, or at least prominently displayed in the settings so people know about it and don’t get an unpleasant surprise. In the settings perhaps we could also choose our preferred category and tags (see below)
• I know this is a mockup, but please reconsider “miscellaneous” and “non-english speaking”. Misc is well nigh useless - instead just follow discourse own UX model and leave them uncategorized. Meanwhile non-english speaking is unfriendly and makes me feel like an outsider and not part of the in group with Discourse, which I know is probably not the intent but that’s how it comes across. This makes Discourse look like yet another US-focussed, not inclusive project that is ignorant of the wide world out there that mostly speaks other languages besides english (or should I say American?)
• consider using tags or a second way to filter by country, default language locale, target age group, scope (global, national, local etc)

[rewphus]

Meanwhile non-english speaking is unfriendly and makes me feel like an outsider and not part of the in group with Discourse, which I know is probably not the intent but that’s how it comes across. This makes Discourse look like yet another US-focussed, not inclusive project that is ignorant of the wide world out there that mostly speaks other languages besides english (or should I say American?)

You are absolutely right, that was not the intent. I was just pulling the largest categories off the existing Discourse Directory topic. The content itself should really not be representative of the feature, the mockup was made more to show workflow and possible design.

[cregox]

This should be an opt-in thing, not opt-out

Totally!

I can already picture many angry people saying they want privacy.

[erlend_sh]

Continued here:

Discourse index

Hi, After working on the Discourse Notifier mobile app I realised, one killer feature for the app would be to improve discoverability. A shared index would help with this (and would also help when you know the forum but cant remember the URL). MVP app would have: a user facing form to register your site. The form would only have a URL field, and we would retrieve data automatically a GET /sites API endpoint with a q params to filter results and probably some pagination logic V2: implement c…