Picking this up as this came up in another discussion (“Tip of the day” / Or how do you remind/nag people with good tips for using Discourse?)
I would definitely love to have a bare-bones (in terms of functionality theme (or « variant » of a theme) that is activated for users by default and which allows them to opt in to the « advanced/full interface » with all the available functionalities Discourse provides. Maybe there is a use-case for more granular addition of features to the interface, not certain yet.
It would be like when you connect to your router admin: there is « basic » mode, and advanced, and sometimes expert.
My use-case is migrating people from Facebook. So, what would be the minimal features/functionalities they should access?
- post topic, with hidden title field that can be revealed if desired
- reply to topic
- like topic or post
- get link to topic or reponse
- add picture
- edit profile and some basic settings (the rest hidden unless some action is taken to reveal them)
- simplified notifications (all in one bucket)
- remove most of the meta-information about topics that is surfaced in list view (xyz answered n minutes ago, etc)
- search with limited options (simple search, advanced can be accessed, like on google)
There is certainly more, these are just initial ideas. I think I’d try to strip out pretty much all that is possible and keep the bare minimum to allow people to do the things an « average social media user » is likely to be familiar with. Roughly: publish, like, comment, include a link or a photo, fill in profile, check notifications.
How best to go about this technically, I don’t know. It might be possible to cobble together a kind of proof of concept with the various components mentioned above.