How does the Discourse project work?

[cpradio]

@codinghorror

I’d say you need to be active on at least 5 different reasonably sized Discourse instances to have enough data. (Not including meta, since meta is kind of a dodo bird in terms of feedback, it’s not really representative.) The team is unique in that we sit at the confluence of probably 100+ Discourse instances, of which I touch at least 10 per day, and probably see up to ~20 on any given day, including weekends.

There’s a serious “sample size of one” problem that you want to avoid. Your particular community may have certain… predilections and quirks… that perhaps may not be shared by many other communities. But from this vantage point, we see everything – we’ve read literally every single meta post since Feb 2013, most meta discussion that occurs on other active Discourse instances, and we sample ~10-20 Discourse instances every day, Monday through Sunday, every week, for the last year and a half.

Okay, but that wasn’t exactly my point…

My point was, there was zero sharing of any data that lead to the decision. It simply was, this place doesn’t have it and it works (but oh yeah, they at least have a “Related” title above them so the user knows that they are for…). If you had stated: Out of the 20 most popular Discourse instances, the glyphs are causing a stack load of confusion, we’d be having a different conversation right now, but I don’t believe that is the case (out of the 4 I know are popular and just did a search on the topic for).

I’m simply stating, that if you make a change and don’t provide actual information as to what lead to the decision, we are left to assume the data ourselves (and that isn’t a good thing). I don’t doubt that you have data at your disposal, I worry that the justification you provide doesn’t include the data.