Hi! I think I read what you say as being someone who would like to join our writing community. Let me say first off, we’d love to have you, we’re all about supporting writers. I’ll help you get there after I explain.
We’re in the process of maybe relocating our community from where it is, to somewhere else that hasn’t been determined yet, nor have we figured out whether we will have to move at all. Thus the “cost, implementation” stuff – you can simply ignore that. That’s me with my software tech hat on.
However: due to all the uncertainty, I’m going to recommend that you get an account at Absolutewrite forums, where a few of us are looking around. It’s not Discourse, but Absolutewrite went through their big shakeup back in 2014, so they’re stable.
Let me know if you decide to do that, and I’ll meet you over there and give you a better idea of what our little community is like, and the challenges we are facing, trying to stay together and keep supporting each other writing.
My username there is “readwrite”.
We are very good at the supporting each other writing, in my experience.
After speaking with you, I would encourage you to try and find the budget for a hosted Discourse plan (if you end up going with Discourse, which of course I think is absolutely the right platform since it has worked so well for your group thus far. It’s well worth it!!!
Also, keep coming back to his forum for infinite learning of both so many ways you might improve or enhance your community, and also for sharing with us your progress and invaluable experiences!!!
We are always listening!!! And we are always available to help!!!
So, as it turns out, we’re going to get to stay where we are.
The Board of NaNoWriMo has closed the main forums, but as long as we on the regions play nice, which we’re already very good at – I mean, where, anywhere, that is worth spending time in, doesn’t pretty much follow that rule? – so, it looks like we won’t need to move, and I won’t have to become system admin again, and this is good!
But I’m delighted to have found my way over here, and there’s a bug I’m going to wrassle with, and rafts of stuff I want to explore.
I will paraphrase a comment made by one of my community members about a couple other examples of forum software other than Discourse that we put our toes in, because I think it says something important about Discourse:
Thank you! It’s unclear if anyone is still available to do anything technically above my level, the place is really broken down.
At the moment, our group is closing ranks using “Ignore” and keep posting as if the intruder weren’t there.
I made one statement,
at (intruder)
Uninvited participants are here against the express guidelines set down by the ML.
Whether there will be a community desire to move elsewhere, or whether we will decide to keep on with the “close ranks and support each other” – I have no idea.
There is value in letting a community work out a process of standing together against invaders, given that this is not a situation where the invaders can do more than say things. They can’t, for instance, get us banned if all we do is go on doing what we do so well already:
Be nice to each other.
Ironically, “Be nice to each other” is exactly the beef the intrusive users have against me specifically. It’s a wild ride, but as a writer I’m observing the verbal tactics and storing them away for future use in my writing.
If you can get the moderator access, even at a category level then we can try some solutions.
It looks like these intruders are more of an annoyance than a trouble.
You can try to sail along for as long as it is bearable. Trolls eventually die down if they don’t get the attention they’re craving for.
So this is the deal: the forum is in massive crisis.
No moderators are active, staff and Board are busy with much bigger issues than one little sub-community in a corner.
I suspect that I’m not eligible for any level of moderator access, if there were even anyone with the time to spare to give it to me.
However: it would be useful to know how to create walls around our threads, just in case I get lucky. For one thing, I might be able to pass it on to the ML who is my immediate “superior” in the heirarchy. I’m not sure what levels she has.
What would you suggest? (and huge thank yous for help and support!)
My guess is that restricting access to many/most of the site’s categories to members of specific groups and making use of category moderators would be the best way of dealing with what’s gone wrong on the forum.
Related to that, I’m not finding a great topic on Meta that describes how the category moderator functionality works.
Steps that I’ve suggested in my previous reply should be sufficient.
Create a private group (i.e. not open for public membership). Make sure to add all the members of your sub-community to this group.
Create a category and change the permissions as follows:
Remove all existing permissions.
<private_group> can Create/Reply/See
Staff can Create/Reply/See
Move the relevant topics to this newly created category.
Wow. That looks great, but may be above my access privileges.
I don’t have a clue where to go to create a private group, or to change permissions, and it would not surprise me if wherever that is, it is not open to me.
But I’ll check with my ML, who tends to feel very unqualified technically.
(It’s not that I don’t think I could do those things if I had access, I’m sure I could! but despite me having become a community leader, I’m still a purely ordinary user with no special privileges.)
This is something an actual staff member would have to do. Check out on the /about page of NaNoWriMo forums if there is someone with the right access who is willing to help.
There was a Blocked and Reported podcast episode about this. As I listened, my heart went out to the people who just want to pursue writing. The whole thing sounds utterly miserable even if just half of it is true. I’m really sorry you are dealing with this now.
The important thing is, an awful lot of people did manage to write, especially all the people who are off in communities that don’t bother with the forums. Those of us still on the forums – we’ve got the resilience of having friends who are kind and supportive, and there are many, many little pockets of PM friends who, from my membership in one, are pretty much unaffected.
It’s not the first time a disaster like this has damaged a community on the internet, and I think there’s a good chance the rebuild from the ashes will be all the stronger.
I have some ideas on how-to. Atm I use a group for members (closed but public) where ppl apply. Then a category(ies) the group has access the owners of that group are in another group for category moderation.
Atm Group’s category can be viewed but to post/reply one needs to apply.
This works not bad though extending groups to include a ban list with temp and Perm bans for group owners would be ideal. To better allow people ppl to join public groups and be banned if needed.
Your jumping.in here and sharing your process as you travel this bumpy road — and so well articulated — this is an amazing thing for us here in this forum to learn from you along your journey with NaNoWriMo.