In the process of exploring this platform, i discovered that there is a Lounge Area for members.
I have racked my brains for days but I have failed to figure out the perfect use for it.
I plan to start a Language Forum and Professional/Business Forum.
Any suggestions from the community will be appreciated.
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It’s not a fit for every scenario. You can always delete it if you can’t think of a use for now. Do you expect many TL3 users?
It’s just a category with a trust level set as access control, rather than a group.
For us it got us thinking about the trust levels and how we could use them, than any specific focus on the lounge.
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Yeah I can’t think of any use for it right now but I sorta wanted to have it there/use it.
I was hoping for some suggestions from people who have used it or just general thoughts from the community.
I see it in the way that modern communities don’t explicitly need the typical “admin + mod” staff team. You’ll still have them, but if your community is healthy enough, well-known contributors will arise and take care by themselves.
Sometimes you’d want to discuss things among these people, be it a problematic post, or some things in preparation for e.g. new categories, missing features, etc. The #lounge can be seen or used for that, and once things turn out well, you’ll share it in public domain.
Seeing the #lounge from within the trust levels and the gamification factor you’ll have with Discourse, users might just also put effort to join this sort of exclusive channel.
I don’t use it in my community thus far, but that’s mainly for the reason that there are just a couple of users applicable for it after 4 months of operating our new platform. Still it will allow us to discuss changes and work on the way, e.g. writing howtos, who wants to do more moderation, or if anything is missing greatly, e.g. a plugin one can found on GitHub.
The typical user doesn’t care much about the features in a forum to make answering a breeze, the long term contributor does a lot in my experience. They’ll also “monitor” what’s missing, and are at most valuable for their feedback. That is also one of the reasons for dropping Woltlab in favor of Discourse 
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You have mentioned interesting stuff. Thank you for that.
UPDATE: After reading this amazing book called Buzzing Communities by Richard Millington. I have discovered the ideal usage of the Lounge Area…so if you have one, you can invite people based on the following criteria.
(Kindly go through the screenshots to see the criteria)
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