This is pretty neat - thanks for creating this plugin and sharing it with the community! Is anyone using it with success? How is it going?
I was just talking with some colleagues in my community about bringing people together around themes of shared interest. E.g. people we know to have shared interest who we think should meet. We already do it on an ad hoc basis, but this plugin came to mind as a means to systematize it and not create more opportunities for connecting and engaging.
I wonder if there might be scope and interest to combine this with the Events Plugin 📆 by @angus, to allow for the creation of scheduled mingle events. The events modal when creating an event topic could have a “this is a mingle!” option, which when selected opens up options to set it up including the message template.
Other ideas that spring to mind:
- ability to customize the “host” user who sends the mingle messages, e.g. it could be a moderator in charge of the mingle event.
- ability to include a group in the message and add tags for coordinating any followup, which would work well with the Tickets Plugin 🎟 by @angus
- ability to specify user fields for matching for a specific mingle event, e.g. to connect up people from same country or who share some datapoint in user custom fields
Separately from this it’s occurring to me that it would be interesting to be able to grab a list of users in a particular topic or message, and add them to a discourse group to use for various purposes like this. I suspect there’s already a data explorer query for this (is there?) but some UI method for admins would be neat. Being able to take the people who have contributed to an active topic and obviously have shared interest and starting a mingle event for them would be super interesting.
And finally, I’d love to see the Voice recording plugin by @pawel get some love, which would really make mingling a heck of a lot more dynamic and fun… letting people save recorded messages to each other.