(If this should be broken off as a separate topic, let me know… I’m not sure if I should continue posting in this thread/category or go elsewhere with this.)
I’m going to add user fields. Some are general information we would like to have for all users (voluntary), e.g. the city/country they are in – or do we manage that with a hundred different groups? Just thinking of that now: user fields or groups? Aside from city, some pertinent information could be: “big family” (people with lots of animals), “managing this alone”, “working irregular hours”, “disability or health issues”, “absent most days vs. usually at home”, “level of comfort with technology”, “stress level”… all these are “context” indicators about the user that are super useful for us to know because they influence the way we will advise and support people when they post.
Two categories of user fields I feel should definitely be user fields – one batch will serve for people migrating from facebook, another for “real new members”:
date they joined the community on Facebook (most people know), can be approximative; name on Facebook or profile link (to help us recognise people)
for new members we have screening questions that are already in place on Facebook, that I’d want to transfer pretty much as is (do you have a diabetic cat, give us some details, what are your expectations/needs, are you giving insulin/treatment or open to doing it, how stressed out are you right now… that pretty much covers it)
Is there a way to “group” user fields with a conditional (“I’m coming from the community on facebook” / “I’m completely new to the community”)? (See, this is kind of like a question on features, so should this stay in the Community category?)
I understand it can be hard to restrain ourselves from over-engineering, but keep in mind that Discourse is very flexible, and that you can tweak your categories afterwhile. Which includes merging categories, moving posts from one category to another, replacing a category with a tag and vice versa, etc.
So, it’s not a major issue if you think you made mistakes, or if you think your categories and tags organizations could be improved after launching your forum:
Of course, it’s always ideal if everything’s right off the launch, of course. What I’m trying to say is that these tools can ease your overthinking, since what you come up with can always be changed afterwards.
Yes, exactly. That’s what’s making me think that « start simple and iterate » (which is my default mode for doing things) is a smarter choice here than « prepare everything perfectly before the guests show up at the door » (which is my ideal mode for doing things, rarely seen or achieved in reality )
I’m biased towards doing things this way and think it’ll probably be best in your case too.
One way to approach this is to consider there being different milestones on your way to a complete launch, that might look something like this:
site made available to close collaborators
site made available to beta testers
site made available to pilot group
site made available to whole existing community
site made available to new members
end of support date announced for certain activities in old community
certain activities no longer supported in old community
At each of these stages, you slowly expand who is included, iterate on the site until you believe it’s ready to move on to the next stage. Do things required for that next stage, but not the stage beyond. Learn what’s really needed as you go.
The last two steps could also be repeated in a loop, as you replace activities one or a few at a time. Maybe eventually you spin down the old community entirely. Or maybe it remains indefinitely to support a smaller set of activities.
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