Tracking the status of RFCs using Discourse

Feature
1

Feature name

State of Discourse

Feature objective

Make Discourse an RFC-like forum

Feature Description

  1. A Request for Comments ( RFC ) is a publication in a series, from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or groups of engineers and computer scientists in the form of a memorandum describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. It is submitted either for peer review or to convey new concepts, information, or, occasionally, engineering humor.[1]
  2. State of Discourse is similar to what states in RFC-type documents would be. State of Discourse is used to better control user posts. RFC’s documents have these states:
  • Informational (Informational)
  • Experimental
  • Best Current Practice
  • Standards Track
  • Proposed (Proposed Standard)
  • Draft (Draft Standard)
  • Internet Standard (Internet Standard)
  • History (Historic)
  • Unknown

In my case, in my resource it would be these states according to the post type:

State of Discourse / codes

  1. Draft (Draft Standard) | 1 - Draft (Draft Standard)
  2. Experimental | 2 - Experimental
  3. Proposed Standard | 3 - Proposed (Proposed Standard)
  4. Standards Track | 4 - Standards Track
  5. Best Current Practice | 5 - Best Current Practice
  6. History (Historic) | 6 - History (Historic)
  7. Informational | 7 - Informational
  8. Standard | 8 - Standard
  9. Unknown | 9 - Unknown

State of Discourse / cases

  1. When the user creates a post and that post has no response. This post has Discourse status as Draft (Draft Standard). And when the user creates a post and that post has not been published. This post has Discourse status as Draft (Draft Standard) too.
  2. When the user creates a post and that post has a reply. This post has the status of Experimental Discourse. If there are more responses, this post has Discourse status of Experimental.
  3. If multiple users like the post and really believe this post is good, then that post is tagged as Standards Track. If there are more of the same or similar posts the default status is announced as status of Best Current Practice Discourse
  4. Any modification to the post is seen status is announced as Discourse of History (Historic).
  5. Whether the post is accepted by all community members, Discourse status of Informational.
  6. If the post needs any correction or improvement, status is announced as Discourse Informational (Informational). If the post is corrected and improved, status is announced as Discourse Proposed (Proposed Standard).
  7. If the post does not have a reply of 1 week, 1 day, 1 month or 1 year - status is announced as Discourse Unknown.

Notes

  • This state is done automatically
  • Post states always appear on the homepage
  • The cool thing about you having post states is that you follow that post
  • Quality control over user posts to avoid abuse, avoid spam, avoid out-of-order posts
  • Discourse is an attractive and even more community software, nothing better than increasing the quality of the software, the quality of the user experience

idea

image
image1285Ă—354 26.7 KB

Descriptive image

As we can see in the image, there can be different states in the same post. According to user interaction the state changes. The state can be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. We can see in the image that something happened, the post received a lot of comments, going from being a draft to being the Standard state, code 8.

references

1 Like
2

One way to do this without any add-ons would be to make subcategories (or, just top-level categories?) for each level, and move posts between them as they “graduate”.

Presumably a plugin could move posts between categories based on your criteria — or you could have an external script which uses the API to do it.

3 Likes
3

So this is about adding RFC-specific features to Discourse? Shouldn’t that be the title of this topic?

2 Likes
4

I am definitely interpreting based on some guessing, but I think it’s about adding “state tracking” features to Discourse, with RFC tracking being an example? I’m honestly not sure if “State of Discourse” is intended as a kind of joke or not… but either way, it is pretty confusing and should be something else.

In any case…

We’re currently doing something way less involved for Common Issues in Fedora Linux which I think might be similar, with a top-level (Accepted) Common Issues category with Proposed Common Issues and Archived Common Issues categories. I’m using an external script (at this point very kludgy — I am not actually a programmer) to process and move the posts between categories, as I suggested above.

2 Likes
7

I am definitely interpreting based on some guessing, but I think it’s about adding “state tracking” features to Discourse, with RFC tracking being an example?

  • Yeah. Exactly, that’s what I was thinking. Discourse states are based on RFC.
  1. I talked about the RFC because part of the technical documents that I develop part of the team does something similar.
  2. The problem is that this process is very bureaucratic and manual and is subject to human error at times.
  3. Because sometimes I write something technical that has to be reviewed by the team, if the person on the team is not very careful or is a person who sees a lot of details, the documents sent may be in the wrong place. My idea would be to implement Discourse in our small team.
  4. My idea would be how I work with technical documents, my idea would be to follow posts that people make. Tracking posts based on RFC. Since it is something that we work a lot.
  5. But I haven’t found any plugins or similar resources on Discourse or any forum-type software out there.
  6. The feature, in my opinion, is innovative, if you think about the technical documentation teams that use legacy software. I believe that these legacy and old software can be replaced by Discourse. Discourse is very interesting software and I like it a lot. Whenever I can I recommend it to friends and acquaintances. My problem is that I haven’t found any plugins or similar features that I’ve described just now, such as RFC-based post state.

We’re currently doing something way less involved for Common Issues in Fedora Linux which I think might be similar, with a top-level (Accepted) Common Issues category with Proposed Common Issues and Archived Common Issues categories. I’m using an external script (at this point very kludgy — I am not actually a programmer ) to process and move the posts between categories, as I suggested above.

  • I don’t want to keep looking at category or subcategory, I would like something dynamic.
  • The way the user interacts can create a new state or not.
  • Because if there’s no change of state, I’d have to do something like you’re planning, like, I’d have to create a script to move posts from one category to another.
  • I’m not criticizing you, I think this idea is good, so much so that I even thought about doing something like this, but I didn’t know anyone who thought the same. The only problem I see is that I’m not a programmer :frowning: and I haven’t found any script on the internet that does this.
1 Like
8

I don’t understand this. “Category” is really just a label, a type of metadata that happens to be represented in a hierarchical view. If you make these all subcategories but then look at the “all” view of the top level category, you’ll see all of the posts.

You have to track this state somehow. Your other option — without fairly invasive additions —would be to use tags, but I really do think categories are a better fit. Examples: Categories let you have different permission levels, and you could increase the search ranking for topics in the “higher” states and decrease for “lower” ones, so official documents are prioritized.

2 Likes
9

You have to track this state somehow. Your other option — without fairly invasive additions —would be to use tags, but I really do think categories are a better fit. Examples: Categories let you have different permission levels, and you could increase the search ranking for topics in the “higher” states and decrease for “lower” ones, so official documents are prioritized.

  • You’re right, you clarified a lot of things, thanks for that. Really, categories is much better
1 Like