I was looking at the pricing for hosted plans and trying to understand why the “staff” roles were so restricted, since that includes both admins and moderators. The limits for the three tiers seem really low, to be honest.
While I’ve used Discourse quite a bit, I’ve never run one myself, so my knowledge of the moderation aspects is limited. I came across the Discourse pricing page today when I went looking at community platform options for the PTA at my kids’ school. Since I was looking at the Starter option, I was kinda surprised that it only allows two “staff” roles and that moderation and admin are both “staff”. Considering the board of the PTA has six members plus various committee chairs, even the 15 person limit for the Enterprise tier was starting to feel a bit tight.
So, while searching around I found the info about Category Moderators, which aren’t considered “staff”. Now, while there’s likely at least some of the board and committee chairs who could be fine with Category Moderator roles, when you’re looking at a volunteer organization like a PTA, having only two people who can manage users, it seems like a really tight limit.
So I’m kinda curious why “staff” accounts are so restricted? In my experience, smaller communities often benefit from having more distributed user management since moderation may be spread out between more people. I guess the question is - is there something about this role that makes it more expensive for y’all or data you have that shows that communities at these sizes only ever need to have 2, 5 or 15 “staff”? Is there a specific reason that only “staff” have user management permissions?
The thing is, I understand that communities benefit from a minimum headcount and a single school’s PTA likely isn’t going to reach that, but I could imagine the city’s PTA association getting a shared Discourse with groups for each school and space for general discussion, which would allow more cross-communication between the different PTAs… but with over 100 schools, 15 staff wouldn’t even allow each school to have one “staff” user to manage their own members.
I guess the other possibility is that I’m not really understanding these roles properly - if so, maybe someone can help me understand?
Hi @Catija, we are out till the end of next week on our yearly meetup.
I alerted the right people who can offer a response here, but it will likely take a bit.
Creating pricing tiers for a product is part art, part science, and part guessing.
It is not all based on “what it costs us to host” instead, we try to create the tiers to match “types” of customers and provide the right value at the right price point. Hobbyist communities with low traffic tend to need a lot less moderation; businesses tend to need more. It is worth noting that at the enterprise level, we don’t tend to worry that much about admin counts, though I would say too many bosses can be an actual pathology in community.
Thanks Sam - and no worries about the delay! I hope you’re all enjoying your co-location time!
I totally agree about how there can be too many bosses in some cases, so no arguments there. I think that what qualifies someone as a “boss” and the format of the community can be major factors in when you hit that. Part of that could be due to my mentally pushing Discourse beyond what it’s “intended” to be - and maybe even beyond what’s possible.
When I think of my example of a single Discourse for an entire city’s PTAs, I think of a space of spaces.
There’s discussion areas for everyone to participate and
share their ideas - “Has anyone ever done x before at their school?”
support each other - “We’re struggling to get parents involved, what can we do?”
collaborate - “We have speaker X coming - would anyone else want to book them while they’re in town?”
store shared documentation/reference materials
with the added benefit of platform stability for parents with multiple kids and as kids grow up - as they go between schools, the platform doesn’t change, the groups a parent’s in does.
There’s spaces for each PTA to have their own stuff so they can
create a knowledge warehouse instead of keeping what they’ve done in the past in members’ heads such as what assets they have or can access, prior event planning
discuss/track projects that are in flight (without siloing them in an email thread)
store reference materials, documents (or links to them), and assets (e.g. logos)
But this space should be “safe” with some amount of access control
Private space that limits access to parents/teachers/students through invites or QR-code
Groups to limit access to some content based on school or role (e.g. board members vs volunteer)
While it makes sense for the city’s PTA org to have “Admin” control:
manage the actual software implementation (site settings, impersonation)
access or manage a user’s PII (some exceptions)
see dashboards and logs
fully access all categories
manage categories (creation/removal)
managing post ownership
Much of the stuff that falls into the “Moderator” arena but not the “Category Moderator” one is where I see room for flexibility. The user management features, in particular.
approve new users (depending on membership entry points?)
manage group membership (for their groups/categories)
see user emails (for their groups/categories)
lock posts
grant badges (?)
In a community like a PTA, the groups (and category access) for many users would be changing from one year to the next - at the start of the school year, and whenever new parents join. That seems like something better done by someone on a school’s PTA board who actually knows the people joining, rather than being gated by someone in the larger org.
I think maybe part of where I’m getting confused is the terminology. I see references to “group owners” and “group membership” but the only mention of “group” in the Trust Level Permissions Reference chart is about “tag groups” (not the same thing?) and the group owner role isn’t mentioned on the User statuses, roles, and permissions page, either.
Is this just the missing piece that addresses most of my issues?
Hey @Catija as Sam mentioned, to answer your initial question, what we tend to observe in general with existing users of Discourse is that the staff to member ratio scales very much nonlinearly, with a small number of staff handling very large communities.
In smaller, high-trust communities, the ways we see power distributed more evenly among members has generally been through making more users “trust level 4” or by using category moderators. We’ve also been making an effort over the past year to allow permissions to be granted to larger groups at a more granular level. See for example, this topic: Changes coming to settings for giving access to features (from trust levels to groups)
There are certainly some exceptional cases where communities grant admin or moderator privileges more widely. But for the most part, I think where we see that happening, our thinking now is that we have some gaps to fill in ways more aligned with the above.
In your case, from what I’ve heard you describe so far, my feeling is that most of what you’d like to accomplish could be done so with categories and groups for each PTA, with some additional responsibility delegated to group owners to manage their group’s membership and category moderators to moderate the activity with the primary categories defined for each group.
I need to dig into more of the details of what you’ve shared, but if you get to the point of trying to configure things in a way that would meet the needs of your community, we can continue to riff here on both what general approach makes the most sense, as well as to discuss any specific issues that you bump into along the way.
Yeah, this recent series of changes does seem to largely address my concerns. I think what’s maybe missing is y’all adding references to these changes to the documentation about user roles. While the page about roles doesn’t literally say that only users with Admin/Mod roles have access to the listed features, my brain interprets it that way.
In particular, adding basic info about the Group Owner role to that page (with a link to the Group Owners-specific page for more info) alongside the Category Moderator section would be great - as would adding a column indicating which settings are accessible to Group Owners on the fancy Trust Levels Table.
It does seem like some of this is maybe still in progress (?), so if my request is premature, consider it a “when this is live” request!
For context, my experience with user permissions comes from Stack Overflow - I was a Community Manager there for five years, and most of the privileges I’ve mentioned are granted to the volunteer mods for the sites - so I’m pretty familiar with large communities. I say this totally tongue-in-cheek - it’s nice to see Discourse user privileges aligning more with what SO has come to rely on.
I say this totally tongue-in-cheek - it’s nice to see Discourse user privileges aligning more with what SO has come to rely on.
makin’ a note to look at that more closely. thanks for the suggestion!