When you started your first Discourse community, what did you find hard to do?

community
#18

2 posts were split to a new topic: Add user title selection menu

#19

This sounds pretty nifty! :smiley: :memo:

Any thoughts on what each tasks would be, that an admin does in reply to discobot?

Oh, that sounds good too! Noted :memo:

When you say member titles, what do you mean?

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#20

I definitely like the sound of that :heart_eyes:. As there are lots of settings what parts would you say are the most important to include in the tutorial?

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#21

That’s something very interesting and thank you for giving me a chance to elaborate. As you know, new owners come here and seek help in the #support category. Some questions though are very similar to one another and we can find many duplicate topics regarding them. For instance, one of the most frequently asked question is how to modify text. I believe I have seen the following path for more than 100 times :joy: admin>customise>etc...

Of course that tutorial will not learn you how to edit the forum via CSS, HTML but it will show you were the entries are and how to locate them for future reference. It could also cover a variety of other topics, such as:

Tutorial Points of Interest
Site Settings How to: 1) Customise Trust Level Requirements - 2) Add forum description and logo - 3) Set minimum characters to post - etc… (It would cover the most FAQ)
Creating Categories How to: 1) create categories - 2) Modifying the category (How to add category moderators, enable an approval process, add who is allowed to post / view / see and what each if that means)

And so on… Those tutorials will have admins understand the discourse tools faster, where to locate the most frequently used site settings, how to enable / disable them, etc…

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#22

Is it possible to make this more obvious? I remember the first forum I was prompted to admin and I couldn’t find the button to create categories. Perhaps add how to create them in to the Admin quick start guide in the #staff category :sweat_smile:

I just remembered this as Thomas mentioned it.

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#23

Yeah, category creation is buried pretty hard. It’s only on /categories, and in a drop-down that only has one item on most forums (on some it has two).

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#24

Partly intentional, though, as site owners tend to create too many categories:

and

To start

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#25

Ah! Thanks for clearing it up Jeff. I agree with Riking too though because it can be so buried sometimes that it can be difficult to find although I see where you are coming from with creating too many categories. The first article was definitely an interesting read.

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#31

A tutorial that simplified email setup. I went months with mine misconfigured.

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#32

Do you mean technical setup? In this topic we’re talking more along the lines of community management or software onboarding.

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#33

I found (and still find) it hard to set up a good moderation model. Detached interfaces for administration and moderation could be a great help there.

This could make it easier and more visual to grasp how moderation is setup and how adjustments change the model and processes. It could also better support on-boarding of new moderators and revising moderation decisions.

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#35

Neat suggestion, I haven’t looked at it like that before. Have you set up something similar before? Any ideas you can share here?

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#36

Maybe we should have two settings
I mean in settings page only show the settings that are mostly used by the new users and add a :white_check_mark: Show advanced setting checkbox in top alongside :white_check_mark: Only show overridden checkbox to show all the settings below Advanced settings text.

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#37

Nice suggestions! We are actively discussing splitting advanced settings even!

This will be tricky to figure out which settings new users use, any thoughts?

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#38

For this we should ask community managers which settings did you overridden like now i only edited
these 26 settings.

title
site description
short site description
contact email
contact url
site contact username
exclude rel nofollow domains

logo small
large icon
favicon
short title

base font
heading font

enable google oauth2 logins
google oauth2 client id
google oauth2 client secret
enable facebook logins
facebook app id
facebook app secret

min password length
password unique characters

tagging enabled
max tag length
min trust to create tag
tags listed by group
force lowercase tags

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#39

The hardest part of onboarding is figuring out how to deliver information to my users with optimal visibility, concision, and friction.

I’m using Versatile Banner for anonymous users just to give them an idea of what we’re about.

Then I have a category called Start Here

And here is where I’m stuck. I’d like to have about eight fixed topics that are always in the same order. That would let me deliver bite-sized chunks of information. But I don’t see how to freeze the topic order.

I’ve seen people put everything into a massively long topic with a TOC, but I think that’s a bit overwhelming. I could create eight sub-categories with one post each, but then they’re needing to click on the category followed by the topic.

Any ideas?

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#40

I never saw all of this in one place, so here’s my partial checklist to personalize a new Discourse install

Menu / About

  • edit the tabs: About, FAQ, Terms of Service, and Privacy

Menu / Admin / Customize / Text

  • Edit the recommended texts
  • Then search for blog.discourse You’ll see a lot of links you might want to change

Most of those links point to the following guides that you might want to copy over onto your site:

You can also search for meta.discourse but most of those references are not visible to most users

Menu / Admin / Customize / Email /

  • Welcome Staff also points to the Moderation Guide
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#41

When you say search for, do you mean search in?

What references here are not visible to most users? It will be helpful to work on those and fix.

Do you mean to edit the Welcome Staff to include a link to the Moderation guide?

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#42

One thing that i found difficult was lock post vs the close topic function. Yes, they are easy now but I always was locking posts when I wanted to close. I think it would be best to change the lock post icon to make it look different from the close icon.

1 Like
#43

In Customize / Text, there is a search box that says: Search for the text you'd like to edit. I mean, type “blog.discourse” (without quotes) right there and hit enter.

That’s how you will see all the references to posts on blog.discourse that you might want to relink to your own posts

If you search for meta.discourse (in Customize / Text) you will find, for example, dashboard.s3_cdn_warning which talks about uploading files to S3, which most users would probably never see.

I mean Welcome Staff already includes a link to the moderation guide on meta.discourse, so if you create your own moderation guide, you would want to change that link. I went through all the emails and that’s the only one I saw that includes an external link that someone might want to personalize.

3 Likes