Thank you so much for taking the time to share a bit about your experience here. It’s also certainly brought new life to this discussion.
I’d be happy to talk more about it with you, and you’re also welcome to share more here, but this post alone so far has already been valuable, so thank you.
Yes, we certainly value making Discourse flexible enough to meet a broad variety of use cases. That said, we think there are reasonable approaches we can take to reduce complexity. There are some low hanging fruit here where things are unnecessarily complicated that we can simplify with some straightforward time and effort. The idea @bloomexperiment shared is another example of the kind of thing we’re thinking about:
I have been thinking along very similar lines, for what it’s worth.
Some things we’ve (re-)discovered in our recent research around use cases is that communities don’t fit in a box.
Moving some of this setup from being whole site setup to being setup for a smaller space within the site (a group or category, or some combination of the two) can help address that. A given community could have a space for more social stuff and another for working on a project and another for answering support questions.
This would also allow communities to experiment more.
We can certainly continue this in the topic you started, but wanted to acknowledge it here first.
I appreciate your taking the time to share a few example of things that you think may be worth improving for the overall user experience for community members in Discourse. @lindsey and the team that was formerly focused on chat are now looking at this space more broadly and there is plenty of overlap with what you’ve listed here and what they’re starting to look at more closely.
thank you for highlighting this. It is something that we also revisited recently. Along with civilized discussion, we place particular value on enabling communities to get lasting value out of their conversations and the content they collectively create.
always nice to get your insights here @oshyan. We are certainly continuing to invest in making Discourse something people really desire to use (admins and community members alike). We know there’s plenty to do here and always will be!
We talk about this on occasion as well. There are times when I see Discourse more generally as a communication platform. We use it ourselves for collaboration and are always happy to see topics like these: Why you should use Discourse internally for your company/team instead of Slack (4 years use case)
An interesting framing for this is broadening the value of community itself. @HAWK gave a great talk recently about using Discourse for collaboration, framing it in terms of the value of building an internal community.
I strongly recommend watching it if you haven’t had a chance to do so.
(She’ll also be at Running Remote in Portugal in a few weeks to tell a similar story).