Discourse enhancements

Learn
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More moderators and tagging / sections for this elm-lang discourse.

What is the reason for more moderators?

It feels like no one is moderating the forum right now (or enabling new features available in recent discourse releases). This hasn’t been a problem except a small discussion about increasing the interval before auto-closing threads didn’t get a response from a moderator. Occasionally, it would be nice if a moderator stepped in and suggested splitting a thread into a new topic.

What type of tagging / sections do you feel are missing?

For browsing or discovery during search, it would be nice to mirror the channel names in elm-lang slack as tags. As for sections, I don’t have a concrete suggestion, but the current limited number of sections feels too minimal and I would be up for whatever a group of moderators decided on as a next evolution of the topics.

Also, it would be nice to have a very thorough overview of elm resources, link to FAQ, and other websites from Welcome to the Elm Discourse! .

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Who are the moderators?

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According to About - Elm :

  • Ian Mackenzie
  • Evan
  • Richard Feldman

But I doubt that’s correct…

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Those are automatically generated from the database, so that’s the right list.

Can you say more about which new features you’d like to see? Maybe that would help. This instance is hosted by the folks who make Discourse, so it’s likely not a matter of updating the software.

For context, the current categories were designed this way as a way to say “here is what you can do on this forum.” I’m not convinced that adding more tags would be helpful at the current level of traffic.

Overall, it seems to me like adding more moderators would be the move. Making sure folks are well-supported here is probably a good way to grow usage. (This is the part where someone might think “well, Brian, why don’t you volunteer?” but I have done that and gotten burnt out—at this point I can participate but shouldn’t moderate.)

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I’ll add my voice to the call for more moderators given that @rtfeldman is busy with Roc and more, and @evancz has non-community management priorities at this time. Leaving essentially @ianmackenzie as the only moderator.

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Oof yes and I’ve been pretty busy ‘moderating’ my 1 year old recently so I’ve been sadly neglecting my Elm moderation duties recently :sweat_smile:

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My thought on this is to ask, who is this forum for? I actually think the current categories are ok and its not really a problem for me, after all pretty much any topic can be made to fit one of Learn, Request Feedback or Show and Tell. But if the purpose of this forum is to be as useful as possible to users of Elm, would it not benefit by becoming a bit more democratic?

It could be that the current level of traffic is low because this is seen as somewhere that is not being run primarily for the benefit of its users but instead trying to force its users to conform to some pre-conceived idea.

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I personally don’t care about moderation per se, I think we’re all grownups.

Could you disable the feature closing posts after 10 days?

I feel it really hurts the conversation here. It’d be great to be able to post follow ups, resurrect/rediscover old posts…

The OCaml discourse forum works like that and, IMO, it’s fantastic!

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I don’t think anything is needed right now, but if things are enhanced/reorganized later, turning on the sidebar would be nice. (any changes to this forum are low priority for me, I think elm-lang slack covers most users needs and this is a nice supplemental, but if there is a constraint in the number of people available to maintain and moderate, I would allocate more people to elm-lang slack than here)

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Just a thought… which may also be a little bit relevant to the Building and Extending Trust post :man_shrugging:

So, I was having a shower this morning, and letting my mind wander, as I do, and thought: some kind of ‘off-topic’ section might be nice.

I’ve built some good stuff with Elm over the years, both for my own business when I had it, (a pretty good CMS for my staff to use) and for friends/acquaintances - but I’ve always known I did it ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. I could never had done it in pure JS, and probably would have struggled trying to do it in React etc (maybe I’m doing myself a dis-service, but one thing I know for sure is that it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as enjoyable as doing it in Elm). The existence of Elm (thank you @evancz :pray:) and the packages created by community members (too many to mention) made my life ‘better’ for want of a better word…

Over the years I figured out who the ‘movers and shakers’/giants are in this community, and I trust their advice whenever it comes my way, and always enjoy reading random/interesting posts, some of which goes over my head, some of which I learn from.

Howerver, I know nothing about these people other than they are far more experienced and knowledgeable than I. Every now and then someone might post something like “I’ll be getting to it when I can, but I now also have a newborn…” which is always nice to read.

It doesn’t have to be personal stuff that gets posted, it could be absolutely anything…

I was simply thinking that as a community, it might be strengthened if we knew more about each other within the community, and maybe built relationships outside of Elm, and this can only happen with dialogue.

For instance, when I’m not taking care of my mum (she has Alzheimers and I’m full time carer now), I have two past times that help me de-stress - writing code and playing pool. I love playing pool - I play league twice a week and around one comp a month. Luckily both these past times cost very little money.

For all I know there could be other members who also enjoy the game of Pool, for me it’s English Eight Ball, for you it might be 9-Ball, Straight Pool or Chinese 8-Ball :man_shrugging:

Maybe I get chatting with another member about Pool, and we get to know each other a little, then something related to Elm comes up for one of us, and we end up working on it together :man_shrugging:

Maybe we find out we don’t actually live that far from each other, and then decide to go and meet and both play at a pool comp that’s close by to both of us :man_shrugging:

I don’t know, I’m just rambling on now, I just think that conversations outside of Elm between other Elm devs can strengthen the community. Of course, I guess some topics might divide people, but as someone else mentioned - “we’re all adults” so hopefully divisive topics wouldn’t come up or would be ‘handled with care’.

I’ll stop rambling now, if you’ve read this far, thanks, and I hope I didn’t bore you.

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@benjamin-thomas yes many people think the same. See Poll: posts closing delay

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What do we need to do to make this happen? Either existing admin changes it, or we get a new admin on board to make the change. :pray:

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Maybe by gently asking @ianmackenzie to remove the 10 days automatic closing feature? :pray:

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Argh I’ve been completely delinquent in my moderation duties recently, apologies…I can’t even complain I have a baby any more, strictly speaking she’s a toddler now :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m not sure I feel quite comfortable making site-wide settings like that unilaterally, but I’ll see what I can do (also perhaps about bringing some more moderators on board :sweat_smile:).

@paulh I certainly enjoyed pool quite a bit at one of my old jobs that had a very popular annual pool tournament, but that was many years ago! I do kind of like the idea of a way to post “intros” or similar, as long as we have some sensible guidelines to prevent oversharing or NSFW content or whatever…I’ll try to look into that as well.

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Yes having a baby sometimes means lots of waking up at night and other surprises but that’s totally worth it :wink:

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