I am not sure about having both mailing lists and a forum, unless there is a clear separation of scopes between the two platforms, otherwise it would quickly become a big mess, no?
Because we are basically using the default configuration from Discourse, I have made a quick survey of how other projects use Discourse, to understand if some tweaks to our existing forum could potentially solve the issues we currently have.
Survey
I have surveyed the following Discourse forums:
- KNIME's Community Forum, which feels comparable in the sense that KNIME can be seen as an alternative to OpenRefine (although the user community and use cases are still pretty different I think). It's also an open source project, but driven by a company (so I guess that the development process and project management is not expeced to be public at all).
- Figma's Community Forum. Figma is not comparable to OpenRefine and is not open source, but I think it's interesting because its user community is less programming-savvy that KNIME's, so it's useful to take inspiration from as well
- NextCloud's community forum. NextCloud is a widely used data hosting platform, also appealing to a broad, non-technical user base. It is open source and a company is steering its development.
- EVE Online's forum. EVE Online seems to be a video game (series?)
- MetaMask's forum, about a cryptocurrency-related product
I tried to sign up to all those forums and get a sense of what the experience is. Here is a summary focused on various aspects of the onboarding process.
Forum scope
Are Discourse forums purely user-facing, or can some more technical/internal discussions also take place there without scaring users away?
- Knime: the forum contains discussion both for end users and for developers. The categories are grouped into two families, "Software" and "Community". The most active categories are advertised in the left-hand side of the page. This seems like a reasonable way to point users to the best resources for them, while making it possible to also host more technical discussions on the same platform.
- Figma: the forum does contain some more technical categories (such as the ones about using Figma's API), but they are definitely still user-facing and not about internal coordination of course, given that Figma is a proprietary product.
- NextCloud: there are "Development" and "Installation" categories alongside other ones focused on the end-users, such as "Support", "Non-english support" and "Features & apps".
- Eve Online: all the categories seem to be user-facing (I assume development is happening privately and I am not sure if third-party developers are able to do anything with the product, such as a "mod")
- MetaMask: there is a "Developer Discussion" category, which seems to complement activity on GitHub, similarly to what we have been doing so far
Landing page
How can the landing pages advertise the right content/categories to newcomers?
- Knime: the landing page prominently features pointers to various important resources (likely statically pinned somehow) and shows two columns further down, with the latest topics in all categories and the announcements. The left-hand side menu features a selection of categories, which is also useful to hide more internal/technical content.
- Figma: the landing page shows the latest topics, likely in all categories. Because the most active categories are for end users, this means that basically only end user content is visible there
- NextCloud: their landing page use the same layout as ours, likely Discourse's default one, resulting in the same sort of mix of topics
- Eve Online: theirs uses a different layout, which I find promising because the latest topics are shown category per category (with only the latest three topics shown). This means that by making sure that user-facing categories are shown first, the first
screen worth of content is only user-facing. - MetaMask: no recent topics are shown at all on their landing page, which is also a good way to keep the information displayed under control, I guess. The user-facing categories are shown first.
Email notifications
How can we make it easier for forum users to subscribe to the content they care about?
- Knime: I was not able to sign up because their registration page seems broken to me, because I am apparently supposed to solve a non-existent Captcha (both with Firefox and Chromium)
- Figma: they seem to be using a SSO at
figma.com. When registring to that SSO, I am given the option to sign up for the mailing list by ticking a checkbox. It seems like a pretty great UX to me, but it's unclear if we'd be able to do the same with vanilla Discourse though. - NextCloud: when signing up the experience looks pretty much identical to the one we currently have. The mailing list mode is not enabled by default. But there is one notable difference: as a new user, I am automatically subscribed to the "Release" category. This means that out of the box, I will get an email for each new release of NextCloud.
- Eve online: I tried to sign up but accessing the forum apparently requires having a "character" in the game, and I think downloading the game for the purpose of creating a character to test the forum could be endangering my productivity, so I hope you understand that I stopped the experiment there
- MetaMask: they seem to be using the default settings, with the weekly summary of activity. I could not find any category that I am automatically subscribed to.
Proposal
I think it'd be worth trying out some of those alternate settings before we give up on Discourse. I am interested in the following measures:
- Adopting Knime's, Eve Online's or Metamask's landing page format
- Adding some "default navigation categories" like most other Discourse forums use, to promote important categories and hide more internal ones
- Adopting NextCloud's use of the automatic subscription for select categories. I think we could do that for some low-traffic announcements category, but perhaps it's even concievable to add the Support category by default as well, to get closer to the "user mailing list"
feeling?
If there is enthusiasm for trying some of those, I could do more research to figure out how to enable those settings.
There are other features that could be worth adopting. For instance, Figma seems to be using some sort of plugin which lets people vote for feature requests and display the number of votes in the list of topics. I think that could be fitting for OpenRefine too.