Creating a space for new users for Fedora Join

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

I’m continuing this from a mailing list thread, mainly because I want to include a screenshot but also to kickstart this group working in this space…

@ankursinha

I don’t think Discourse lets us keep this communication channel
isolated/protected in the same way. For one, irrespective of whether it
is a category or a tag, a user sees posts from all of Discourse on
their landing page on discussion.fp.o. Even if we send folks to a
category/tag, it’s really easy to navigate away to other parts of the
universe there. So, the excellent navigation features of Discourse are a
good thing for users that want to keep up with multiple tags/categories,
but not necessarily for newcomers who may find the large amount of info
it exposes them to confusing/overwhelming to begin with.

I’ve really tried to make the new layout less overwhelming — that was actually one of my goals in the reorg. Instead of a huge array of categories (which is both daunting on the front page and overwhelming when picking where to post), there’s just the few.

I do hope to consolidate more things here — move discussions where possible, and mirror and bridge them when we can’t or don’t want to. That might make it more intimidating on one axis, but on another it simplifies, because there’s less “Okay, to get started, learn about Pagure and Hyperkitty and the Wiki and GitLab and also some stuff is on Github plus there’s still Taiga, and we have Telegram, IRC, and Matrix, and then Hackmd of course, and Fedocal plus Jitsi or Bluejeans…”

If you have more suggestions on how we can ease people in, I think that’d be good in general.

@ankursinha

A dedicated limited/filtered “view” that limits newcomers to our
tag/category only would be ideal, but I’m not aware of a way that this
can be done (without affecting other users and so on).

We can definitely do this. We can create a “Getting Started” group (hopefully soon a Fedora Accounts group), and set all categories except Getting Started to muted, and that one to Watched.

That would make the front page look like this (with the existing Fedora Classroom category as an example:

… and all of the menus (Latest, Active, New…) only show posts from that group too. You can then click “Muted Categories” to see the rest, and unmute as you like. (I guess probably we’d actually want to make Site Feedback also unmuted, but all the tags in it except Site Help & Feedback and guide — otherwise that probably also overwhelms. Anyway I hope you get the idea.)

@ankursinha

PS: one of my few issues with Discourse for multi project/team
discussion is that it isn’t opt-in in the same way as mailing lists are.
Even before I decide to “watch” some and “mute” other things, I’m
already seeing everything. I still need to “watch” (subscribe) bits as I
do in mailing lists, and additionally, now I also need to spend time on
“muting” (unsubscribing) others. I wonder if there is a way of somehow
starting with everything muted (a clean slate!) so that I can then
unmute/watch only bits I am interested in.

With the new site, the default settings are:

• Watched: none
• Tracking: Community Blog, Podcast
• Watching First Post: News & Announcements
• Muted: Everything in Team Workflows

Which I hope is a decent balance.

We actually could mute everything as the default for everyone — there’s even a site setting for that. Or we could set it that way for tl0 users, and then have more show up unmuted when you reach tl1 (although we’d probably need a little custom work to make that be smart about what people have already changed for themselves.) Lots of options!

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@ankursinha

I wonder if there is a way of somehow
starting with everything muted (a clean slate!) so that I can then
unmute/watch only bits I am interested in.

@ankursinha actually, there’s another approach you might take. I added a “See only what you care about” section to Tips and tricks: what do you need to know about Discourse platform. Does that do what you’re looking for?

[ankursinha (FranciscoD)]

@mattdm

We can definitely do this. We can create a “Getting Started” group (hopefully soon a Fedora Accounts group), and set all categories except Getting Started to muted, and that one to Watched.

That would make the front page look like this (with the existing Fedora Classroom category as an example:

This looks great. I’m thinking about the implementation though:

• so we’ll need a FAS group for this, which means when we file a Welcome to Fedora ticket, we add the newcomer to this FAS group. That’s fine for us to do, but it’ll mean they’ll get access to all of Fedora infra (as CLA+1)—would that be OK? At the moment, we let folks join a team and get sponsored to a FAS group to get the CLA+1, and we only add people to the group temporarily if they explicitly ask to be added to edit the wiki.
• I expect this would only work if someone logs in to Discussion for the first time after they’ve been added to the required FAS group. So, how would this work for someone that got on the site before they were added to the FAS group? They’d still see it all, no? We wouldn’t then update their view?

@mattdm

With the new site, the default settings are:

• Watched : none
• Tracking : Community Blog, Podcast
• Watching First Post : News & Announcements
• Muted : Everything in Team Workflows

Which I hope is a decent balance.

Similarly, does this apply to folks now joining the platform only, or do we folks that had accounts already also get our levels tweaked?

@mattdm

@ankursinha actually, there’s another approach you might take. I added a “See only what you care about” section to Tips and tricks: what do you need to know about Discourse platform. Does that do what you’re looking for?

That’s really helpful, thank you. I’ve set my default view to “Unread” now, and that does help me focus on the bits I want to read.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@ankursinha

This looks great. I’m thinking about the implementation though:

• so we’ll need a FAS group for this, which means when we file a Welcome to Fedora ticket, we add the newcomer to this FAS group. That’s fine for us to do, but it’ll mean they’ll get access to all of Fedora infra (as CLA+1)—would that be OK? At the moment, we let folks join a team and get sponsored to a FAS group to get the CLA+1, and we only add people to the group temporarily if they explicitly ask to be added to edit the wiki.
• I expect this would only work if someone logs in to Discussion for the first time after they’ve been added to the required FAS group. So, how would this work for someone that got on the site before they were added to the FAS group? They’d still see it all, no? We wouldn’t then update their view?

RIght now, groups aren’t synced from Fedora Accounts, but hopefully we can get that implemented soon. But yeah, that does present some complications. However, adding to the group after your account has been created does change your defaults. (You can change them back.)

I think we could have a question on initial Discourse login; something like “☐ I’m new! Start me with a simplified view, please!” which would put you in that group. I’m not quite sure how to do this automatically, so I’ve asked Discourse support for options. That’d be a group that isn’t synced with Fedora Accounts so would get around the CLA+1 problem.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@ankursinha

Similarly, does this apply to folks now joining the platform only, or do we folks that had accounts already also get our levels tweaked?

I set anyone who had not changed their category notification preferences to use the new defaults. For everyone else, I translated category settings to the equivalent tag ones, and added the new ones above, hopefully without disrupting any other notification settings.

@ankursinha

That’s really helpful, thank you. I’ve set my default view to “Unread” now, and that does help me focus on the bits I want to read.

Cool. I might look at other ways we can make that more discoverable to others who might find it helpful!