Within the Fedora Project a small group of editors provide support for an on-line magazine.
Articles for this magazine are created by people with many connections to the project. These
range from project managers, to developers, documentation writers, and simple users of the
Fedora Linux O/S.
Each author opens a Discourse topic and supplies a description and outline of the article
via a template. The editors need a way to communicate with the authors, track what the status
of their article is, as well as simply who the author is. This is being done by using the
Discourse topics. The author, by creating the topic is, by default, “responsible” for that
article. The editors edit part of the template to assign editors, update the status, and
provide other information for the shared editing process.
There are occasions when the responsibility for an article changes. This may be a new author
assuming the responsibility, or an editor needing to create and assign an article to an author.
This re-assignment process can be done by using the “Assign” option for the topic.
However, an issue arises when the assignee is not a member of a group that can be assigned to.
This is most obvious with authors who have no higher lever TL status or group membership.
Their “userids” simply do not appear in the list when an attempt is made to search for and
assign the topic.
What is needed it a mechanism to allow a non-group user to be assign a topic. Or, perhaps, a
group that can be created for anyone with a FAS account (FAS - Fedora Account System). This
account is a requirement for authors writing for the Fedora Magazine.
I note that those that can not be assigned-to also appear to NOT be in any FAS group, although
in at least two cases that were checked they where a TL1. They have, however signed the FPCA
(Fedora Project Contributor Agreement). This leads me to suggest that if we could create a group
containing all the FPCA signers we might be able to assign to those folks.
Hey @rlengland, thanks for opening this topic. This is something that I need to look into with the Discourse support team. I’ll share this topic with them and see if I can get answers, or if someone might be able to ask directly here and help us debug how to make this workflow possible.
I think there are multiple teams which could benefit from this, especially as the Community Blog is considering a migration to Fedora Discussion as well.
For the benefit of public knowledge, here is the reply I received from our Discourse staff team. (They replied right away, I was the slow one here.)
I have made the change and added fedora-contributor to this field. @rlengland, if you could test, validate, and confirm this is working as-expected, that would be great. Thank you!
