We are now syncing Fedora Account System groups to Discourse! If your team has a group, this guide should cover what you need to know. If you have any questions not covered, comment below and we’ll update.
What’s synced?
There are many, many existing groups in the Fedora Account System, and many of them are special-purpose or obsolete. Therefore, we’re only syncing groups that also exist here — they need to be manually created by an admin. We’re also leaving some special-purpose Discourse groups alone. That’s staff, admins, and moderators, as well as the “trust level” groups.
What can regular site users do with this?
Maybe not a whole lot on its own. You can create polls which are only available to members of certain groups — that might be useful.
Some groups may opt to allow @ mentions for the whole group. Like @council.
What can teams do with this?
In addition to the above:
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We can set up special Team Workflows categories where team members may have special permission to post or reply (or to have full “moderator” access to). A whole category could even be private to the team, although of course doing things in the open is the Fedora way.
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We can configure a group to automatically grant trust level 1 so long-term Fedora contributors we already know aren’t subject to the limits for new site users (which protect against spam and abuse).
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Group membership can add to a users’ notification-tracking settings for Categories or Tags. For example, when someone is added to the
@councilgroup, they’re automatically set to watch council. This is a good way to make sure team members are getting notifications for relevant posts. (This isn’t locked — anyone can change their own notification settings later.) -
Groups can have a “flair image”, which members can chose to have displayed on their avatar. This can be set by the group owners — see below.
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Groups membership can also convey the ability to select a “title” which will display on their profile and user-card popup — for example, “Fedora Council Member”. (Note that users can also select Badge names as titles already.)
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Teams can have a “group inbox” for private messages (and we can configure that to be able to receive email at a dedicated address, if that’s desired).
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We don’t have this active but could turn it on if desired — there is a plugin which allows topics or replies to be assigned to a person or to a group collectively.
Also: group visibility can be set to public or only shown to logged-in users or even only to group members (and site staff). Group membership can likewise be restricted.
Group Owners
Members of a group can be designated as Owners of that group. Group owners can:
- set the display name for the group (“Fedora Council” for
council) - change the group “flair” image
- fill out the “about this group” information (see Fedora council - Fedora Discussion)
- add other people as group owners (or remove self as such)
- change interaction settings — who can mention and message the group
- change the default notification level for group messages
- change who is allowed to assign things to a group (were we to enable that)
- change the default notification levels set for group members (which tags and categories to watch, if any)
They can also
- add/remove group members — but they should not do this, because any changes will be overwritten. FAS is the “single source of truth”.
- change the setting that allows people to join/leave the group (again, don’t, though).
I am looking into hiding these options in the UI so they don’t cause confusion.
Note that group ownership is not currently synced from group sponsors in FAS. See Issue #23: Add users that are sponsors on IPA as admins in Discourse - fas2discourse - Pagure.io if you’d like to help add this functionality.
Getting a group created
Post in Site Help & Feedback with the request tag. Note that the group must already exist in FAS. If you need that, file a ticket with Fedora Infrastructure as usual.
In addition to the group name, let us know who the initial owners should be, whether the group member list should be public, and whether group members should automatically get TL1.
Is the sync instant?
Not currently. As a first approach, the sync runs on a timer, several times an hour. In the future, we could have this trigger on group updates or new logins here.
If you notice an out-of-sync problem that lasts for more than an hour, please let us know!
Moderator Groups
This is a work in progress, but the intention is for volunteer moderators here to choose particular categories they are interested in covering, and we’ll use specific groups managed in FAS to organize this.
Credit!
Thank you @dkirwan and @lenkaseg for implementing the OpenShift operator which does the sync. Stay tuned for a DevConf.cz talk on this!