Sounds good. Would you have the time to enable this @hhlp?
The text could be something like “Welcome, please search the forum for existing topics before asking a new question.” (I’d written a much longer text initially, but thought its best to keep it short).
@mattdm: the wiki page needs to clearly note that Discussion is primarily for community discussion, like the mailing lists (and that a few teams no longer use mailing lists?). At the moment the wiki page says " Ask Fedora is a community knowledge base and support forum hosted by Fedora Project. If you’re looking for something a bit more conversational, visit our new forum at discussion.fedoraproject.org.", which doesn’t clearly state how they are different. It suggests that Discussion is also a support forum, but “more conversational”. What do you think?
There’s a balance between giving people too many warnings up front (doesn’t feel friendly) and telling people they’ve done it wrong after they’ve posted (also not a nice feeling — see Stack Exchange.)
I think the wiki page link is a good compromise, although it’s unfortunately one of those wiki pages which really needs a big update and moved to https://docs.fedoraproject.org/. I guess that’s really something that should be done after the Matrix server comes online, though.
+1. @hhlp, I think your text is fine. I’ve tweaked it a bit to make it sound less like a request and more like a general note that they could use the search box if they want. How does this sound?
Welcome! Before asking a new question, you can use the search box below to check if your query has already been asked and answered. New users, please start here.
It’s just hit me that we do already have a locked category: the #start-here category. A single post here about “Off topic discussions” could be added, if you think that’s useful? It’ll direct folks to the wiki page/discussion.fp.o etc?
Please remove the new extra search form.
This is a waste of space resulting in a significant usability regression.
The Discourse forum already provides a built-in search function.
The default search button is always visible and easy to access from the top bar.
The new form goes against the common Discourse workflow and disrupts expected behavior.
This leads to negative impact on usability of other forum features.
Could you please elaborate on the “usability regression”?
The search button is visible, but it’s passive. Adding the search heading actively engages a user, so I think that’s more useful. It is also only visible on the main page, so it doesn’t take up space while reading topics etc.
I don’t think it gives a negative impact but sure, as with everything, we’re open to ideas.
One thing we could do is provide a theme variant which does not include this. As an experiment, I’ve added “Sam’s Simple Theme” to the site and not added the search box, and made it user-selectable. (You can find it in your account preferences under “Interface”.)
For example, the user wants to read the latest replies, perhaps even using it as the forum starting page.
The expected behavior is to display the list of the forum threads effectively utilizing screen space.
It makes no sense to display the search form that is forcing the user to take extra scrolling to reach the requested content.
Moreover, this happens every time you refresh the page and becomes extremely annoying over time.
Well, it’s better than nothing, but that theme is different.
Some of the interface elements are missing and other elements are relocated, so it is confusing.
This leads to inconsistent browsing experience for Ask Fedora and Fedora Discussion.
Compared to the seamless behavior until the recent changes, this is a usability regression.
I hope we can provide the vanilla Discourse theme as an option if possible.
Well, we’re going to have new themes for both of these sites (design team is working on them) so when we have that, we could have a variant without the search bar.
Personally, I also don’t really mind it, but I also see your point. @hhlp, is there a way to make this only show on the front page https://discussion.fedoraproject.org and not on /categories or other pages?
search_banner.headline = Welcome to Ask Fedora!
search_banner.subhead = Before asking a new question, check if your query has already been asked and answered.
There is something here, and something to have to the new design:
The extra search in the main menu is necesary when you are in each category/sub-category to apply a search criteria.
The discourse-search-banner is only present in the main panel, and not in other part of the site (category/sub-category).
Also will be nice if discourse-search-banner we can have add a URL, but now is not possible to acomplish this task
Before asking a new question, check if your query has already been asked and answered. New users, please [start here](https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/frequently-asked-questions-about-ask-fedora-faq/63220).
and redirect new user to read FAQ if they would like…
These is the configuration of the plug-in:
show on → this determines where the banner appears and has the options:
top menu - default ((latest/categories/top/new/unread))
homepage
all → (all pages except the default search page and admin pages)
