Dat Forums

[RangerMauve]

@da2x mentioned in the Beaker browser IRC that it'd be nice if we had forums for Dat that weren't based on Github for regular discussion that wasn't necessarily about bugs.

Some of the reasoning was that Github is really geared more towards programming and doesn't have some of the nice features of a regular forum.

@joehand mentioned that Dat already had discourse forums set up but that they weren't being used. https://dat.discourse.group/

It'd be nice to get this going to make it easier for people coming to the Dat community to engage and talk about Dat stuff.

Some stuff to consider:

• It's currently invite-only, we should open registrations
• What categories should we have?
• Moderation 😱
• ???

It'd be nice to figure this out in the next couple of weeks so we could include it in the newsletter. :)

cc @karissa @pfrazee

[da2x]

Category suggestions (for a public forum):

• [ ] Publishing Dat websites, for people needing help or sharing experiences publishing on the distributed web.
• [x] Beaker support, for people needing help with or wanting to discuss anything Beaker related.
• [ ] Publishing with Beaker, for people publishing websites and things using Beaker. This is for Beaker’s distinctly different tools and workflow.
• [ ] Dat protocol, for people discussing the inner workings of the Dat protocol itself.
• [ ] Dat tools and libraries, for people building their own things on top of Dat.
• [ ] The distributed web, for general but on-topic discussions, news, and things that don’t fit in other categories.

[RangerMauve]

Thoughts on what our welcome message should be?

[da2x]

Thoughts on what our welcome message should be?

“You’re all setup to join in on the discussion! “You’ll find a tutorial message explaining how the forum works in your inbox. “Please be civilized to everyone (feel free to criticize things while being courteous and respectful of the people making them), moderation staff is limited so one-time offenders will find themselves without an account.”

[okdistribute]

I probably won't be able to watch the discussions on the Dat Forum very closely enough to be a good enough moderator

I feel like if we don't have enough moderators or a way to flag and bring down posts it could lead to code of conduct issues which would be sad and bad :(. But with moderation it would be really great!

I wonder if you could have a discussion with gina (@whoisgina) and see if this would be useful for folks from her dat night, or if github is enough, or if an email list or something would be useful?

[da2x]

Forum moderator burn-out is a bigger problem than the time requirements. Good routines help; like disabling email notifications, rotating the responsibility, and only checking the moderation queue ones or twice per day.

I’d estimate 10 min. per day is needed for a forum with 1000 active monthly members†. Given that this will be a niche forum not discussing politics then I believe the discussions can be expected to be mostly civilized.

In the beginning 1 moderator and 10 min per week should be enough. Given a lot of growth then 7 people setting aside 10 min. per week on an assigned day of the week should be enough.

†Figure comes from the time requirements from scaling down a general-purpose 500k monthly active member forum with blogs and more. Since this will be a niche forum this estimate might be a bit high. You won’t know how much time will be required before you open it up to the public, however.

or if an email list or something would be useful?

Mailing lists are harder to moderate as you can’t pull back spam and offensive messages from people’s inboxes. I believe people are more comfortable with web-based forum software than mailing lists too.

[okdistribute]

@da2x thanks for that research! those numbers are useful and make it sound more reasonable to be able to moderate this with a small team

[RangerMauve]

Maybe if we don't have enough time for people to moderate at some point, we could toggle it back to be invite-only to reduce the effect of trolls? :P

[da2x]

Moderation goals:

• The community is self-governing and flags things that needs to be acted on.
• The moderation queue should be checked in on and cleared at least every 48 hours (or thrice a week).
• Moderation queue responsibility needs to be rotated (weekly in the beginning then daily when and if it starts taking more than 10 min per week) so people don’t burn-out.

So, … setup a shared Google Sheet and see if enough people volunteer to having the weekly responsibility for the next 6 months?

[okdistribute]

@da2x yeah you could do that sheet, although i think if we just start adding folks to moderate it will be ok for right now, we have enough to cover this. i'm not sure the responsibility needs to be rotated, i've seen forums that have some folks who are regulars and can check the queue. for now we can probably do this in the low-hanging-fruit way and just focus more on the content, since it seems like there will be enough interest from folks we trust to moderate

[todrobbins]

so yes to reviving the Discourse or no? I'd be happy to be a moderator. I feel like I understand things well enough to help in that capacity. 👍🏻

[okdistribute]

@todrobbins 'reviving' is a strong word, I think it's never really been used. :) have at it, I can make you a moderator (if I even have an account?) @joehand might have to

[RangerMauve]

@karissa I think you have an account, and Joe just made an account for me today. Feel free to email me for an invite @todrobbins.

[todrobbins]

Which email, @RangerMauve?

[todrobbins]

Can we get some DNS going for the forum? Something like forum.datproject.org? Or does that not work with discourse.group sub domains?

[RangerMauve]

@todrobbins You should have the invite in the mail. I'm not sure what the subdomain stuff would be. My biggest worry is SSL support on custom domains.

[todrobbins]

right, I've run into that issue before with another project.

[todrobbins]

PS: I'm going to run with @da2x's suggestions for topics and we can always revise.

[decentral1se]

It's currently invite-only, we should open registrations

Yes please! Github and IRC and good and all but certainly contribute towards excluding certain people who don't feel OK with creating accounts and getting stuck in. Thanks for pushing this along.

[RangerMauve]

I've added some of the suggested categories and got rid of the invite-only requirement. :)

[todrobbins]

Following up on this thread and the connected issues of this repo: is the plan to now migrate all of these issues to the Forum or to keep both avenues open for discussion? cc @joehand @karissa @RangerMauve

[RangerMauve]

Oof. It'd be nice if somebody did this, but it sounds like a pretty big undertaking.

I think Joe did some of this work for the datproject/dat repo already.

I think it'd be safe to migrate threads on an as-needed basis unless somebody want's to take on the challenge.

[joehand]

I'm migrating threads as needed using https://www.discourse.org/github. Tag any issues on any repos we may need to move.

I'd like to only move as-needed to avoid having too much outdated things on the discourse but could be convinced otherwise.

Closed because it is done but still can discuss. Pinning to issues, FYI.

[joehand]

Can we get some DNS going for the forum? Something like forum.datproject.org? Or does that not work with discourse.group sub domains?

http://forum.datproject.org redirects to the discourse.

[JamesTheAwesomeDude]

Should this be re-opened?