remove forum extension (was: enable forum extension)

[lwaldron]

Could we create some kind of forum for discussion of issues site-wide? We are currently using Slack for this but I'd like to migrate some of our discussion to the wiki as a way to a) encourage curators and reviewers to interact more frequently with bugsigdb.org, and b) open these discussions up to the public as we start to try to build a wider community of users. It would be great for users to see notifications of new activity in the forum, both in the Notifications or Alerts icon, and by email (the option to reply by email would be very convenient).

The user forum should be linked to from the main page.

[tosfos]

Will do

[tosfos]

The Wiki forum is up, though we haven't tested it yet. An administrator needs to add a category before it can be used:

[tosfos]

The forum can be accessed here. Once it's set up, please let me know and we will add a link on the Main Page. Once there is content, we can show the most recent threads in the forums, which should probably also be included on the Main Page.

It would be great for users to see notifications of new activity in the forum, both in the Notifications or Alerts icon, and by email (the option to reply by email would be very convenient).

It does not look like this ability is currently possible with the extension. Should we research adding these features?

[lwaldron]

@ftzohra22 would you set this up and see whether it could feasibly replace our curator Slack channel with it?

[ftzohra22]

Yes will do

[ftzohra22]

@tosfos @lwaldron could we please add the option to 'watch' the forum page? That way users can be notified if there is a new thread of discussion added to the forum. https://bugsigdb.org/Special:WikiForum

[lwaldron]

Concur with Fatima's request - I think it will be hard to use a forum without being able to receive email or watchlist notifications about new messages. I would also be content with linking to an external service like Google Groups, which could have the advantage of a quicker sign-up process for people who don't yet have a wiki account. Thoughts?

[tosfos]

We will research adding notifications to the forum. We can link to Google Groups and also allow people to sign in with a Google account.

[tosfos]

We can add basic notifications to the forum extension. We estimate around 10 hours.

We can also enable sign-in with Google and it shouldn't be too difficult. Please advise on how to proceed.

[lwaldron]

I would be inclined to link to a Google Group (I created https://groups.google.com/g/bugsigdb) and also allow people to sign-in with Google. --

Levi Waldron

Associate Professor

Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics

CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy

Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health

55 W 125th St, New York NY 10035

https://waldronlab.io

Join the microbiome Virtual International Forum: https://microbiome-vif.org

[tosfos]

Where should we link to that Google Group?

[lwaldron]

It should be enough to link to it on pages that I can edit myself. @Fatima Zohra @.***> thoughts? If we go this route we should probably de-activate the existing forum.

[tosfos]

You may have noticed that you can now log in with a Google account:

The way it works is that you need to create an account the normal way. If that account is associated with a Google account as the email address, you can use that account to log in to the wiki. We do have an option of allowing account creation via Google account directly, but that is much more involved and requires some discussion if you'd like to move forward with that.

[lwaldron]

It works for me! We can revisit later if we decide we want to allow account creation via Google.

[lwaldron]

Opening again to request disabling of the WikiForum extension, as we are going to use https://groups.google.com/g/bugsigdb instead. Sorry about that.

[tosfos]

Removed. Closing.