Forums governance team meeting - 2022-10-06

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A @forums-governance team meeting has taken place on 2022-10-05T22:00:00Z.

Attendees: @Firefishy @nukeador @Tordanik

Topics discussed

  • Status of the old forum until the migration
  • Migration of forum.osm.org content
  • Site design, involving users in theme selection/modification
  • Thumbs-up reaction
  • User stat visibility
  • Trust levels
  • Recruiting moderators for global categories

Decisions and Results

Status of the old forum until the migration

Migration of forum.osm.org content

  • The banner at the old forum has been updated to reflect the delay
  • The update is still about a month away. Some custom code is necessary, as well as thorough testing (including a test with a copy of the current Discourse site)
  • Content posted between today and the eventual switch to read-only mode on the old forum will still be part of the migration

Site design, involving users in theme selection/modification

  • Wait for sidebar update, see if it helps users to track content in categories they are specifically interested in without resorting to muting a lot of categories
  • We will immediately tweak the icon size. We expect this to be unlikely to cause breakage on updates.
  • Further changes (e.g. visibility of local communities, placing icons in-line with titles on mobile, reducing/removing list of topics on mobile) are likely also possible through CSS changes. We’ll test and consider these in the future.
  • Themes elsewhere (e.g. with MediaWiki) have been quite painful because of their maintenance requirements when new versions of the software are rolled out. Adding themes to our Discourse installation should therefore not be done lightly, it would require a reliable team developing the theme.
  • Client-side changes with browser extensions such as ublock or stylus do not impose this maintenance burden. Some users have started configuring and sharing rules to tweak the appearance of the community forum according to their preferences.

Thumbs-up reaction

User stat visibility

  • Limit access to user profiles and the user directory to logged-in users
  • Additionally, users can control profile visibility through a setting in their account preferences
  • Communication about the change

Trust levels

  • Some manually granted trust levels where people don’t have a particular reason to need the elevated level have been reset

Moderators for global categories

  • We will likely need (additional) moderators for the #general and #help-and-support categories which have become a lot more active
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