Here is an ongoing list of things I’m thinking about that would make discourse a friendlier space to be.
Some of these things are more achievable than others, as this list represents a weird mishmash of what I would do given free reign to rebuild it from the ground up and what I would tweak to make the current stuff better
Main Goals
- To make the forums navigable to people new to discourse
- To make people feel more at home and at ease in a new space
- To better reflect the hyperlink system (relationship btwn courses and cohorts)
Top Level Hyperlink Discourse*
- Split the courses out from the general Hyperlink stuff
- Make it easier to skim and navigate without needing to go back to our UI
- Make Course topics card based
- Keeps a consistent visual language between main site and forums
- Better color usage
- Set up some better color system (color = subject matter of course, or time until next instance beings or activity etc)
- Include more Illustration or animation or some kind of background image
- To add more fun to the whole thing
- Perhaps find better names for topics, categories, and posts. The names themselves don’t clearly explain what they are… but naming is hard
- Would prefer to have text input boxes to have rich text in them rather than showing rwa markdown + rich text preview
- mobile app
- We’re our here in the modern world, and lots of people do most of their communicating on the subway or in a car, or while they’re pretending to be doing their day job. Ya gotta have support a mobile app for that.
- more obvious DM / Group chat functions
- Feed vs Categories
- Would want to explore a “feed” type of thing for announcements and events rather than a category. That keeps the most relevant stuff at the top and doesn’t hide them
Course Category
- Some obvious indication that posts on this page are public to everyone in hyperlink
- More illustrations, or a banner or something with the course illustration to make it more visually consistent
- Again, the discussion tops separated from the cohorts
- Cohorts displayed in cards using color, or something is differentiate them
Cohort Topic
- Visually different than the course category
- make it as immediately obvious as possible that this is a sub-thing of the course.
- offer lots of group customization options, like colors or emoji sets
- Note who is online at the same time
- Group chat options
…bit tricky having both the main site homepage (course dashboard if logged in, landing page if not) as well as forum homepage. Eventually we might try to merge a bit more i.e. so more forum interactions are available from the Hyperlink course page. Short term, will see what we can do!