The Discourse experience, the feedbacks from the community
Hey everyone,
we’re approaching the end of the Discourse trial, as we originally discussed in The first alternative: Discourse.
We asked the users in the community their feedback and summarised them for ease of reading and to let us retrieve them later during the next test run(s).
The feedbacks
- The ActivityPub plugin was installed but not activated, due to this being a test run, but it’s possible to let other people interact publicly with posts; those posts could come from an entire category or flagged with a special tag. To allow us more flexibility and a better conception of what to share vs what to not share we could sport a fediverse tag or similar. Some users showed interests in this possibility.
- Some users found this experience more similar to a blog than a forum and enjoyed that.
- Some users found the native mobile experience not up to the challenge but there was some users that really enjoyed the Progressive Web App on their phones.
- Almost every user appreciated having the freedom of tagging their own posts and even though many subcategories were created it didn’t affect negatively the user experience.
- The minimum lengths of a reply and post were lowered to an acceptable value. On this note, there are a lot of settings that could be fine tuned should the community choose this tool, to offer a better user experience.
- Many users felt negatively the lack of an immediate channel to share videos (aka le-stage) and chat, due to Peertube/Owncast not being so immediate in their usage.
- Some users were interested in the possibility of having an external feed (i.e. Gaming News, Free Stuff). Rest assured there’s a plugin for this, but it wasn’t activated due to this being a test run.
- Some users were completely new to forums but the overall feedback from those users is positive, especially for catching up activities from people in different timezones, preferring using threads instead of the live chat.
Next steps
In the days ahed we will proceed to the next test run, that will be described in the next blog post.
Stay tuned for more updates
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