I’ve been doing some cleaning up here to get this house in order. Updated logos, got Let’s Encrypt cert for the site. I’ve added a plugin to allow marking a topic as “Solved” in the Questions category topics. I’d love to start promoting this area more and really start driving some discussions here. We link it in the New Account email but not prominently. I don’t know that it’s linked anywhere else. I was thinking of embedding it right within the client area as a start. Other thoughts on ways we can start driving discussions here?
I’ve added a new category for Domain of One’s Own because I think this forum could be a great avenue for knowledge sharing and congregating amongst the schools running programs.
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@Jay_Pfaffman @cogdog I would love your thoughts on this given you have run Discourse instances and may have a better sense.of what works and what doesn’t to drive discussion here.
I’ve been thinking about this a little, as I did ping the support address with a note about how it was sort of hard to find this site. Was the “community” link always on the “Client Area” menu bar?
I at first thought, “Well, probably most users are parts of larger communities that have their own spaces anyway.” I’ve seen university pages that seem to tie together all members of a community. It would seem that such a place is where most conversations that I’d have thought would be here would be instead.
But wait!
Then I thought “How about support?” You guys do an incredible job of providing support, and at least some of those things must be FAQs or things that might otherwise deserve some attention. Like when the stupid Cpanel wouldn’t expand the “web applications” (oh, it seems like that’s still the case).
Perhaps you might consider having people’s support questions come here instead of in a secret black box. And if people were posting their support question and Discourse said “Hey, this is like this other post”, it could save you some time. That might be a way to make this a community.
If you were to do that, you’d probably want to configure SSO so that people would’t have to create a new account here, and you’d want some way to opt-in or opt-out. But much of what I’ve posted to support would have been at least as appropriate posted here publicly. (E.g., my last “support” post was something like “You guys are doing an awesome job. blah blah”).
You might be able to ramp up that kind of post by anonymously re-posting support requests.
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That community link in the client area is new and it’s absolutely a result
of your feedback! I’m thinking of other ways to make this space more
prominent too like perhaps the latest posts as a feed in there. The client
area is sort of ground zero for most folks so anything that makes this
space integral to it is good. SSO is a great suggestion, I’ll have to look
into what that would involve but should be doable. I definitely want to try
to push more of the “casual support” questions here as I think folks
benefit from more than just the perspective of whoever is answering tickets
on a given day/time if it’s a community effort, but I also don’t want to be
forceful in making all support required to be public (at least I don’t
think I want to do that yet, I’ll have to think through some of those
ramifications and what that looks like in practice). Thanks a ton for the
feedback!
Tim Owens
That explains it!
I’m not sure whether “community” is quite the right word. It is for me and you, but I don’t know that your users will recognize what it means.
Right. One possibility would be to have a checkbox that said something like “It’s OK to post this question to the public forum with my name” (though you might be able to make some better words than those. Someone’s working on an RSS import plugin that might automate pulling such questions into Discourse.
People who ask questions to support likely don’t know that (or when) their question would help others. On my own Discourse forum (which consists solely of students conscripted to participate), I frequently ask people to re-post their private question to the forum, or get permission to do so myself.
Total sidenote: the formatting when emailing a reply (that was my first time doing that since setting that up here) is weird. Anyways.
Thanks for the advice @Jay_Pfaffman! I’ve also started thinking more about the kinds of internal discussions the Reclaim Team has on Slack that a more open approach here might be useful. You see a lot of back and forth between the developer leads on Discourse’s own Meta forum that I find interesting myself. I could imagine, for example, if we’re discussing the best order of icons in cPanel for our servers that others might have an opinion about that or even just enjoy reading through the thought process behind how a decision like that is made.
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I totally agree about making support more visible. Means I can check and see if someone has had a similar problem, rather than constantly sending what seem like stupid emails.
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You are welcome, @timmmmyboy. I just moved to Reno for my partner’s new job, leaving my academic gig behind. I’ve got time to help out if you guys get swamped or have a special project.
Hey, you should add one on the main reclaimhosting page too, so that non-customers can find it and so that I could navigate here without logging in.
That’s an excellent point, just added a link to our main menu. Good call!
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