Site and Community launch ideas

[SIGSTART]

I like the above ideas, so I’ve clicked the like button on your posts

In addition to the overall strategy, there are some minutiae I’ve been thinking of I wanted to record.

There are a few things from the old community I’d love to see carried over, like MyGame. (Keep the name change the name?) Since Discourse has a built-in badge system, I’d like to create and award folks badges for completing previous challenges once the move is permanent.

I’d also like to see the annual Secret Santa, GOTY, and Steam Giveaway group continue.

Discourse’s trust system may provide an easy way to moderate the Steam Giveaway group – to maintain trust level 3 you have to meet certain conditions over a 100-day rolling window (with a two-week grace period). Perhaps entry and ongoing membership to the private Steam group can be linked to trust level?

How Trust Levels work

Continuing the discussion from This is Discourse—should we keep it?: When someone is invited via email to join, they will be able to sign up at a trust level of 1. While there are fewer than 50 registrants, new users will also automatically start in trust level 1. Once we’re at 50 users, the default trust level will become 0. Trust levels bestow some pretty sweet privileges on regulars, and could provide a handy way to handle our invite-only Steam community in future. Details of the thinking …

Discourse also lets you turn posts into wiki-like pages that anyone of trust level 1 and above may edit. Maybe we use that feature for “official” threads for games? The category system allows for topics in a particular category to be made wikis by default, so we can use that in future.

Currently creating categories is restricted to the admin only. I think there’s a setting to open the ability to create categories to mods. Good idea / bad idea?

Since first experimenting with Discourse, I’ve been kicking around the idea of using it as a kind of hybrid blogging or publishing platform, but the permissioning system wasn’t quite there yet. A few years down the line and you can now specify create/reply/see permissions for every category by user group (admin, mod, trust levels, custom groups).

So we could create a userblog category where folks of a certain trust level can create a thread for themselves to blog in, or we could create (unlisted) categories or sub-categories for each blogger in which only they may create threads and then others may respond.

I’m not sure Discourse is designed to scale as a full publishing system, but having a personal blogging category as a perk for regulars might be cool, no?