Add reference to discuss to homepage

[Gankro]

No description provided.

[brson]

I don't know that I want to prominently advertise our development forums to a general audience. Perhaps a link on the wiki would be better.

[Gankro]

We've already got a link in docs.rust-lang, so I don't think adding it to wiki will do much. I figured we wanted to get as many people looking at proposals as possible, but general consensus seems to be that it should be kept on the pseudo-DL for now.

Fine with me. Close this if you agree that that's how we want it.

[nathantypanski]

I made a post about this when the forum first went public. As mentioned there, there is a link on the Notes - for developers wiki page that I added.

Of course, that's not to say further discussion is moot, but @cmr's response at the time was basically that it should be well-established as a developer forum before becoming something like The Official Rust Discussion Forum™.

[Gankro]

Oh, I didn't realize you guys had that transition plan in mind, neat! Anyway, seems like this isn't desired at the moment. Closing (for now!).

[mfeckie]

@brson, @Gankro, @steveklabnik, @huonw This is kind of an interesting approach to take. I have to say that the prompts to use StackOverflow are kinda off putting. Because StackOverflow is so 'harsh' in the sense that vague, or discussion type questions are so frowned upon and attract often pretty mean feedback. Then there's Reddit and the trolls 😢. It's kinda sad (to my way of thinking) that there's such an awesome place where people (could) discuss rusty stuff and get help and yet the choice is to 'lock' it down. Doesn't the ability to assign categories in Discourse allow a variety of discussion without becoming noisy for those only interested in specific categories? Also, there is the ability to have private categories and categories only those in particular categories (high trust, admin etc.) can post to. I guess I'm saying that it should be pretty straightforward to support both the developer discussions and those who are looking for a bit of help.

As someone who's trying to get into Rust, having a single place to discuss that sticks around (vs IRC) I would find it very valuable. The Ember forum, I think is a great example of a place where people of all levels can get help and it has happily followed the development from a 0.x project to 1.0.

I'd love to see the decisions to keep it more 'developer' focussed revisited.

Anyhoo, keep up the good work folks coz Rust is super exciting 😄

[huonw]

Then there's Reddit and the trolls

Do note that we are referring specifically to /r/rust, not just reddit in general.

[Gankro]

Yeah I've never understood grouping together all of reddit as a single "community". Each subreddit is self-moderating and independent, especially outside of the big/default ones.

As it stands, I think we're leaving the communities diverse and adhoc, as we work out what's good for what. Reddit, Stackoverflow, Github, Discuss, and IRC all have different strengths and weaknesses. It might be worth considering a "Which community is right for you?" guide, but I don't think we've quite worked that out. Especially because I expect roles to shift dramatically post-1.0.

[brson]

@mfeckie Thanks for your comments. We've considered and will consider again whether hosting a user-discussion forum is desirable. The original intent was to do so after winding down the mailing list.

I don't know how to make discourse segregate topics into different areas of the website (not that I know much about discourse). What I desperately want to avoid is having casual users stumble into design conversations and start creating useless noise - it is a major impediment to progress. If you know how to configure discourse to support this I would be interested in knowing.

[mfeckie]

@brson I'm an admin for a Discourse forum, so have experience in dealing with access levels. I would love to help out with adjusting things with your Discourse instance so that it could serve both the developer discussions and the casual user without compromising either.

I'd be very happy to provide a guide to configuring groups and category permissions. Alternatively, I'd be happy to either work together on it or do it for you.

[brson]

@mfeckie Much appreciated! Perhaps you can outline the basic strategy you would recommend. After yesterday's discussion I poked at the discourse settings, but didn't see anything promising.

[mfeckie]

Apologies in advance, this is a reasonably long response

@brson Sure, so with the structure of your current site, here's what I would suggest as a starting point.

Top Level	SubCategory	Restrictions
Uncategorized		?Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Libs		?Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Cargo		?Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Internals	Ideas	Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Internals	Tools	Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Internals	Bikeshed	Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Internals	Policy	Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Guidelines	Style	Read only for all except Developer and Admin
Documentation		Read and Post only for all except Developer and Admin (i.e, can comment, but can't create new topic)
Community		None
Meta		Visible only to admin and trust level 3 and above (Discourse default)

In addition, there would probably be some new categories that help guide newcomers, casual users etc. Something like this.

Top Level	SubCategory	Restrictions
Newcomers	Getting started	None
Newcomers	Concepts	None
Newcomers	Syntax	None

Assigning restrictions

Restrictions can be added at the Category level like this (I mirrored your current structure to demonstrate)

Open the Categories menu and pick the one you wish to adjust

In the next screen hit the Edit button

From here, open the Security tab

Remove the default

And adjust based on what you would like it to be

With this, if you don't add the See privilege, the Category will be hidden from non-specified user groups/

Setting restrictions strategies

As for the how, there are probably two main strategies. One is to base the restrictions Discourse's concept of trust levels, the other is to create specific Groups.

Trust levels would results is less need for an Admin to intervene, whilst Groups would require some regular attention

Trust levels

By default new users who signup themselves are assigned Trust level 0, while invited users are assigned Trust level 1.

In order to be promoted from 0 -> 1, a user must enter (view) 5 topics, read 30 posts and spend 10 minutes on the site. from 1 -> 2, enter 20 topics, read 100 posts and spend 60 minutes on the site. This can be adjusted here:

It is possible to manually change a Trust level from the Admin -> Users tab

Groups

It is relatively straightforward to create Groups, but is more time consuming as it requires someone to add users to the list.

There's a bit of work involved but gives fine grained control over what is desired.

Teaching users with feedback

Any post considered off topic or inappropriate can be flagged.

Admins and Moderators get a notification and choose what action (if any) to take.

Recommended Approach

Personally I think the most straightforward approach is to use the trust levels and lock things down for new (low trust) users and rely on the flagging system to deal with any 'outliers' who don't play by the rules.

Hope this helps 😅

[huonw]

(I'm personally not keen on having manually maintained lists of "developers"; it looks like it would be possible to use the automatic trust levels in place of them, if we do actually want strict access controls.)

[brson]

@mfeckie Wow! Amazing work here. Thank you.

There's a new discussion about killing the mailing list, and some of the comments there are regarding where users go for help.

[brson]

@mfeckie I think I'd like to continue this on the discourse thread, but I do have some questions still.