[CentOS-devel] Gauging interest in Discourse

Wed Nov 2 16:14:16 UTC 2022
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>

On Tue, Nov 01, 2022 at 09:41:18AM -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
> Just want to say that this is entirely an option, although I agree with
> the points Neal raises about how Discourse organizes stuff. Definitely
> the less stuff we commit to doing on Discourse, the more enticing it is
> to just use Fedora's. I did recently see somebody asking how to not get
> CentOS content in their Fedora Discourse digest. I don't know how
> widespread that is.

It's fairly easy to do this -- you can Mute a category to hide it entirely,
or just mark it Normal rather than Watched or Tracking. (Tracking means no
notifications but you get a count of new posts on the website. Watching
means notifications for all new topics and replies to those. There is also
Watching First Post, which means new topics but not notifications for
replies.)

For Fedora Discussion, I have the defaults set up like this:

* Watching: none
* Watching first post: News & Announcements
* Tracking: Community Blog, Podcast
* Muted: Copr, Team Workflows (and all subcategories of that)

Everything else is "normal", which means you won't get notifications except
for topics or tags you've subscribed to, either by interacting with a topic
or by subscribing intentionally. (Then, the idea is: subscribe to a tag like
you would a mailing list.)

There's no easy way to make different defaults for CentOS or Fedora-focused
people on the same site.

As a more advanced thing, we _could_ make people choose something like
"Primary interests: Getting Help with Fedora / Contributing to Fedora /
CentOS Stuff" at the beginning and then wire up something to change the
defaults accordingly. Or, with something I'm already working on, we will be
able to change defaults based on Fedora Account System group membership.

But all of that is advanced. 


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader