I’d like to suggest two forum configuration changes that would make some stuff easier. These are:
- Enable a fixed set of tags for the GMC related posts. Including: gmc-round-discussion, gmc-round-results, gmc-bounty-apps, gmc-grant-apps and gmc-retro-apps, gmc-treasury-report. Optionally also gmc-round-#, but this would require the tag set to be mutable by the GMC Administrator.
- Give the GMC Administrator (or the GMC generally) the ability to effectively manage the grant/retro/bounty proposal/discussion threads.
I’m hoping that @langers can make these changes.
Why tags?
The main reason I personally want tags on these is so I can read from the tag rss-feed on the bounty portal. This lets me fetch links to the latest GMC forum posts, and display them prominently on the bounty portal. Discourse automatically generates RSS feeds for categories and tags. Currently I’m using the category feed, but this has two downsides:
- First, it’s very fragile as I’m just filtering individual posts via keywords (ie, the first post found with ‘results’ and ‘round 8’ in the title is probably the Round 8 results… until the title format changes, or someone posts: “The Round 8 Results Suck, here’s why”).
- Second, the RSS feed is limited to something like 25 items, meaning I can’t get enough of the history.
On a more general level, a small and well maintained set of tags can be useful for conventional users of the forum. Discourse has features that become much more useful when posts are divided effectively with tags. Namely:
- Users can set more granular notification settings.
- Users can more easily browse to related posts.
- Users can filter out posts they are not interested in.
I would not recommend giving all forum users the ability to create new tags. We had that at Maker and it made the forum very difficult to maintain.
How to do this?
There are a couple of relevant discourse settings:
- min_trust_to_create_tag - the trust level required to create a new tag. Probably set this to TL4 (and give GMC Admin TL4).
- min_trust_level_to_tag_topics - the trust level required to add tags to posts. Probably set this to TL3 or TL4.
Why Empower GMC Administrator / Members?
Basically because of this: Round 8 - GMC Call for Bounty Applications - Deadline is January 14 - #5 by ShfRyn. There is a permission that directly relates to this case: Split and Merge Topics. This permission lets users move posts from one topic to another, ie move discussion posts into the discussion threads.
How to do this?
There are a couple of options:
- Give GMC Administrator Trust Level 4, this gives them the relevant permission (but also lots of others.)
- Give the GMC group Trust Level 4, this gives them the relevant permission (but also lots of others.)
- Assign GMC group as moderators of the GMC category, this gives them the relevant permission in that category (but also even more other permissions in that category).
- You can also change the TL4 permissions to be less permissive, there are a lot to go through though if you are attempting to lock it down.
At this point I’d recommend just giving the GMC Administrator trust level 4 (currently @Shfryn, but should transfer to future administrators). A malicious individual in that role can make a mess of things, but it feels like a reasonable assumption that the community can trust the GMC Administrator.
Resources
https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
https://meta.discourse.org/t/trust-level-permissions-table-inc-moderator-roles/224824