Cat gifs it is then!
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I get the problem. You come here out of the blue: what is this place? where’s the content rather than just the chat?
what I love about discourse is that you can make your posts look really blog-y if you want. pics, headlines. but you have to click into them from the list view.
I’ve always HATED the separation of the blog from the forum on BB, though. It doesn’t flow well and there’s a lot of clicks involved.
couple (half-baked) solution ideas:
some system for pinning or bumping content that we deem original or timely or both, something above our chat, in-jokes, or gif bank. content that reflects the best we have to offer.
or it could simply pin/bump the stuff that gets the most traffic. or likes. but that’s gonna be pet threads, potentially. but maybe that’s ok?
you still have to click it open, though. Or, do you? @gwwar wrote what I thought was an awesome script that let you see the OP while in the list view just by mousing-over the title–a frame popped up with the OP in it. maybe this, in tandem with a pin/bump system, we could make the BBS something more blog-y?
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Is there any chance it could be a kind of optional thing? Defaulting to a blog view, but once you create an account you can switch it to BBS if that’s more your thing?
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Discourse’s own @sam uses it as a blogging platform. It’s quite brilliant actually.
https://discuss.samsaffron.com
There’s no need to keep a blog separate from discussion. Just open up some categories to TL3 or higher users only to originate posts. Bing bang boom, done.
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This is what I’m considering, at least as a start.
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If you couple that with the idea that only certain categories can be seen at certain trust levels then you have a very simple way to slowly introduce readers to the community. This can pair nicely with the desire to replicate the safe space that we enjoyed with the select membership at the other place.
unregistered readers - blog view, one or two categories of articles that can be be posted to only by trusted users with the appropriate group permissions
registered - a whole new community opens up
Trust level 1 - more categories, etc…
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I think it would be better to have editors review submissions beforehand than remove to them after the fact. Having a published post taken down would feel punitive to the author, whereas receiving a rejection with input (“thanks, but we’re declining to publish this in its current form because…”) is more standard procedure.
That having been said, I’d favor staring off with a more laissez-faire approach. We’re more likely to find a unique voice if we give people the freedom to improvise. The comments section itself can serve as a sounding board. How many likes your posts get, how (or whether) people respond in the comments will give you a sense of whether or not you’re hitting the mark, and you can adjust accordingly. Over time we can codify things, based upon what seems to work and what doesn’t. It’s easier to adjust a work in progress than it is to prognosticate about what type of post will be popular.
Personally, I like BB’s architecture and would love for the front page to look like the blog version of that site, but obviously that would require a hero to come forward and generously donate his/her time and expertise.
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It’s nice to have it all on one platform, but I can’t say I’m in love with Sam’s solution, at least as it’s presented. My issue is that the “article” is still buried in the board - to get a sense of what it is beyond just the headline, you still have to click through. That’s cumbersome for the reader and ends up reinforcing the clickbait problem of having an enticing headline with poor content. Or worse, an unenticing headline that conceals informative content.
I’d like to see more content on the front page; a headline, a first paragraph, and a pic at least. And if there were a way to highlight the discussion that’s going on around that topic to draw people in, even better.
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dood, I’m telling you
and this script is more complicated than we need since it’s pulling the post from the Wordpress main site into Discourse.
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Huh? Not sure I understand. We’re trying to pull the inside out, not the outside in. But are you suggesting we use that code as a base and “put that thing down flip it and reverse it” so that it scrapes from Discuss and outputs to Wordpress? If that’s what you’re saying, I have to ask, is it worth it? Can you work it?
There’s a number of plugins. Here’s Blog View by @Sam GitHub - SamSaffron/blog: samsaffron.com blog plugin for Discourse
Edit:
Portal View
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maybe we oughta ask Missy Elliot.
We’re trying to pull the inside out, not the outside in
maybe you are. I DON’T want a “front page” separate from Discourse. I’m trying to say that we can have Discourse BE the front page, better than Sam Saffron’s way–we can see the stuff you asked for right in the category list views (new, unread, joy, etc)
what I propose is to make Discourse itself the blog, as outlined in my prior post, and skip Wordpress altogether. As I said, I hate clicking back and forth from Discourse to WP and back.
You want something that can show
a headline, a first paragraph, and a pic at least.
and you’re right–I do to.
The OP of any post made on Discourse will have those things. The cap I posted shows how Gwwar’s script can show these things right from the the Discourse category list view with just a mouse-over of the topic headline–no click-through needed, mouse-over all the headlines, the op’s pop up right next to them damn near instantly. if memory serves, you can scroll and read the whole subsequent thread right in the iframe, or click through as usual.
Gwwar’s script had to go the extra step of going from the discourse OP through to the Wordpress permalink since BB’s forward-facing “front page” is WP
Since Jeff was able to integrate her similar script, which was initially written to be a bookmarklet, into the board-specific Discourse code as a show full post button, then I assume the same could be done for the script in question.
But to answer your question, no. I cannot work it. I don’t code. If it can be done, and if we want that as a “front page” solution, then a smarter person than I has to put it into HMS BBS code. Also, I haven’t run the script in a while but it used to break when Discourse would update so it can be assumed that the script is not current (when Rob made the WP blogview, I reluctantly switched so I could get a chronological view, which BB Discourse won’t do.)
If we do it this way, there is no need for integration with separate publishing software. and, the fucking youtube embeds will show up normally–they would never come through the show full post button.
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I think we’re on the same page - I guess I just misunderstood what you were saying, or what the plugin did. Hope you didn’t take offense at what I was saying - just being a little bit silly.
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silly? you know that being silly is not allowed.
nah, man. no offense taken, sorry if it came off that way.
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Do we, ultimately, want to pull in people from the net?
I do.
A blog seems like a good way to do that.
I’m imagining all sorts of problems emerging from decisions concerning who gets to publish what and when, who gets paid, who creates content for free, finances blah blah blah and before long we’ll have our very own top-down authoritarian crisis!
A not-for-profit blog that somehow leverages the best contributions without excluding or over-promoting anyone. Is that possible?
What kinds of media and or events could we create to promote the blog? Do we want to? If we do, what’s our mission? To communicate the emergent will of a bunch of Anarcho-Marxists? Do we even want media penetration?
These questions are all long-term stuff but Ima just throw this out here and see what happens. Like I always do. 
Oooh and we could get on to Jeff about the stack store!!!
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While I’m not calling the poll closed, I think the results are worth reporting and considering at this point; basically it’s 75% for a blog, 25% for BBS as the front page. Near as I can tell the “Something else” is the idea of reformatting some of the BBS in to something that looks like a blog, which I really think is the same as having a blog. Or am I misunderstanding this, @ficuswhisperer @noahdjango?
In reviewing the comments I haven’t seen any strong objection to having a front page blog, though some like @adonai might want to skip it and go straight to the discussion, which I suppose could happen just like it did on BoingBoing - just bookmark the bbs instead of the front page. Or if this is part of the discourse system, it sounds like having some sort of filter would be possible.
I’ll leave the particulars of which tools to use to the people like @LockeCJ and @noahdjango who understand those things better. Worth discussing, for sure, since the right tool is very important, but that’s a technical question of “how” based on what works for the way that we want to display our information.
Barring any strong objections that I may have missed, or that haven’t been voiced yet, I think we should move the discussion to the who and what of the front page.
Who: Should everyone be able to post, or should it be limited to a certain TL? should there be an editorial board? or perhaps a core team of “editors” who are responsible for driving most of the content, while leaving the option for others to post as well?
What: Exactly what kind of stuff should we be posting? I’d suggest that we have a general guideline like “anything worth talking about” (a kind of mission statement) that drives it, but also some guidelines or general categories that we’d like to cover, ie politics, science, gadgets, or whatever - something that starts to define the “voice” of the front page.
Thoughts?
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speaking personally, not really.
but it would be fine if they came, I think, but actively courting that seems like a treadmill. but if others want to do the work on
- getting them
- keeping them in line
- funding/staffing the website to enable a ton of traffic
then I suppose it’s fine.
eh, call it what you will. I wanted to draw attention to a little-known option for what I thought was a nice and easy way to browse. I thought it would also be easier to implement than making Discourse work with an outside blog platform but I could be totally wrong. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to presume that Discourse is designed to readily integrate with Tumblr, WP, etc. I don’t know. In my head, keeping everything Discourse is the easy way. This may not actually be true, though.
re: who can post, I think the crucial question is more to do with implementation? Say I get the particular trust level, that doesn’t mean I want everything I may post to go to the front page.
I feel like, given what I know is available already in stock Discourse, if we made a category called submissions to post under, our community could lurk the posts there, and the OP could make a poll: Publish? yes/no. if Yes votes minus No votes > X% of total users, then publish. This could be done, like, now. today. no special committees or coding required. we would need to determine/tinker with what X is, though.
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I don’t think the writers should be limited to a certain TL. We could have some great writers who don’t have the time or are otherwise disinclined to maintain status here.
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So, anyone registered at HMS gets to post to the front page, without condition or approval? Seems an invite for rants and trolls…
I think you’re assuming that the people already here are the only people who will ever be here. I think we need to plan for the future.
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I didn’t say there should be no other rules or (dis)qualifications. I just didn’t say anymore about editors and other related whatnot because I didn’t have as firm an opinion on these aspects.