The nice thing about having a community plan is that it’s harder, later on, for an individual or group to hijack things for their own purposes.
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I think so. It doesn’t prevent evolution (and shouldn’t) but it helps make those changes both obvious to all, and a genuine decision, because it’s now transparently obvious.
Returning to your original point, though, I’d definitely be in favor of editors proofreading before approving posts.
I’m not sure if this is the sense in which @Lucy_Gothro was using the term, but “copy editing” generally refers to more intensive editing for style, accuracy, etc. That would be a lot to take on.
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I’d be in favor of that too, assuming we have a willing editorial staff. If nothing else, it might prevent the first 14 comments from being pedantic.
Aside; I’ve always felt that commenting systems have really failed when it came to those kinds of comments. There should be a separate way of lodging concerns about spelling and grammar than in a regular comment thread. Attention seeking pedants love when they can threadjack about some minor issue, but the fact is they just detract from the real conversation. Why not have a category of comments, visible only to the author and other pedants, to talk about grammatical problems?
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I’ll take that as a request to be included 
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Hey, I enjoy doing it, what can I say?
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-R2oth-kbJUA/V4v39cQi_XI/AAAAAAAAPoY/YdV0EqYAp48KqwU9YUo47IQPrXMrpd0UwCLcB/s1600/19529131.gif
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If you’ll bear with me, I want to share how I was initially drawn to BBS. It was last summer, and I was incensed over the Brock Turner rape case. I read a multitude of articles and comments sections, trying to engage, and it … didn’t go well. If you self-identify as someone concerned with gender issues, then that becomes all you are. You are labeled as such and clearly all your ideas must find seed from this one and only place.
Remarkably, I happened upon a BBS post and engaged. I think it was @nimelennar with whom I first had engaging and witty repartee, or at least that’s how my addled brain chooses to remember it. I went on to find a marvelous group of smart, funny people (and a kick-ass group of ladies, too) with whom I could engage.
As we all acutely know, representation matters. I’m a very intermittent poster due to work/childcare obligations, and in all sincerity, I know I may have less say than those who are clearly committed to this new group by virtue of the gift of their time. But if the ratio here reflects BBS, I would encourage you to make sure any editorial board includes females.
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Not necessary with Discourse; just have a point in the FAQ saying to flag the OP and direct it to the author.
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I’d like to contribute as well.
About artwork… Most articles, books, sites etc. already have visuals that slide in when they’re linked to, so a fair amount of it should be transparent. There will be edge cases.
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Okay, I’d like to make a proposal:
We’ve got two threads now, that are running in parallel, and discussing a wide, wide range of different aspects, all at once, and occasionally in literal parallel (I think). The enthusiasm is dizzying.
@waetherman set up this file to [quote=“waetherman, post:1, topic:338”]
gather together a team of “editors” who can take on a few tasks;
[/quote]
…and, in the most wonderful way, I think we (me included) have got sidetracked.
In the exact same way that we have have a moderatorial team that is taking all the userbase thoughts and input and is thrashing-out the details, I think it’s time to assemble that team of editors that @waetherman set out to, and have them start thrashing things out from the continuing input from here.
Group dynamics are such that I suggest that we have a fairly small group to ‘get things done’ (but ultimately large enough to do the work of editing after), and tasked to come up with one (or more) proposals for us here to make this work. (The proposals can then be presented and fed-back on, and so on.)
Even though the group needs to be, well, not-huge (wiggly quotey fingers) I’d suggest that the editors group be authorised to also co-opt some of the lovely, lovely, professional experience that’s been walking temptingly back-and-forth across the two files here.
It’s been @waetherman who has been taking the lead on this, so I for one would be completely happy for him to choose that initial group (especiallyeven if I’m not in it - getting this organised and in shape is more important than even my ego. 
)
That’s not to say that ‘everyone gets locked out from the whole thing’, or all these points here get wasted - I’d expect at least one of these duplicate files to keep going, as they’re valuable to feed into the process. And as proposal(s) take shape, maybe another file asking for thoughts on specific parts in the individual aspects (such as the ‘what kind of article sure are we trying to run?’ from above, the ‘should feedback be able to be private to spare people’s blushes?’, ‘platform ideas?’ and so on) alongside the ‘general’ free-ranging discussion here, that can both actively inform the process. (Call it the cat herding file? 
Maybe not.)
Then the editors can present their work and the reasoning behind it and we can shred it to piecesfeed-back and point out problems.
So, yeah.
#Proposal:
That we have @waetherman picks a core team of editors, that (in the same manner as the moderatorial team) are tasked to develop a structure to make this work, involving feedback and general input (as above) and co-opting expertise to build a proposal that works with as ‘light a touch’ as humanly possible, but that covers the functionality of how to actually make this work in practice.
And then present to us.
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That plugin is actually already installed here. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be much documentation, and there’s zero configuration built into it. I need to spend some more time poking at it, to see if I can get it to do what I think it’s intended to do.
I really like the idea of the blog being driven/hosted by the BBS, rather than them being entirely separate entities. I certainly welcome any suggestions along or against those lines. If there’s no way to make that work, I would probably favor a statically built blog (like ghost) over something like Wordpress.
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My concerns with that are: 1.) having a BBS-y front page that only looks inviting to engineers and 2.) our growth being limited by a more rudimentary blogging platform.
For example, we may want to:
- Post original or long form material using a separate template, with a wider column and larger font size, or feature these in a different area.
- Automatically serve higher resolution images to visitors using Retina displays, rather than hard-coding this into each post.
- Set different permissions levels for authors and editors, so submissions can be easily reviewed and approved though the site’s back end, rather than in a discussion thread.
I don’t know what the full range of options are, but it seems like a blogging platform that runs off a BBS might relegate the blog to being a secondary feature that’s unable to grow or evolve beyond certain bounds.
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I volunteer as tribute.
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Did you really just make me laugh with a Hunger Games reference? 
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Just so long as we use Comic Sans (𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯 𝔦𝔰 𝔞 𝔰𝔲𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔟𝔩𝔢 𝔰𝔲𝔟𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔱𝔲𝔱𝔢) and feature a regular column on A̛PL̝̤̹̻͇͕͢ ̥̹̳p̠͡ŗ͙͇̙͍̳̱̤o͇̗͞g͏̳̟̹̲ŗ̘͕̼a̺̠̳̳̜̪͇͞m̧̟̹̥̤̗m҉̹̰͍̟ḭ͕̰̕n̩̺̖g̝̲̪̬̰.́
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I’m with you, leather. Though I think here’s something to be said for palform integration though, making it easy to promote article from BTL to ATL (see @Archon?) and automatically start concurrent comment threads.
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I’d like to volunteer. Journo/freelancer, 25 years’ experience, help out where/how I can. Sub-editing through to writing, overseeing content, etc.
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Indeed. Whatever we decide on, there’s benefit to being able to promote stonkingly good content from the other categories (with the author’s consent) without losing the existing comment trail for that topic.
(That could be done by editing the topic’s leading post (the ‘article’) and manually back-linking to the new ‘main site’ article from Discourse’s side, but an external front page (WordPress, say) would want to be able to swing with the other side of that, too. [If that makes sense to people.]
We’d be missing real opportunities if it couldn’t.)