Well crap... happymutant.com was created by me today

Site Management
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Hiya folks,

@tobinl just told me about this site after I made https://happymutant.com as a discourse site (and registered happymutants.club as well). I got that up and running today and was trying to figure out how to reach out to BB folks since I’m banned. Even made an account there, did the dance, and got banned right after PM’ing three people with the site info… :slight_smile:

One thing that I got working there that I’d like to see here if people feel this site is more established is I created a “NotBoingBoing” account and a “BB” category and then used a community made RSS plugin to pull in BoingBoing posts as topics in the category. You can see an example at https://happymutant.com/t/the-10-worst-jobs-in-america-right-now/44

I’m happy to shut my site down if people want to do this one. My plan with mine was to invite a crowd of the regulars (even some that don’t like me), make a bunch admins and let the site run democratically. I haven’t dug into things here to see what’s going on and how the site is being run. Mainly I just missed all of you.

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The plugin is https://github.com/LeoMcA/discourse-rss-poster and it works pretty easily. I’d post this above but you can only put one link in a post, the site says.

@LockeCJ, are you interested in this?

I made a “NotBoingBoing” normal account (because all posts need an owner) and then a Category “BB” for posts and then added this plugin with the normal “I must recompile discourse to add a plugin.” Then in the admin area under plugins, there is an RSS item and you can add feeds and determine what account posts them and to what category. See my example result above.

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Tip of the hat to you for your exit, it was enjoyed by many.

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Well, damn. I thought I’d sent the invite, but looking through the logs that occurred after the ban. (Best last words, though!)

There were at least three projects that I knew of to create a new home for the community. @LockeCJ was the first to launch, ahead of @messana (who had a test instance) and myself (was going to launch on an old desktop). Redundancy is nice; if it were possible to replicate threads or federate instances, Discourse would be the best thing since Movim (a federated social network built on XMPP).

Welcome to the twilight zone, @enso. Good to see you again.

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federated discourse would be sweet – you listening, @codinghorror?

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Dude! May I compliment you, and say how much I enjoyed your exit? I particularly liked the GFYS that you managed to sneak in between the nastygram and the ban.

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As I told Tobin, I was on my way to coffee (and hadn’t had any) and I didn’t like the whole “this is how you ask for a ban” passive aggressive threats from a jerk who’d already been all over people for over a week. I mean, if you’re gonna ban someone, ban them. Don’t play the weird threat game and make it like they’re “asking” for it. I figured I might as well make why I was banned clear. :slight_smile:

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Since mine will cost me $20 a month, if we’re not going to use it, I’ll take it down. That said, the RSS plugin would be nice so we could comment on BB posts here.

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Cantankerous as you are, we missed you too. :wink:

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That’s sweet of you.

That will be most helpful, especially if it can be replicated for other streams.

Things were said in only the way you could say them, dude.

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I believe it can work with any RSS feed.

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Greetings, and welcome!

I must admit, although we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, I was sorry to see you banned (although I must say, you went out in considerable style).

I’m glad to see you’ve found your way to the new place, whatever it ends up being called.

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I definitely don’t have a problem installing the plugin, but do we really want a topic for every post on BB?

If enough people want to do that, I’m fine with it of course, but I think it probably warrants further discussion.

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Fine by me. Depends on how much we also want to comment on their site and posts, given the history there.

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Welcome @enso! I’m on vacation now but thanks for all the effort to create a new space. I will check out your feed this RSS hack this upcoming week.

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I’ll admit that I haven’t given it any real thought, but my gut reaction is that I’m kind of enjoying the pacing of this site and my time away from BB, and I’d rather not have every post automatically replicated over here. I’d like to see where this bbs goes when left to its own devices, at least for a little while, before we add full-on Boing to the conversational stream as part of the infrastructure of the site.

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I can’t really dig into it right now, but can’t we get an RSS feed of just a particular author’s posts? If so, maybe we can rotate the authors on a weekly basis, kind of like a guest blog. Last week was Rob, this week is Xeni, next week is Pesco, etc…

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We can! Each author’s page on BB - the blog - is also an RSS feed!

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Well, some of us are on a 10 year ban. :slight_smile: So it is here or not at all.

and the RSS plugin just goes off of feeds provided to it.

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I totally get that. Even though I’m not hanging out there at the moment, I know I could go back at any time and still have my old identity and history with the bbs, and that’s not nothing. I was disappointed (ahem) with BB, but I wasn’t quite prepared to go out like you did. :sunglasses:

And to be clear, I’m not opposed at all to discussing boingboing posts over here. But when I looked at what you’d set up over at happymutants.com it kind of gave me a shiver, of the familiar-but-not-quite-right kind, if that makes any sense. Even if we saw every BB post over here (or there), the conversations wouldn’t be the same because it’s not necessarily the same audience.

I guess I’m just thinking of this being more orthogonal to BB than parallel. We still intersect with BB, but we’re not just an echo of what’s going on over there. Maybe we could be a sort of curated view of BB? Where folks with a foot in both worlds bring the best of the boing over here?

I don’t know, it’s late and it’s been a long week, and like I said earlier this is really just my gut reaction to something I didn’t even know was possible, so take this for what it’s worth.

Also, this is not meant to knock what you did. That clearly took some effort and it’s awesome that you cared enough to go that far with it. Well done!

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