Improve the usability of this forum - perspective from a Fedora Discussion Contributor

Meta Moderation
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Hey there!

I am rather active on discussion.fedoraproject.org and would tell you about our moderation and structuring style there.

We use categories like here, and tags extensively.

Example: If someone has an NVIDIA issue on the KDE-Plasma desktop, which seems specific to kwin, and there are issues with discord, we tag

  • f41
  • kde-plasma
  • kwin
  • nvidia-proprietary (or the old nvidia)
  • discord
  • 3rd-party-software

We have a ton of new users there, many come there instead of opening a bug. So we direct them to the best place, add the link, solve the thread and tag bug-reported.

The results are extremely well searchable posts, which increase the UX of new users dramatically. Example

We have a #howto with somewhat of a system, like your Guides. There is a system to not tag it directly, wait until people loosely verify it, and then tag it a week later.

NixOS has a steep learning curve, but is a waaay better concept than Atomic Desktops, for a lot of people. Appliances like the Steamdeck are the hype, everyone is building unbreakable systems, but they always suffer from lack of customizability.

I have installed NixOS a week ago, and I am kind of a nerd. It is extremely hard to get setup, and there are no presets! No uBlue Aurora, no “look how great this system works”.

So improving the discoverability of user-provided solutions to common problems is KEY!

I find it hard to get solutions for common things, and I plan to contribute here, but the infrastructure is needed first. Please add tags :slight_smile: and allow TL2 users to create new tags

Oh and please add more reactions! Like Fedora, only positive ones, no sarcastic or negative ones. Make the forum more fun!

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Addition: I am not sure if this forum even has a linear moderation structure like Fedora Discussion has?

@moderators @admins

Do you use the Discourse trust levels? They are really good and useful, as we have different communities in the forum, the development or the docs.

I see this extremely in Fedora, where there is still little interaction between the developers and forum moderators.

I think Fedora uses default Discourse trust levels

  • TL0: New user, highly restricted
  • TL1: Regular, normal Member, light changing abilities like tagging, longer edits
  • TL3: even more
  • TL4: semi-moderators, can change post title, tags and content, move posts, split comments into separate threads. Set timers, lock posts, set slow mode etc. Just not delete or user moderation.

This system works extremely well especially for continuous tasks like improving the title, formatting, tags, adding links. In short making this knowledgebase more useful for search engines i.e. future users with the same problem.

While the community here seems mostly technical users (which wouldnt need to be), this system would improve the pretty bad documentation situation (as rhe forum is a dynamic and natural form of documentation).

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I’m not a mod, but even at TL3 I can retitle and reassign the category for topics.

Btw regarding reactions, it seems that it requires a plugin and isn’t part of core discourse:

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