Initial presentation

Hi,

To build on what @ihnorton did, I updated to:

  • include horizontal line separator
  • indicated questions are organized in categories
  • indicated how to post a new question
  • indicated how to search the archive

I think some block could still be re-ordered …

I think we can remove “You can log in with Google, GitHub, Facebook, or email” - people will prompted to log in when it is relevant. Maybe we can change it to something like this “Sign in with … to receive updates about new software releases and major events”.

Good point. Here is an updated version:

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I’ve moved the short description of Slicer to the top, to make sure people know they are at the right place. For example, to prevent them posting questions about Slic3r or other similar software or products.

OK. All good stuff. How about the following in order to prevent confusion:
Just one line about Slicer, with 3D Slicer being a link:
Welcome to the 3D Slicer forum!

Next, I really would like to see the following on top:

The first line should read:
Click +New Topic to ask a question.

Below that you can put everything else.

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Another important information for naive users (me included) is how to subscribe to the forums.

How do I do that? I thought i was subscribed, and then i just connected to post something new and saw all these new posts!!

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Right now users are only watching Announcements by default. If you want to get notifications for other categories you can click “Watching” in the right side of the screen:

But… this is definitely, 100% non-obvious! Maybe we should have everyone watch Support automatically as well? That seems like a reasonable assumption for new users.

And we should have a better tutorial/FAQ. I can write something up tonight (unless someone else wants to). The FAQ for “Chef” (sysadmin tool) Discourse looks good – we could model on that:

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@ihnorton are you saying that we have to watch topics one by one?

You can also control all watch settings for categories/tags/etc. in bulk under (top right icon → username) → Preferences:

This is the only thing I don’t like about Discourse so far. The mailing list mode works really well, but it is a little more difficult than I had hoped for users to get it configured correctly. (It would be nice if there was an “email preferences only” page. 99% of users probably don’t care about all of the other stuff in the Preferences)

Not exactly. Watching options are described in the screenshot posted by @ihnorton

Make sense.

I also wonder about development.

That said, after the user register and/or we create a new category with watching setup by default … we should make sure the user is notified and understand how to update the “watching” settings.

That would be great. Thanks @ihnorton

Users that we migrate from the slicer-users/slicer-devel mailing lists should definitely should be set to watch Support/Developer category by default.
For new registrants (who just want to post a question and get answer) it may be better to limit unsolicited email volume to a minimum (notification about new releases, NAMIC weeks, etc). This way probably more people would keep their account, even after they got answer to their question.

14 posts were split to a new topic: Email mode config improvements

To address the remaining of @rkikinis comments, I tweaked a little a bit more:

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After few more exchange with @rkikinis, here is what we have:

The “Click here to post a new question.” is now larger and we removed the text in parenthesis.

2 posts were split to a new topic: Discourse post direclty from error log

2 posts were split to a new topic: Test post-by-email

It should probably be clarified that “New topic” button will only show up after one signs up and logs in. You are referring to a non-existing button :wink:

(I don’t have the permission to fix this myself)

All set.

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