Hello @rcheesley, excuse me if I reply this 3d, but this is the only one I found I have the ability to reply.
I’m finding really a lot of difficulties as I’m not able to post new 3d and I’m not able to reply to the ones already posted.
Can you point me to some documentation or 3d where is clearly explained when I will be allowed to post?
There absolutely no info about the onboarding of new Mautic’s users.
I’m completely lost and I’m not understanding what is happening: are there some issues on my side or is effectively too much complex to become a member of the Mautic’s forum?
I have moved this into the Site Feedback category rather than as a reply to a non-related topic.
You have permission to make new posts, and to reply. There is an onboarding process via the Mautibot messages which I see you’ve completed already.
To create a new post, you click on the blue plus symbol which appears at the bottom right of the screen when you are logged in. To reply, you click reply on the relevant post which you want to respond to (you replied to my post, so this seems to be something you can do?)
What browser are you using? Can you take a screenshot when you are in the forums showing me what you see?
@rcheesley, yes, I saw I now can post new 3d and reply…
The problem is that this behavior is confusing: there is no indicator about my current level, so I don’t know what I have to do to go further in the flow to unlock the ability to post…
More, it’s true that the @mautibot tells us that we need to go through a flow before we can post, but, again, this flow is not so clear.
Maybe a post that details all the steps required to unlock the ability to post could help new members to better understand how to become an active member of the community.
These are only suggestion: I really don’t know which steps could be useful… I’m thinking about it as I’ve just installed Discourse for one of my projects and thinking about those “blocks”: my goal is to make the onboarding process as simple and clear as possible…
All new users see a large blue box at the top of the page (until they manually dismiss it - if you open the forums in an incognito browser you will see it in action) which features the content from this article:
Do you feel the text in this article can be improved to make it clearer that accounts are staged and people need to be active/browse the forum before they get access to post?
Yes, I saw the box and also read all the links: this way I was aware of the trust levels and how they work.
The problem is that I spent more than 10 minutes reading and opened a lot of posts on the forum but never reached level 1: this was very very confusing to me and only my strong desire of participating to the community made me continue to exploring ways to reach level 1.
The first problem is: how many posts I have to open before I go to level 1?
The second problem is: if I dismiss the blue box (as I did) how can I find again the information about trust levels?
All other information can be learnt also simply participating in the community. But the entry point is the participation. And if I cannot post I miss the only one fundamental entry point.
So, I think, once someone has dismissed the blue box, another non-dismissable message should be set that tells that
the current level is 0
To create 3ds a level of at least 1 is required
To reach the level one I need to spend at least 10 minutes on the forum
I need to read at least X posts on the forum (and specify HOW MANY POSTS I need to red to unlock the level 1!)
There is also another feeling really frustrating: while at trust level 0, you have no possibility to communicate with someone or to ask help to anyone… In the end I gone to GitHub and asked there some guidance, also if that is not the better place to ask for this kind of advice…
So, maybe a board with the ability to post also at level 0 is a good solution… The problem is: until you reach level 1 (and this is a bit challenging) you cannot get any kind of support for nothing: this is really really frustrating, especially if you are not a developer and are not used to deal with such kind of obstacles.
Just a quick update on this, I have made the pinned post clearer exactly how long and how many posts need to be read, so this should hopefully give a bit more information to new members without feeding the spambots what they need to get past our anti-spam controls.
I would consider a category which is open to Level 0 posting if we had a few more active moderators on the forum - at present I am the only person moderating, and I am only available in UK timezones +/- a few days a week where I work later.
So definitely something for the Education/Community teams to consider going forward but we don’t really have the resources right at this moment.
If I can express an opinion, I perfectly understand your concerns… I don’t know the real volume of messages nor the efforts required to run the community in this moment.
Anyway, I have some thoughts to express:
The best way to avoid spam bots is to use technologies like reCaptcha and signals like spam marking by real users.
I think that if someone wants to cheat the system, then it can study it once and then program the bot to do exactly what is required to behave like a human. Hiding the rules required to be promoted as a user, in my opinion, is only a way to hurt real users without real benefits.
Also considera that Discourse is an open source platform and so the rules are publicly known (also if, maybe, you edited them to suit the needs of Mautic’s community);
The best approach, I think, is to try: you can always go back, and remove the freedom of posting if the effort required to moderate the board is too much. But, until you try, this is only a supposition
Then, a bit of offtopic, I have a suggestion to increase the engagement of the community: I follow a lot Symfony and its way of communicating with the community.
At its heart, the communication is based on “A week of Symfony” and “Live on the edge” category on the blog.
“A week of symfony” is a weekly post that explains what happened during the past week and that highlights some information:
Symfony development highlights
Newest issues and pull requests
They talked about us
Upcoming Symfony Events
Call to Action
The most important sections are, in my opinions, the 3 and the 4.
The “Newest issues and pull requests” contribute greatly to build a sense of community: highlighting the most important discussions on GitHub contribute to engage developers who can also contribute, with simple opinions or thoughts or, better, with real code, contributing to build a real open source product like Mautic would be and, at certain levels, is;
The “They talked about us” section, equally, contribute to build a sense of community among the users who, also if cannot write real code, can contribute with posts and thought useful to the end users of Mautic.
I think that pushing those two kind of contents can greatly improve the reach of the Mautic’ community, build a better and stronger one and, in the long run, contribute to make Mautic known by even more people.
