I thought about community engagement here and about some input recently expressed on the forum - and would like to invite a conversation about some ideas. I’d be especially interested in the opinion of moderation and administration to better understand how the forum is handled and what resources are provided by the foundation (in terms of time/people).
Enabling private messaging. Getting in touch with people on the forum should be able on the forum without linking to external tools and webpages. For some, this might help isolating their activity on the forum from the rest of their digital life, but also helps increasing the forums as part of a community hub. I have found a post by @winston-yallow in the initial forum post about deactivating the Follow plugin to protect this board against being flagged as a social network. Does the same argument apply for private messaging? Or is PM activated but based on “trust level”? edit: It is a permission thing. Users with trust level “new user” are not able to use PM.
Enable Post Voting. Post voting is a default plugin for discourse which allows users to add polling elements to their posts. This can invite more art-focused discussions, as well as general design decision making inside the forums. Game development is for the most part making decisions and this should be supported with polling on the forum.
Add “Art” sub-category to “Showcase”. I’d make the argument that talking about art in games is a very important aspect and is the most representative element of a game up front. To invite more art-related discourse, we should provide a place for it by default.
Transparency on moderation. Please do update the guidelines, will you? The AI clause is still not present and it could be more concise and less repetitive.
Transparency on administration. Right now the admin table shows a couple of people but I’d bet my chair that this board is not run by all those people. Could you clear up who really is the or an admin here?
Transparency on Trust Levels / permissions. This one is a big one for me. Discourse gives plenty of options to customize permission levels for users based on various parameters - but nothing about those different levels nor parameters is explained in plain sight. Users here earn badges and there seems to be some kind of Trust Level management, but it is obscured. Please explain how Trust Levels are handled right now. For example: I’m still tagged as “new user” while people with less time and interaction here are “trusted user”. Is it a manual process?
I hope that this kind of collected post is fine for the moment. I tried to frame it more as an intention and less a strict feature request.
PMs are allowed, not sure if it’s locked but you can just do it by clicking the profile and pressing the “Message” button, but maybe you’re prevented from that due to being a too new user or something
@ximossi Those are DEFAULT Discourse rules. Any instance of Discourse can be modified by the host, AKA the Godot Foundation, as Discourse is open source.
This official Godot forum is quite sanitized and corporate compared to other forums online.
When I say “corporate”, I mean that it’s leadership is obfuscated to the average user. I assume it’s split between a few people. I really wish this wasn’t the case, but what can you do?
And “sanitized” means this forum also has higher standards for, well… everything. Almost to a fault.
I’m not even sure why the Forum Feedback category exists, as everything is so tightly and silently controlled, to the point that no useful updates are added besides basic maintenance and moderation.
This also directly contrasts with the engine’s development. I assume this is to protect the Godot foundation’s image. (Check out the feedback this place has gotten. There’s a lot of really good suggestions in there that the devs don’t want to capitalize on)
I truly hope that this perceived lack of administrative presence boils down to not having enough time/resources.
To be fair: this forum is not as active as reddit or discord. So expecting more engagement here from the foundation would need more traffic and more community here. Which is a bit the point I’m trying to make: fostering a more active community here needs a bit more will and probably additional moderation/community staff.
@wchc@eons could any of you (as being on the forum most recently) please take a look at my profile and see why I still am “new user” trust level? Sorry to waste your time on stuff like this <3
But I’d just suggest engaging with the forum naturally and not trying to push getting trusted status faster, if you use the forums and engage naturally it’ll happen
I completely agree with you - and I don’t want to push this thread into an personal issue resolve.
It still is a symptom of a certain lack of transparency regarding the rules of this forum. By Discourse’s standards I should be “basic user” and the changes the admins made here are not listed - this makes it hard for new users to understand the principles behind it.
Also, it is frustrating to not be able to send PMs, attach more images per post and so on.