No login to read on the forum

We’re thinking of making the forum readable again without having to signup and logging in. In detail this change would mean:

  • All topics and posts are readable. But you’ll have to be logged in if you want to post yourself.
  • Profile pictures and usernames will be visible. But anonymous users won’t have access to your profile card (click on @nolo to see how profile cards look) nor to your profile page.

What do you think? Please share your opinion on this!

2 Likes

The thought of my words becoming more public scares me a bit. But I think it is the right way to go! :+1:

1 Like

I don’t know if it’s better or not for the project, but personally I would stop posting.

4 Likes

I think by the time we have a useable app, we should also have a public forum to support it’s reach and have a feedback channel.

But I wonder myself if having the whole forum public is the best approach. I feel our idea of community goes well with having to login to be part of it.

We could try a top-level fork on the forum with a setup like this:

  • App (Public)
    • Product Updates
    • Features
    • Feedback
    • Bugs
  • Community (Log in)
    • Conversation
    • Trust & Safety
    • Issues with current platforms
    • Governance
1 Like

I’m personally a fan of making it all open if it means we get more people engaged and interested!

Why is that? As @nolo mentioned, no one will be able to click on your profile if they don’t log in, so they won’t know who you are :stuck_out_tongue:

Did this for now: Introducing public categories

So I’ve been tinkering a bit more with that. My main impression is that it makes sense to have a members-only forum. The forum is not conceived as a stand-alone platform, but rather as a supplement to the app. To access the app, any user will have to register. So perspectively we’d be heading towards a single-sign-on based on the app log-in anyways.

I think it would still make sense to have a public facing part on the forum, like a public channel or show window. Here’s how I sketched a public landing page so far:

So there’s a banner only shown to anonymous visitors. Below are posts from the public category, the only one visible if you are not logged in.

We can extend on the plain forum style and give a bit more color to the public presentation of posts. We can also structure the public category with tags. I introduced a bulletin tag here, that could serve as a selection of public content. Anonymous visitors would be redirect to this selection as the default view:

So who’d decide about which public content gets selected for the bulletin? There’s an option on the forum that I like a lot: category moderation. We can give groups special powers limited to specific categories. For the bulletin I created a group editors and gave them exclusive access to the bulletin tag within the public category:

Screenshot from 2020-11-23 10-37-45

Over time we could expand this approach and have a wider range of selections by tags, or even have several groups responsible for different selections.

Please share your thoughts about this! And if you like it, consider posting in #public, so we get some content going to work with :wink:

1 Like

I like the idea that the forum can be a public-facing part of the platform that’s independently accessible (similarly I would like to see the same thing for city pages).

I still don’t understand how we make the distinction between what is publically vs privately accessible. I understand the arguments for both, but I don’t see where we would make a split in content, and if I’m posting, I don’t find the idea of a “public” category an appealing place to post as if I’m posting I’m a user, and so there are specific categories for what I’ll want to post so I’ll put them there.

My preference is that we should weigh up the pros and cons of private vs public, and then make that decision for all posts. I’m am pro making it all public but I understand people have reservations.

That being said if we do want to make the split and keep this model, then I think mods should have the decision of using the bulletin tag but not category by category. A public face should be very well curated (I like the look of the second image). Of course, category moderation seems like a powerful tool but if we’re going to have private/public view, we should keep category moderation for private use.