Continuing on from the Meta post.
A combination of Discuss post + notifications that a new post exists (by email/ping/slack/status) seems to make the most sense, so I spent some time trying to figure out how to make Discuss better suited to us, feeding that need to be sure you're not missing vital info while not being overwhelmed by too many useless notifications.
In an ideal world, we all want to our day here, check what’s up that is relevant to everybody, then check what’s up that is relevant to what we’re working on, and then be able to check anything else we’re interested in. And parallely, we check our Status channels and DM’s as we did with Slack - and have forgotten that Slack even existed.
So here’s a list of things we’d like to start with:
#1 - If people should see it, post it here.
Enough has been said about missed threads with important updates, recurrent discussions being repeated ad infinitum, etc… Everyone should be able to see what is happening, read and comment at their own pace. Just do it.
#2 - Categories vs Tags
We also want to keep things easy to scan and easy to search for. Until now we have mostly added categories, and hardly used tags. Subcategories are also an option, but what
discourse people seem to have agreed on is that Categories are like walls. Build 4 and you have a nice house; build 24 and you have a maze.
@naghdy (thank you so much!) and I came up with a possible re-categorization - feedback is welcome - if we get none, we’ll move ahead by end of the week. When we do this we’ll also add real descriptions in the first post.
| Category | (example) Tags or subcats |
|---|---|
| Status - All | Principles, SITG exps, All hand events (Prague 2018), Communication topics, calls for volunteers, Town Halls, People-ops, Expenses, |
| Product | Chat, Engineering, Wallet, Desktop, Mobile, Hardwallet, UX, Design, PM, Brand, Content, Dapps, Security |
| Outreach | Marketing, Social, Events, Activism |
| Education | Workshops, Tech talk, Announcements, Newbies, L&D |
| Ecosystem | Incubate, Studio, Embark, |
| Research | Nim, ULC, LES, Swarm |
Tags or subcategories is still up for discussion, too.
A thing I like about tags is that you can append one to any catgory - so say desktop does a learning initiative, it’s easy to find and track under learning. With categories, not sure how to get that.
On the other hand, categories in theory can be set to default watched for all users, so important news would be less likely to be missed (i.e the threads about Prague).
#3 - Email notifications - settings
Provided #1 & #2 work, Discuss has a lot of options that you can set to get notifications in your inbox.
We’re all different people with different habits - and what’s a reasonable amount of emails to one can be spam to someone else, or just not enough to yet another person.
The idea is that you’re aware of
- Things that concern everyone at Status
- Things that are important for your work
- Anything else that you want to know, want to contribute, etc
The tips here are settings for you to consider - still, try to find what works best for you. And if you have a magic trick that works really well, share it with everyone, please!
https://discuss.status.im/u/{your_username}/preferences/categories
If you want to be sure not to miss any post in a given category (if we do the changes above, it would be the Status-all category), you can set it to watch here:
And you can do that with tags as well:
Questions - comments - concerns?
. I’ve been going back and forth on what would be the best structure for us and imo Category + Tags would be the most flexible.