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Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on Should there be a forum-like place for the Codidact network?

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Should there be a forum-like place for the Codidact network?

+5
−1

I would like to propose a place on the Codidact network where one can informally talk with other members of the network in a slower paced setting about off-topic stuff (for example movie recommendations, politics, gaming and whatever else someone has a desire to talk about).

In this case, a slower paced setting refers to something that's not a real-time chat but rather something similar to a classic forum / bulletin board. Why that? So that people who can't join a chat regularly or only have time here and there can still connect with other members of a community. Additionally, a forum is a better tool for (lengthy) discussions while a chat primarily serves the purpose of (short-term) information exchange. (Yes, discussions can and do happen there aswell, however, oftentimes these disappear in the backlog when something new is written so that they can't be accessed / continued well in the future.)

According to the Codidact vision, the project aims to put the community first which is a good thing (and most likely for a lot of people a motivation to contribute here). There also is this important bullet point:

A way for community members to interact informally, strengthening the bonds within the community -- because communities are made out of people, and people need to have the option to get to know each other.

Different interaction modes help to achieve this goal as a whole. Communication isn't based on one medium but rather on a lot of different ones, slow ones, fast ones, ones without exchanging words at all (touching and feeling in real life) and so on.

I think that a forum-like place for off-topic stuff would complement the existing chat on Discord nicely as forums, at least in my opinion, enable one to jump into the community more easily than chats. (Before posting, you can read what other like-minded people are talking about right now, or you can just read threads to get a feeling what kinds of users are there.)

As an example the post about a meta category for Meta: While it's obviously off-topic here, I could have imagined myself answering it with (ridiculous) arguments to reason for or against it[1].

What do you think of a forum-like place for the network?


  1. It's really an interesting question because before discussing meta affairs, you must have defined meta affairs - which in itself invites a lot of discussion as to what a meta affair is :D ↩︎

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1 comment thread

General comments (7 comments)
General comments
Moshi‭ wrote about 4 years ago

There actually used to be a forum, but it was abandoned in favor of Meta and chat.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 4 years ago

The forum Moshi refers to was more focused than what this question describes, though. Zerotime, can you say more about what you imagine this looking like? For example, you mentioned new threads being bumped as a negative, I think, but the forums I've used have done that too. What would be the important points of the user experience? I want us to be able to support multi-modal community-building (I wrote that vision text); some Discord channels move slowly so I didn't realize we had a gap there.

luap42‭ wrote about 4 years ago

I mean... we could likely remove/hide all posts from the old forum mentioned by Moshi and Monica and allow continued use (still moderated, but not continuously observed) if there were a group of users interested in maintaining it... I would apply similiar criteria to creating a new site, but otherwise I think this would be fine, as long as CoC and ToS are upheld.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited about 4 years ago

@luap42 or it could be a "fun" category off of Meta, or a place in Discord with different conventions, or a different Discourse forum to avoid conflating chit-chat with older planning, or something else... I'd like to better understand the need before we dive into setting something up. I think there's value in having it not require a separate account/identity.

luap42‭ wrote about 4 years ago

@MonicaCellio yeah, sure. I was just thinking that the forum is already set up. And I'm not really a fan of having a "fun site" kept directly within the other "less fun" sites and would rather favor it being a bit different, but you are right that this needs to be decided after we know what is needed/wanted.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 4 years ago

@luap42 category, not site -- a place right here on Meta for people to congregate. But, needs assessment first.

ShowMeBillyJo‭ wrote about 4 years ago

@MonicaCellio I see the Meta category solution as only being feasible if we have the right post type to support it. Q&A and Article don't seem right, because they're semantically different than a "discussion." A post type like Q&A, but with no comments and no voting, would make sense to me. (Am I reinventing the wheel here? Are current and future post types already defined somewhere?)