I started this site as a logged-in-only community, not because I wanted to create a walled garden, but because at the beginning of the pandemic I thought a very small, and essentially “private” group would be the best way for us to support one another during these difficult times.
Note that this is a separate question from whether registration should have an “approval” or “invite” step. I think that’s a reasonable policy for the time being, since it has kept the site free of trolling, and free of people without any genuine interest in documentation.
Make the content of forum.docling.net visible to visitors who are not logged in
Keep the current system: only users who are registered can see content on the site
FWIW in case people are wondering what a more public community looks like, I hang out on another Discourse forum and their content is public. The community is called Clojureverse, and it serves people interested in a programming language called Clojure. I think the community is quite healthy, and I think it is so because they have a good mod team.
I think the decision made here should respect the wishes of current Docling users, though I’ll repeat what I said in the other thread, which is that making content public would help draw in new users and, more importantly, help disseminate information from the very valuable conversations that take place here.
I don’t want to put too many balls in play, but if there’s reluctance to give up a more informal atmosphere by going publicly visible, another thing to consider would be expanding Docling onto another medium that’s more appropriate for ephemeral, informal content, such as Slack or Discord. Just a thought!
To be one of those jerk users who proposes ideas without any understanding of the implications: would it be possible to make it public on a by-channel basis?
From this discussion, looks like the answer’s yes: if I’m understanding right, you can set the site-wide setting to have all topics viewable by people who aren’t logged in, then override that setting on a per-topic basis to make certain topics (e.g. Watercooler) visible only if you are logged in. Busy procrastinating on term papers atm so I can’t set up a Discourse instance to confirm, but if nobody’s done so a week from now I can confirm.
Thanks for your thoughts on this! And is this poll exciting or what?
This is a great question, perhaps the poll is too black-and-white. So we can imagine a scenario where categories like (say) Web Documentation are wide open, but Watercooler is private to registered users. That certainly makes a lot of sense to me. We could publicize the “talking shop”, but maintain some “users only” corners where we can chat freely without worrying about a search engine legacy.
It occurs to me that we might also want to add some sort of obvious user interface clue that helps users to know which kind of category they are posting in.
(And it also occurs to me that we really need to do some work on our categories! It’s a mess, my fault. We need a category infrastructure week. )
Thanks for looking this up, @lgessler! I recall seeing some way of doing essentially the opposite as well — “unlocking” a given category while the site as a whole remains locked. I tend to think the solution you found makes more sense; I feel like the majority of our posts are talking shop, and anything we wouldn’t want to be indexed by a search engine could be categorized as such.
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