Make the first-discussion-post experience 10x better

[ewinslow]

Ideas:

• "Add discussion" button always appears on main discussion stream
  • If logged out, clicking prompts for login
  • once logged in, clicking takes user to new discussion form
• As question is typed, similar discussions appear in a second column (like auto complete search, to discourage duplicates)
• Can select target group from the form
• High quality titles are encouraged (visual quality meter?)
• Pasting code snippets is way better (e.g. with http://pierrebaron.fr/PBCKCode/)
• Fast

[ewinslow]

To measure title quality, we could look for stop words, exclamation points, all caps, etc.

[beck24]

We were talking about using an 'answers' type plugin about a month ago. I have one that's a fork of a fork etc that made it over to AU and is a decent approximation of stack overflow. I'm going to test it out locally with the community setup and see how it fares, but I believe that does most of the above out of the box. Plus the SO format is much better for many of the question types we get anyway.
If it looks like it works really well, then it might be good to have an admin tool to migrate an existing discussion to a question so we can utilize our existing data

[ewinslow]

Isn't the discussion type basically the same as a "question"? We already have blogs in core, which can serve the more generic announcement-type purpose and aren't necessarily looking for a response.

Just don't want people to suffer from the paradox of choice.

[brettp]

I'd argue questions vs discussions is a matter of semantics.

Pasting code snippets is way better

I've thought multiple times about trying to detect if code is being posted
and either automatically converting it to a GH gist or notifying the user
with some interstitial to use a code snipplet hosting service.

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Evan Winslow notifications@github.comwrote:

Isn't the discussion type basically the same as a "question"? We already
have blogs in core, which can serve the more generic announcement-type
purpose and aren't necessarily looking for a response.

Just don't want people to suffer from the paradox of choice.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/14#issuecomment-33700860
.

Brett Profitt
Elgg Lead Developer

Elgg: http://elgg.org/
Skype: brett.profitt
Twitter: http://twitter.com/brettprofitt

[ewinslow]

Something like http://pierrebaron.fr/PBCKCode/ could work, too.

[beck24]

The demo on that doesn't work for me...

[ewinslow]

Me either. I guess we'd have to fix it... :)