We were toying with a new category, “Beeblog”, for discussing blog posts. If there’s demand for that it’s fine with me. But I propose we be pretty conservative about adding new categories and not add them for the sake of, well, categorizing. Rather, we should add a category because we believe there are people who want to subscribe to just that category, or want to exclude that category. Here’s how the existing categories satisfy that criterion:
Akrasia (catch-all)
Bugabee (bug reports and feature requests) ignored by people who are interested in the behavioral economics and general lifehackery but aren’t that deep into Beeminder specifically yet
Tech (uebernerd hackery) ignored by non-programmers
Newbee is where you go if you’re new and confused, or if you like helping people (eg, @insti and @drtall – I sure love you)
Meta you might ignore if you find this kind of navel-gazing super tedious
News you might subscribe to if you just care about big announcements or timely things
InnerHex is super secret and most of you don’t know about it but you can ask me!
Yeah. Typically they’d first be News and then we could move them to Akrasia if much discussion ensues.
(I also have mixed feelings about blog-related discussions on the forum. It’s kind of sad to have no comments on blog posts so I generally encourage people to add their thoughts there. Of course the right answer is to use Discourse instead of Disqus for comments and actually automate it so that there’s a new forum thread for every post and you actually see that forum thread below the post, as well as here in the forum proper. But that sounds hard to set up.)
If you’ve got a substantial comment that’s liable to provoke discussion, sure! Comment wherever makes the most sense to you.
But mostly it means that we need to do some behind-the-scenes setup to make it work smoothly as the obvious-best-and-easiest thing to do.
Edit: my addled brain has just caught the brilliant bit of irony. If it’s important enough to commit to, then yes. If it’s just another #UVI, then maybe not. Bumping the thread was a good way to bring it back to the top of mind pile…
I love how you think! It’s the Right Answer in the sense that given infinite time we’d definitely set that up… But now that I’m thinking of it, we’re paying discourse.org for ongoing support of our discourse installation and help with things like that might well be part of what we’re paying for. So I should at least ask them about that… [and done].
@dreev I’m setting up Discourse comments for the Wordpress blog for my company. It looks like you’re using Wordpress on your blog. I can take a look at what a Disqus to Discourse import would look like, and then what Discourse Wordpress comments would look like.
I actually talked to Jeff Atwood about this and they’re thinking a full import may not be worth it but rather just switch to Discourse for blog comments starting now. Jeff’s blog shows what it would be like! I have slightly mixed feelings about making people click through to the forum to comment and requiring a Beeminder account to comment. On a lot of blogs it’s probably a net win to filter out drive-by commenters but I’m not sure that’s the case for us. On the other hand it’s confusing having discussions happening both in the blog comments and on the forum.
You may be able to turn on other types of login for the Beeminder forum (I
don’t remember which ones are enabled now) like Google or Github, but you
still have to click through and login to disqus…
I am personally wholeheartedly in favor for bringing the blog discussions
to Discourse like how Boingboing does it, but I’m OK. I’m probably not
going to comment a lot on the blog posts anyway.
I already needed to sign up for a Disquss account that I didn’t want, or use for anything else, just to comment on the Beeminder blog. That seems way worse to me.
