culture

While we've offered general tips for building a Discourse community [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/08/building-a-discourse-community/] , we also get a lot of questions about what specifically you can do to help launch a successful Discourse community. What is the "elevator pitch" for your community? The

The user trust system is a fundamental cornerstone of Discourse. Trust levels are a way of… * Sandboxing new users in your community so that they cannot accidentally hurt themselves, or other users while they are learning what to do. * Granting experienced users more rights over time, so that they can

tl;dr: Discourse will be participating in Outreachy Summer. If you are eligible to participate in this internship, please consider applying [https://www.outreachy.org/2018-may-august/communities/discourse/#testing]! About Outreachy Participants of Outreachy work with an open source organization (in our case Discourse) on a 3 month programming project.

For almost a year now, we’ve been doing something that’s considered quite risky [http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html] for an open source project: Paying contributors. Communities like ours are fundamentally built on intrinsic motivation [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-vast-and-endless-sea/]. Getting money involved can jeopardize the whole

Getting going in an online community can be overwhelming, especially if you've never used the platform before. If you're new to Discourse, here are a few quick tips and tricks to get you started: Reading Selecting a title from the topic list will always take you

This is our first year participating in Google Summer of Code. In short, if you're a student with some Rails & Ember skills, you should check out our GSoC profile [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5787017325576192/] and consider applying for a chance to do paid work on Discourse

Discourse is a large open source project [https://github.com/discourse/discourse] buzzing with activity, so a lot of cool things happen over the course of a year. Let's look back at 2015 and pick out some highlights. Our Most Popular Topic of 2015 The most viewed topic

We don't consider Discourse successful unless the communities using Discourse are thriving and growing. And no community we host has thrived quite like Choice of Games [https://www.choiceofgames.com]. Their Discourse has absolutely exploded over the last year, to the point that they are now the 22nd

We measure Discourse's success as an open source project by one simple metric: are Discourse communities working? Is your community working? We recently interviewed Brian Adams [http://badevguru.ghost.io/] of OpenROV to discuss how they use Discourse and get some specifics about what is – and isn'

Sure, anyone can set up their very own Discourse in 30 minutes or less [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/]. But how do you get people to go there? I often describe Discourse as an interesting dinner party. Think of categories as rooms, topics as tables, replies as conversations.

Here's my ForumCon [http://www.forumcon.com/] 2013 keynote, Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k02ev0qzP4] -- you'll have to juxtapose the video with the slides manually, unfortunately, but here they are side by side. Update March 2022: Unfortunately the

I've gotten in the habit of explaining Discourse to people as a clubhouse. A place on the Internet that belongs exclusively to you and your friends -- whether you have 10 friends or a few hundred thousand. There's a big difference between a Facebook Group and

This brief clip from the season 7 finale of the television show 30 Rock skewers stereotypically snarky Internet forum culture. Any recs for the best place to buy a girl's bike [on the upper west side of New York City]? (She's 8) I'm sorry,

If I learned anything at Stack Overflow, it is the importance of meta to any healthy community [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do.html] . Meta is the one dedicated area every single forum needs, no matter its size, no matter how obscure it is, regardless how many posts

With Discourse, it was clear that we needed to totally reboot the software to create next-generation forum software. But code is only part of the story. Any reasonable attempt at delivering a Civilized Discourse Construction Kit has to provide a safe, simple default set of guidelines for civilized discourse. Today&