Discourse about Discourse

I assumes the forums here (“categories”) are going to mirror Slack channels?

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Code seems to work fine. let x = 0

match () with
    | () -> ()

I don’t think the forums will mirror the channels. We have many tags setup (now) which mirror existing Slack channels, but discourse in particular is typically easier to use with fewer categories, and tags in place to differentiate and allow discoverability/filtering/etc.

Most questions here will likely go in #general and just be tagged appropriately (ie: web/mobile/etc)

That being said, we are planning to start with the few categories/tags we currently have, and adjust as needed.

May be better to remove descriptions from forums to clean up the front page; a pinned topic may work better. I suppose you are deciding between the two as you have both for general. I don’t think discourse can look as smart as a regular forum but it can be cleaned up a bit.

I think it will get unusable without categories. You could merge slack channels to create a reasonable number. For example:

  • General (/ Code / Help )
  • Beginners
  • FSSF (/ Mentorship)
  • Compiler (/ Language Design)
  • Datascience
  • Editors
  • Apps (mobiledev/desktop)
  • Web
  • Usergroups (/ speakers)
  • Human Languages
  • Random

We do plan to reduce the number of channels in Slack, but Discourse tends to work better with fewer categories and more tags (which is how we currently have it setup). If things get difficult to use, it’s fairly easy to reorganize later.

For details on this in the Discourse meta, see “Do categories scale?” and discussion here.

I see the forum becoming a stream of consciousness without categories. With categories, you can see both the categories AND the stream of consciousness on the front page, so you have the best of both worlds! Tags are no substitute. That would be my vote anyway. Perhaps others can give their opinions on this as they join.

Lets see how it plays out - this is the “Discourse recommended” way of doing it, so I think it’s worth trying there first, then adjusting if/when needed.

Syntax highlighting too!

let inc i =
    i + 1

let foo x y =
    x |> y 

let ans = foo 2 inc

printfn "The answer is %i" ans
<hello name="Dave">
   World
</hello>
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This is really cool. Haven’t used discourse before wondering how extensible it is. Like integrating F# formatting or even FSI Bot

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I don’t think FSI Bot will ever happen here - but improving the formatting may be possible. Discourse is open source, so improving formating in the code base should work its way into the hosted versions too…

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I’m new to Discourse, so I hope I’m doing this right.

I might join this one too, if I ever find the time to learn Rust. https://users.rust-lang.org/

world |> hello :wink:

Wonder how many FSSF members will “transfer” to this site from Slack - it is quite change. But I think I like it.

Looking at two created topics in General category… :thinking: I think @sergey_tihon deserves separate category (e.g. F# Weekly) where each topic would be one issue of his weekly newsletter? Does it make sense?

Sergey is using the news tag to flag F# Weekly. Discourse is geared around having “fewer” categories, with tags to differentiate. Discussion above has links with motivation for that.

You can track “news” and it’ll send you notifications, etc, just for F# Weekly (and major announcements) that way.

Thanks Reed. It’s been a while since I used discussion forums. Notifications seem to be the way then.

Yes, and discourse has its own way of doing things that are different than classic forums… People seem to really enjoy it as a platform, and prefer it, but there’s a learning curve for some of the “more advanced” operations.

I want to help integrating better F# code colonization :slight_smile:!

Besides I’m also in favour of adding some categories. So far discourse works neat and fluent :slight_smile:.

I’d love to figure out a way to port FSI bot here. However, I am not entirely sure how that would fit in. It works well on Slack, because everything happens immediately. I am not sure what the workflow would be on Discourse.

I don’t think fsibot makes sense here…

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