We presently use the forum’s top banner to announce winners of the Impact Award. Although that’s an important reminder about our incentives, I wonder what other use could we make of this key space.
Imagine a new user’s first visit to the forum where we have the best chance to convince them of SCRF’s value. It seems to me that pointers to our three “best” current posts would have a deeper and more lasting impact for us.
Alternatively, we could look into a plugin that would let us do a similar “pinned” post in the right column of the home page. The point is to make our excellent content inescapable for new visitors.
(Note: Since our titles can be long, automating this might require a dedicated “Short Title” field.)
Hi @rlombreglia
I agree with your idea that have newcomers know the best current posts at a glance at the forum homepage. I believe this could allow newcomers to notice the value of the forum easily and allow great works to gain more attention. Two sides of the homepage are blank where we may also take advantage of it, such as putting more important information on there, your plugin tool, or maybe a content wishing pool.
Thanks @Astrid_CH. I don’t think the “empty” edges around the page grid are an option, but there are plenty of other possibilities.
My suggestion to highlight “three of our best posts” was arbitrary, but putting too many things in front of new visitors obviously defeats the purpose. What is your sense of the right number?
@rlombreglia I really like this idea… one other thing we’ve done in the past and I wouldn’t mind seeing return is putting a couple of links to our “how to apply to SCRF” documentation in the top banner. There must be a plug-in for Discourse that would allow us to feature certain threads, although we can also pin them. I’d love to see a breakdown of how our site is used - how many of us access it on mobile vs desktop etc
I like websites that have minamal buttons with only 1 search bar and also enables viewing in darkmode. The holiness of SCRFs forum hurts my eyes… DARK and simple is best
After some preliminary research into Discourse plugins, I haven’t found one that would allow the easy updating of a “pinned” post in the body of the page. (See a couple of my research results below.)
However, doing my idea using the banner at the very top of the site is a problem that SCRF has already solved. If we want to use that banner to promote several of our “best” posts, we could do this by manually listing short versions of the post titles linked to their post IDs.
Here are links suggesting problems with pinning posts:
I like the great use of space in your mockup @rlombreglia.
As far as what goes in there, here are some point-form ideas/thoughts:
advertise the primary needs of the org.
open positions
available grants and bounties
recurring events and meetings
special events or disbursements
awards
grant allocations
“showcase”
great comments or posts in the forum to enjoy
posts that are great but need additional attention
SCRF properties
twitter/youtube/github/chat
Important documentation in github
mandates, frameworks, processes, etc
To get all that working we’ll also have to come up with some calendaring and scheduling plans.
And most importantly one or more people would need to take ownership. Perhaps the nascent discovery team? Or is this a forum moderation task? Community Leads? A group effort?
I don’t have a clear thought about the number as well. What do you think if we could have a mechanism to decide “what are our best posts”, such as “likes” or “hots” or something else (should be discussed further) rather than a certain number every time (of course, the number should be confined)?
Great thoughts on utilizing the header. It’s an important area of the site that currently has a lot of unused white space.
I would advise against thinking of using this space from a marketing perspective but rather of usability for the existing forum members. In other words, it should be used to promote discoverability of content to the existing user base.
This discussion is a great primer for creating an entirely new landing page for SCRF. The items Rich pointed out above would be a great start to thinking about the content of this new landing page. This page would be oriented to audiences not already a part of the SCRF.
I will be posting more information on the topic of this new landing page soon within it’s own thread.
I could not agree more. Discourse seems to have an option for this!
Also from comments there:
For others who want to try this out, head over to chrome://flags , search for “Dark”, and enable “Dark/light mode of system UI” and “Force Dark Mode for Web Contents”.
