Generate and implement new ideas for Discourse group "tags"

[pet3r-pan]

On the discourse forum, we are able to have tags as shown below. We can create any tag and give people tags on certain occasions or conditions etc. (eg. donated to ethmagicians = doner, or active member = no-lifer)

These tags can be made from text along with any icons from the font-awesome set.

Would love for this thread to be a place of grace peace and joyous come together for us to brain storm some ideas for new and spicy tags for people.

[jamesyoung]

Project/group affiliations? Possible to put in links to Twitter/Peepeth profile?

[bmann]

@pet3r-pan just clarifying that those "tags" are group affiliations.

We can create Discourse groups at will, and make them public / private or something in between. The public ones can be ones that users can join.

@MadeofTin wrote this up before, see #14

I would like to see this turned on. Probably this is actually a dupe of #14 -- what do you think Peter?

[pet3r-pan]

@bmann Re: tags - Agreed. Tags for group or ring memberships. But aside group / ring memberships, they could be used to recognise other things such as volunteers of a magicians council and be given a unqiue tag etc. But its just a fun idea.

After playing with discourse's configs using metacartel's forum as a staging ground, I learnt that...

Properties of groups

• Groups act as categories on the forum (threads can be categorised both using groups and categories ~ can be cumbersome)
• Groups can attach members with tags such as 'regular' by default eg. so we can grant the security ring group members the tag 'hacker' or any other nonsense
• Groups can allow members to message everyone in the group (mailing list capability)
• Groups can be either be joined by anyone, requested to be joined, or purely invite only
• Groups can be attached to categories (You can set specific permissions for group members for certain categories, in terms of creating new theads, viewing and replying in threads of certain category eg. Only people in the security group can view or reply or create new threads in the security category)

I see groups as a good way to help identify people through tags (hence this issue) but also potentially enabling a mailing list capability which is really awesome for announcing community calls.

What was the real reason behind your request for issue #14 @MadeofTin ? I am not sure what the goal of your request is - will be helpful to move things forward. Why did you want groups enabled in the first place?

I would create groups on the forum for enabling tags and the mailing list capability but not for the reason for categorisation as we already have sufficient levels of categorisation imo. So yes, groups will be enabled and created in the process of this issue @bmann but wouldn't call it a duplicate. (depends on what @MadeofTin 's goal of the request was)

// Reminder to self: Create ReadMe doc for creating new forum improvement issues

[bmann]

Using groups for Rings means mailing list mode for ring owners which is a little more effective than hoping people see category posts.

And, open groups for Rings means people can self select what they want to show they are involved with.

It also would mean we could identify people who are actually organizers of a group / Ring — which isn’t captured anywhere.

Groups don’t really do categorization unless you send group PMs. I agree that categories as they are is fine.

[pet3r-pan]

For ring organisers, we can manually give them a badge or title.