Ideas to Improve User Experience on KDE Discuss

General
1

Hello dear community,

I mentioned in my previous post that I joined you recently. Although I am new here, I have participated in many active forum communities based on Discourse. As a result of my experiences and observations in these communities, I would like to share with you some ideas that I think could be useful for the KDE Discuss forum and the deficiencies I have identified. I hope these contributions are useful.

First of all, when the KDE Discuss interface is translated to a different language using the site translation tool, the section buttons not working poses a serious problem in terms of user experience. I only experience this situation on KDE Discuss. However, as far as I have observed, there is no section in the section categories or subcategories for new members to get to know the community. If such a section exists, please let me know, but even if it does, I think its location and availability are quite difficult. Therefore, either editing an existing section or creating a completely new section would be useful.

Some of the communities I was previously a member of had AI-powered text editing features. I think this is a really great and very useful addition. This way, community members can organize their texts according to appropriate grammar and spelling rules, making topics much more organized and understandable. Another feature that caught my attention was a plugin that allowed users to display their operating system as a symbol next to their profile pictures. This plugin made it possible to create groups specific to their operating systems and have this visible in people’s profile information when they joined these groups.

I hope that community officials will start working on these issues. I believe that these developments will be very valuable for the forum.

3

are you AI? you have to tell me if you are because those are the rules :wink:

as for the translation difficulties you mention, i don’t find any of the terms you use to apply to anything i see on the page in front of me, so you are going to need to be more specific and precise in your descriptions for us to be able to help you or understand what issues you are having with the website.

“site translation tool” ?
“section buttons”?

as for getting to know the community, i don’t think there is any formal hierarchy or anything, you will just have to get to know us by interacting with us.

4

It’s be nice to disable gamification / awards nonsense when you sign up. I don’t want to play the discourse game.

and turn off the thing that searches what you are typing and lists a bunch of unrelated stuff. it’s like judgmental clippy.

I suppose I should learn to use matrix.

5

I also am very active in a technical forum, and we do not tolerate AI generated answers - which is what yours appears to be. We acknowledge there are language barriers, and people must overcome those - usually with dedicated foreign language sections; otherwise English is the default.

People can leverage AI to help somewhat, but they are responsible for their posts. We actually expect members to post at least the minium information for their system:

Info 
Operating System: Manjaro Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.15.0
Qt Version: 6.9.1
Kernel Version: 6.15.3-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics
Memory: 16.1 GB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Graphics
Product Name: B550M Steel Legend

This I would deem a minimum - and if people don’t include basic information in their post, generally their first reply will be “Unless we’re playing guessing games here, you should post inxi -zv8” with advice about how to paste code to format the post.

Your post is a prime example of this, you mention your XYZ as an issue, yet you offer no specific information about what language you’re trying to use.

The idea of incorporating AI tools in Discourse would be an extremely sensitive topic, with many users prioritising privacy even to the point of Anonymising their usernames in forums (not pointing any fingers here…).

Furthermore, when Profiles give the opportunity for members to input data about their environment, desktop, distribution etc… they are never reliable sources of information (the number of times someone using Manjaro (Unstable) ask questions in the Manjaro forum, then complain that the solutions don’t work - simply because after completing their profile with ‘Manjaro Gnome Stable’ they reinstalled ‘Manjaro Plasma Unstable’… so this concern is invalid - information should come with every post… nobody should rely on the information given on the day that someone joined the forum.

KDE Discuss is rather more casual, which I think is intentional… Which is definitely a good thing for you, as your post is a perfect example of a pointless rant severely lacking in specific and precise information.

So now it’s time to bash Discourse?

If you don’t want to use Discourse, then find a better alternative… I had no problem wasting not more than a few seconds stepping through a few ‘essential steps’ albeit every time for every forum.

Also, modern people appear more lazy than I remember in the past, and using Discourse this can happily include me… Rather than needing to search continually when replying to a topic - if you decide to post a link: Understanding Discourse for new users - Using Discourse - Discourse Meta and it has already been included in another post (as they can get LONG) then the integral search and helpful information is useful, and despite often including some ‘unrelated stuff’ it does help cut down on spam.

There is no Clippy, and personally I disapprove of people bringing Windows paradigms into a technical Linux forum - especially when they are unrelated.