Steve,
the only status I found acceptable was, that only McNeel employees had admin rights and noone else was even “moderator”. We are talking about an improvement over the Newsgroup and all I can say is that systems in Forums in my perception work - a lot - worse. This despite all the work spent on “moderation”.
I find that Uber-System Discourse offers by default simply grotesque.
Regardless of agreeing with me - was it at all (technically) possible to limit admin-rights to just McNeel staff?
This is an excellent point. @sam is one of the developers for discourse and has already posted on several topics here. I’m sure he would like to see what your input is.
I’m not seeing that. Does that happen on this system? As Steve said, they can twiddle the knobs and make adjustments as time goes by based upon how the system is used – something that cannot be done with NNTP. That system is dead. It’s a dinosaur. We all liked aspects of it, but we’re beating a dead horse… it’s long past time to find a viable solution. The current system was best for hanging on to a small, old user base. Over the years, I saw very few new power users entire the system… it was the same faces all the time. Given the size of Rhino’s user base, it seems that is not even close to a fair representation of the people that use Rhino. Yes, for a few of us, on a personal level, it was nice having all the attention because of a small set of users in the newsgroup. But ultimately, that’s not good for new rhino users, nor is it good for McNeel as a company to get such weighted feedback from such a small user base. Time to move on. It WILL hurt in ways. But I can already list about 6 things I hate about the old newsgroup and prefer about this system. I don’t want to see us turning back. That would feel very… Luddite.
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I like the idea that it acts as a central, universally accessible hub.
It does look visually cluttered (the main threads page is like a strobe light looking at all those numbers and avatars).
I don’t quite get the threading structure. It seems replies to a post are tacked in the bar underneath the post itself as well as they appear later down in the thread on their own (this double inclusion confuses me).
Overall, I feel it is currently slower to visually parse (takes more brain cycles to process all interface elements) compared to the simplicity of the old newsgroup. This information overload, will start taxing people once the novelty wears off.
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I’m not seeing that. Does that happen on this system?
Yes, it does. This thread has 60 posts. That’s a lot! Would you like to switch to a summary view with the best answers? Sorry, I’m feeling terribly sick suddenly…
Note that I’m not in love with NNTP as a system, so I’m not against stopping the Newsgroup.
I just find this here a lot worse.
Admin and Moderator levels are explicit rights that I can give to any user in the forum. They are not rights that you “earn” over time through use of the forum. The only way they are “earned” is through convincing an admin (currently me and @brian) to grant these rights.
When you first join discourse, the default settings (which can be changed) make it so new users (or spammers) can not
- Send private messages to other users
- Reply as new topic in the right gutter (UI removed)
- Flag posts
- Post any images
- Post more than 2 hyperlinks in a post
- Have actual links in the ‘about me’ field of their profile (will be silently and temporarily converted to plain text)
- Mention more than 2 users in a post
In a very short period of time, these rights are granted. After a little longer than that, you get a button to “invite” non-members of the forum to participate in topics.
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Having that OPTION makes you sick? It’s an option. You can ignore it. 
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Nobody’s questioning any of that, least of all me. The key word you used is “viable”. That’s different things to different people. You can get used to anything. I already read and post in the Python, Grasshopper, Rhino/Ning and Mac forums just to name a few. They’re all different and each one has its advantages and disadvantages. I like a number of features on this platform, the select/quote thing is nice, for example. However, of all those I just mentioned, this one is the least “readable” - but of course that’s just my humble opinion. And since I spend a good portion of my life in this “continuum”, readability and oversee-ability is very important to me. It’s #1 on my list.
----H
Thanks for your answer!
I was just referring to this nonsense…
What do I have to do in order to get a CLEAR?
I guess it’s a matter of personal taste. I never took to the NING format. So I didn’t participate. Not sure why, but this works better for me. And works on my mobile device better as well, which is a key feature for my needs.
Yes, it does.
I don’t want to be pestered with status gain, and voting at all and not get presented a content remix based on this.
Sorry, I just don’t quite what has you all worked up over this. It’s not like we have badges with our status next to our names. If you don’t want sorting by popularity, don’t.
The nonsense you are referring to is what I just wrote a short hand version of. Discourse doesn’t have anything above trust level 2 right now so the stuff that @discourse wrote about beyond that are thoughts on what they might implement on higher trust levels.
Also, remember this system lets me configure a whole lot of these settings.
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The main focus of trust level 3 is earning the right to edit topic titles and topic categories, as well as the “frequent flier’s lounge” category that is private to trust level 3 and beyond. There is some other stuff but those are the big ones.
It’s coming!
Isn’t that inherent in many conflicts?
One has a hard time to understand what bugs the counterpart. Yet one has to accept that it feels real.
I personally don’t think that these two options are useful in any communication context.
When looking for a better replacement for the newsgroup I don’t want to deal with (=see) this.
That’s all I say.
Duly noted. Personally, I didn’t even notice this option. Doesn’t phase me. I’ve been bouncing back and forth from the old newsgroup to here, and I’m finding the limitations of the old newsgroup just plain painful now. I look forward to it being shut down and having everything in one place finally.
Well personally, I hadn’t seen the proposals for higher levels of trust before (I don’t really have time to read the main Discourse forum, I have far too many other things to do right now) and I have to say that they raise a a few warning flags here to. Somehow the elevated status thing just doesn’t jibe with my vision of McNeel’s generally very egalitarian approach to things.
----H
Anyway, this topic is getting sterile - same old arguments we used to have on the ng that ended up as 100+ posts long - without actually resolving anything. When you’re doing statistics, you remove the extremes and examine the middle, so that means that we can take Marc, Heath and perhaps a few others out of the equation on one end; myself, Holger and perhaps a few others out on the other end, and look at how those in between react…
@stevebaer - the info in the above post is good and reassuring, thanks - I hadn’t seen it before, this stuff gets lost easily. I don’t get the part about “invite” though, - why do we need to formally “invite” anybody? Everyone should be welcome…
----H
I think that’s the problem.
Most people probably haven’t read that bullshit and think I’m just a bit hysterical.
This is being worked on right now by the discourse team