Progress on the Biofabforum

Regarding the pings: I don’t have desktop notifications on, so I don’t know. I meant the blue bubbles in the top right on my account picture. Those are probably related.

Thanks!

Regarding the blue notification bubbles on the user icon: you might have an edgeryders.eu tab open in parallel, in which case it is normal that only the edgeryders.eu tab and not the biofabforum.org tab gets these notification. The same will happen with multiple edgeryders.eu tabs open in parallel, in which case only one of them gets the notification bubbles. Because Discourse keeps only one connection to one browser open to send these notification bubbles.

If you don’t get the blue notification bubbles even when biofabforum.org is the only Discourse tab you have open, please tell us again. In that case, we’ll have to fix that.

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Updates: The Biofabfrum site is not yet ready for launch, but we are getting close. I assume 2-3 days at most, 1-2 days if it’s urgent (with some changes following later in this case).

(In the last days, quite some time was spent to fix seemingly random theme changes too the Biofabforum theme on the edgeryders.eu site. We feared that our chosen solution for the whitelabelling would not work out at all in the end, but actually it did. :sweat_smile:)

The important remaining tasks right now are:

  • Show only the Biofabforum sub-categories in the hamburger menu.
  • Make a click on the top-left logo trigger a page reload. (In effect, the user should land on https://biofabforum.org/c/biofab when clicking on the logo, but currently does not.)

And some less important ones:

  • Set the site title. (It is still “Edgeryders” currently, visible in the window title bar of the browser.)
  • Hide non-customizable settings in the admin backend.
  • Fix that e-mails currently use the wrong logo and wrong “From:” address in notifications about biofabforum.org activity.
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Progress again: only the three “less important” tasks from the post above are still to be done:

Questions for @winnieponcelet: Could you please provide

  • the “From:” address to use when sending notification e-mails about topics in your category (not sure if we can get this to work in a meaningful way, if not we’ll use a more neutral sender name than currently …)
  • a short description of the website, ideally one sentence (will appear in automatic link previews when linking to the startpage from Facebook etc.)
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Perfect, great work @matthias ! It is not urgent, so take your time. We wanna do a first “wiki-thon” early - mid march.

Answers to your questions:

  • BioFab Forum works as a from address. I don’t fully understand your remark. If it is not feasible to make it into BioFab Forum, you can do something that seems suitable to you. It’s just that if it’s an “Edgeryders” from address, it needs to be clearer that Edgeryders is the host somehow, so that it’s not “alarming” when people receive e-mails.
  • BioFab Forum is a place for biofabrication enthusiasts to meet, share knowledge and discuss
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Understood. Our plan for changing the From: address of e-mails did not work out, so sending it from the usual contact@edgeryders.eu address together with explanations will be the way we have to go.

Progress updates: After we fix this e-mail notification setup, all of the tasks mentioned above are done. Also, the site title has been set (may take a cache refresh to show up), and the search will only return results from the content of the your self-branded platform (see issue #130). Logo and favicon have also been updated with the versions you sent today.

So basically, we have to fix the e-mail notifications (see issue #128) and we’re done :slight_smile:

On a more general note, the implementation strategy we chose worked, but narrowly. It’s not a really clean solution in terms of programming, so when needing other features it can become difficult, and some features are not possible with the way we implemented things (esp. notifications from an own e-mail address, as discussed above). For these reasons, we think of moving over to a new way of implementation when the next project of this type comes along, and we have a good idea already (“multisite setup with synced databases”, more details in issue #129). Biofab Forum will be migrated to the new solution free of charge if and when it will be ready.

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Great work! :slight_smile:
I have noticed that when I visit the Edgeryders website on my phone, I get the BioFab Forum theme. Also a cache problem?

Re: general remarks, that works. We knew there would be a learning curve. Looking forward to what’s next :slight_smile:

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Also we should schedule a debrief at some point when everything is finished. Both for the project and the practicalities of us using the biofab platform.

Could be a cache problem, or more likely a frozen setting in the database resulting from a failed solution during the development. Happened to @daniel as well … Daniel, can you check if this is the problem here?

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So far I can’t reproduce this. I verified that it is not a frozen setting in the database. So it could be a cache problem. @winnieponcelet is it only the case when you are logged in? Is it also the case when you switch to „private browsing“ mode in your browser?

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Now it’s not a problem anymore, after logging back in.

I do still get an Edgeryders preview on Facebook, see below and thanks to professional troll @unknown_author for helping with the discovery

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Just as a hint for @daniel when investigating this: it could be a caching issue as well, this time on Facebook’s side. They cache link previews for some time (days?), so an old version might be in use.

If a cached version is used or a new version is generated on the fly can be determined loosely base don the time it takes Facebook to show the link preview before posting. If it’s immediate it is a cached version, if it’s with 2-4 second delay it’s a version created on the fly.

To see if the problem persists with current versions, try posting a URL that was for sure never posted before on Facebook. For example by appending a custom GET parameter (should work, but Facebook might ignore that, I did not test it).

Is there a way to see new sign ups in the BioFab Forum? In order to properly welcome people and get them started on using the platform.

To be notified when a new user registers, you can subscribe to this topic. We created a mechanism that adds a post to that topic whenever a new user registers, with a link to their profile.

Currently, we cannot tell which user registered via biofabforum.org and which via edgeryders.eu. You might be able to tell them apart by username and profile information, and by what they have read, even before they post anything.

If you indeed need the information on which platform they registered, please tell us here or (better) in our Github issue tracker for Discourse. It should be relatively straightforward to implement (using an additioal custom profile field and then rendering that information as well into the welcome thread message).

Tried this again, and posted about the remaining issues with this in Github issue #132. We’ll work there on a solution.

There also seems to be still OpenCare mentioned when people sign up to the BioFab forum. Someone earlier was confused at “having to give credit card information”. It was one of the questions of course, but it scared him. Our audience will sometimes be the type of person that does fall for phishing scams, not your average digital native Edgeryders community member. Any ideas on how to tackle that?

Just listing some questions that I have now.

There were also questions about googlability of the threads. How does that work in this case?

We will change the questions to be neutral, not mentioning OpenCare or credit cards. I asked @alberto to do this on Github issue #131 but he might have missed the notification or is too busy … what is it Alberto? I can take over if needed.

@matthias yes, struggling. Actually, can you think of questions that keep the idea of ethical consent, but move beyond opencare? You are more qualified than me in this domain.

Hmm good question. The important point in order to not be penalized by Google is that the same content is not seen by Google on two domains. The proper solution for that is of course that your content is only indexed on your domain and our content only on our domain.

The way how to implement this proper solution however changes (and becomes simple) with the multisite solution “upgrade” we intend for the future for your site. To not duplicate efforts, the solution for now should be to index all content only on our site.

Note that this has no effect on user engagement for you, as users will still find and engage with your content. Independent of that we should indicate prominently on our site that your main category is also available on its own domain.