Badges and levels of trust
I vote no on that stuff. I can see if for certain other situations but not ours. Unless we want to designate people who are hosts of various areas/domains/categories - whatever wer wind of calling it. But otherwise I don’t think overt merit systems work with out way of doing things.
Agree about badges / trust levels
I’ll disable badges on the staging website, and about trust levels … we may use them in a rudimentary form to prevent spamming, but not as a merit system. Will have to see how to configure that.
Gamification failed in Edgeryders
We experimented with gamification in the very first Edgeryders platform (Drupal 6), but those features fell completely flat. I am not sure how directly this applies to the badge system here, but we should remember it.
StackOverflow uses badges, and so does Khan Academy. I admit I do not pay attention to the badges, in the sense that I don’t change my behaviour to unlock more of them, but I do get a nice rush when I unlock them. And as for user levels: recently my reputation on StackOverflow reached the level where I can upvote or downvote an answer. And that was very useful, because now I can compensate people helping me by increasing their reputation.
Maybe user levels are useful at the very bottom, to prevent very early users from breaking stuff, but probably not above that. And badges may be a good thing if they come as little surprises in your normal workflow.
There may be a connection 
The company behind Discourse was founded by one of the founders of Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange (who dropped out later to “revolutionize online dialogue” with Discourse). So there is probably a direct connection why Discourse has this badging and user level system.
On Stack Overflow, I don’t care about badges at all. It’s just too much for me to understand what each badge is and what I’d have to do to get it. I’m not interested that much in the game. But I care about reputation numbers there. Having these little green “+10” or “+20” reputation change notes in the top bar when visiting there again is nice. They almost look like money notes 
This is what a busy Discourse site looks like
The site is a blog (a sophisticated one, but still a blog), a BBS and a store. Not complicated. They handle a ton of traffic.
It is noteworthy that in their case their main page - the blog - does not have an obvious link to the BBS. They drive their conversational traffic through their blog posts and the comments therein. You can however go to their Discourse BBSpage as their main page (if you find it and bookmark it) and go backwards to their blog stuff. I’m sure it was an interesting conversation they had deciding to do it that way.
upvoting = likes
primitive upvoting
Today’s Interface -> ER in Discourse
Edgeryders has a complex nomenclature with terms that point to pages that don’t differ very much: post, blog, wiki are pretty much the same thing in practice. A written statement followed by the same comment options. So having three names for nearly the same thing is overly complicated.
Discourse is much simpler. It breaks down into Categories - Topics - Replies
I presume categories here would be the various projects.
Finding the metaphor
I agree with @Matthias :
Like you, I like the idea of project: discussion around, and aimed at, action. In this narrative frame, yes: categories are projects, topics are threads within the project, replies are comments to the thread opener. @Nadia likes the idea of challenge, which is more a set of issues. In her narrative frame, categories are challenges (example: renewable energy in the home, or running co-living spaces), topics are “stories” where people share their own experiences, and replies are again comments. It is important to get this right.
I don’t see where you can change “Categories” as a name
Unless there is some hack I don’t find. They fix it as Categories - Topics - Replies as near as I can tell.
We gotta change that in code.
@johncoate , you are right, there is no way to change the “categories / topics / replies” wording in the admin backend. Since it’s open source software and we will maintain our own Discourse fork anyway, we would change this wording right in the Ruby code of Discourse.
Porting data over
I can see that you have already ported a bunch of material into the Uncategorized category. Was it difficult to accomplish? did they all come from Posts rather than blogs or wikis? Would it be just as easy to port blogs and turn them into topics like you have already done?
About importing into Discourse
@johncoate , our Ruby developer Daniel is working on the import these days. The way it’s done is by writing a Ruby script that takes content right out of (a copy of) the Drupal database, then creates Discourse content out of it. This way, we can run it, fix errors in the script, then delete the previous import results and run it again. Concurrent updates on the edgeryders.eu Drupal live website are not a problem … all content will be taken over with the final run of this script.
The script is not that difficult, but due to Drupal’s convoluted database structure (>300 tables) it takes some days of development. It is just as simple to import posts, wikis etc. since they are all the same entity type “node” in Drupal.
How to create Discourse test accounts.
A bit of instructions for @johncoate who wants to test Discourse with multiple user accounts (and for everyone else who wants to try that).
Instructions:
Background info: I have configured Discourse to allow new user registrations now (“Settings → Login → allow new registrations: checked”). It took 4-5 attempts until this setting sticked, probably due to something missing in the test installation, for example sidekiq. For the same reason, public registration is not possible yet (Error message: “We cannot detect if your account was created, …”). And even if it were, an admin user would have to approve the account. So instead, use the process with invitation links above. Invitation links have to be copied and pasted, since our test installation intentionally cannot send e-mails (to prevent accidents of spamming people …). And finally, you have to use a private browsing window (or alternatively, a different browser) because Discourse does not allow parallel logins from the same browser.
I sent myself an invite
Have not yet received it. But I see that it requires installing sidekiq:
Some problems have been found with your installation of Discourse:
Copy & paste the invite link instead
Yea I know about the “sidekiq is not running” problem … still early days of this installation.
Please use the instructions (just above your last post) instead. It’s about copying & pasting the invite link to use it. Since it can’t arrive by e-mail so far. You may have to delete the pending invite before you can invite yourself again to get hold of that invite link.
ok I will try it
thanks. I can see that there are a lot of options for setting up Discourse and a number of customizations. But what you can do and what I think you ought to be able to do are not always the same. I’m looking around, trying things, and notating problems, questions and possible workarounds as I go. One thing will be knowing well how much a host of a Category (or Challenge when we change it, if we change it) can do for him or herself to manage and keep tidy their area and how much has to be done at the higher end admin level.