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
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
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.
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?
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?
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).
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).
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?
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.
Still dumping ideas, documenting what you should consider if ever another of these comes up for someone who is not as closely involved with Edgeryders.
Some people who are coming from Edgeryders, seem to think that the BioFab Forum is part of Edgeryders. They seem to see notifications, threads etc. and the Biofabforum is also listed as a subcategory of “Workspaces”. Therefore they also interact with it as such. No real consequences of this so far but some minor indications. But worth taking into account.
Another question: people can now make topics in the general “biofabrication” topic. There’s a rogue thread now: https://edgeryders.eu/t/mycelium-longboard-attempt/8159 which is hard to find, since it gets lost in the other threads. The subcategories don’t show it anywhere. I think it would be more clear if all threads are by default in the subcategories, so no possibility to make threads independent of the categories.
Hmm yes. The thread you mention still shows up in the https://biofabforum.org/c/biofab page, under the list of the sub-categories. The problem with disallowing posts in the “Biofabrication” parent category directly is that then you’d lose the + New Topic button on the frontpage as well.
We have the exact same issue on the edgeryders.eu platform in the OpenVillage category, for example. Our solution has been so far that a moderator / admin subscribes to such parent categories, to be notified when a new topic is created there. (In your case simply here – click the top-right “circle icon” symbol while logged in.) Then, you’d silently edit the topic and move it to the right category. Works well for us, and nobody has to far complained or noticed anything “strange” happening in the background. Makes sense?
Yes, Edgeryders can see this content via the global “Latest” tab and “New” tab already.
What are “minor indications” – did anything happen that ideally would not happen? In my understanding it’s a plus to have a larger community be exposed to and interact with your content … that was a main point in the whole “whitlabeling” concept.
Our plan was to emphasize this even more by listing the “Biofabrication” category and its sub-categories on the frontpage. We only hid it for the development time. I’ve put that on hold for now, but suggest you give us the green light to do so and we’ll see how it works out. (Changing anything major thing like this once your online community is more established will be difficult, so I think the right time to try this is indeed now … .)
