In July 2017 we moved the OpenCare conversation from the old Drupal Commons platform to the present Discourse one. This gives us an opportunity to rethink (and simplify) the language we use to refer to what we do.
Here is why. Drupal is, in essence, a blogging platform. It thinks in terms of “posts” (long-form essays) and “comments” (normally shorter reaction to posts). Discourse is a forum platform. It thinks in terms of “topics” (threads) and “posts” (contributions to the thread). The first post of a thread is still a post.
The forum ontology maps nicely onto the OpenCare-SSN data model. We have this notion of a “contribution” to the conversation. This would be any user-authored, self-contained piece of text. So, I propose to rename the relevant fields in the GraphRyder accordingly:
- “posts” and “comments” should become “contributions”.
- “posts” when it means “threads” should become “threads”. I think this is only in the statistics though, not on the actual graph.