How to use the Micro.blog Help Center

All the Micro.blog official Help documents have now been converted to Topics in this forum. You can search for answers or browse the table of contents. You can also add new topics with your questions.

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I have some questions about using the forums vs other feedback channels but I’m unsure if you want any replies in this thread at all? I’d be happy to start a separate thread if that would work better.

Go ahead and ask here. It’s early days for the Help Center forum format, and I think we are starting getting a feel for how to best organize questions and replies.

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Y’all are doing great, Jean. Totally sucked me into something I wasn’t expecting to get sucked into.

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Sorry for the late reply!

There are some disconcerting defaults;

  • anyone can message you;
  • you get a notifications browser prompt;
  • you have to choose to opt-out of mentions;
  • you have to choose to opt out of email notifications.

Do we still use GitHub for feature requests and bug reporting?

Maybe there could be a notice for people to know the different types of support between the forum, email, GitHub, and Micro.blog accounts.

When I sign out of Micro.blog, the forum keeps me signed in. Is that the correct behaviour? I even signed into a different account but the forums kept me in the original; I actually like this but wasn’t sure if that was how it is supposed to work.

Are all of the pages from the previous site going to be moved over? Should we report any that are missing/linked incorrectly from elsewhere? If so, where is the best place to post that report?

It looks like the forums are completely open to the public. It might be good to help people understand this, especially since somebody might think this is the place to post sensitive information when asking for help.

I see no reason for the Discourse forum to be publicly accessible (and search indexed?).
I can see keeping the home page view public justifiable for giving people a preview to fact there is an active community.
I’d feel more comfortable giving examples etc. confidently if I knew audience of post discussions was limited to M.b subscribers.

I’ve since posted a few bug reports on GitHub and am now considering how best to handle my list of feature requests (there are a number of them at this time).

Are feature requests pertaining to the forum itself still best posted here?

Is it OK to post a lot of feature requests on GitHub?

Is the GitHub repo for Help still relevant for anything? Or does this site replace it, at least as far as our involvement?

good questions. I imagine much of this is in Discourse specific settings, so will be different place to action than usual codebase. But I believe Manton still manages Discourse settings.

I’m now curious as to who the forums are supposed to help. They’ve become quite disorganised and I’d be surprised if the average member of Micro.blog would find them to be useful as the go-to resource for support.

Then I think about newcomers, or even potential members of the community and it’s difficult to imagine that the average person would do anything other than take a quick look and be immediately put-off by it.

Is this now a place mostly meant for power users, or those who are lucky enough to have been around since it was created? This would be helpful to know so that if we want to randomly help other people on the timeline, or introduce people from outside of Micro.blog we know to where we should be linking.

Seems like the categories oughta take care of the power-user aspect. Everything I (sporadically) post goes under the “developers” category, where I figure would be tinkerers might benefit from what I learned digging about in Hugo 0.54 after a decade or so away from web development.

Side note: I personally miss the email notifications as I had them going to an inbox I actually check (#ADHD) and very, very rarely actually drop into the help center. I don’t so much miss the “what you’ve missed” email so much as the forwared replies or mentions or whatever.

Side side note: I dropped the README files into new topics in the developers category’cause I’m not really sure how else folks are gonna come across available plugins that aren’t listed in the plugins page.

Side side side note: Today the wild hair up my arse has me introducing list/grid view buttons to the bookshelves plugin.

Update: Thinking further on this, what might be missing is a smoothly flowing walkthrough for the novice that immediately catches their I when they pop by all the wait-what-tf

Update on the update: and to be fair, I did not actually look for one before writing that.