The distinction between “categories” and “groups”, in Discourse, is a bit confusing.
The following post by “pfaffman” (Jay Pfaffman") - Support Expert of “Discourse” - that he posted in September 2017, in the “Discourse Meta” forum, explains the difference:
The group being a collection of members, and not a collection of topics - does NOT have a forum, with one small exception: you can send a message to all the members of a group (and that message will be visible only to the members of the group). Group messages are treated as discussion topics (but only other members of the group can reply to them).
Ricardo, thank you very much for that clarification!
I have to think, because I do want Topics to be open for all Site Members, but I want an easy way to
exclusively reach those who have expressed a desire to be recognized as being MATE adherants,
have something like the main forum, but with “filter” to show MATE-centric topics, and
exclusively search those Topics that are MATE-centric.
I don’t know that a #MATEdesktop tag is the way to go, because OPs may not include that, so those might be missed.
Is there a way that a cron job could scan recent posts (window to be specified) to locate instances of keywords or phrases that would be MATE-relevant, and generate a message to myself, or other Moderators, to edit those posts to add the necessary “tag”, which would then facilitate points 2 and 3 above?
As an aside, kind of, is it possible to have a mouse-over function, which when hovering over “Scope …”, it would offer a pop-up window with a checklist of tags to reduce the list portrayed in the Forum’s default list. There would also be a “reset” option.
Personally, I see groups in Discourse designed like they’re for a team working on a project - a private area/space. As they are set up right now, these seem unlikely to work at scale, since any group message notifies everyone (which is why I disabled email notifications for the whole site). Groups work well for the flair.
I’d advocate for moving those group messages into the main categories and disabling messaging within a group (if possible, can’t remember). Except any groups that are focused on something like moderation, e.g. @mate-mods, where private messaging makes sense for those individuals.
I’d also consider disabling @mentions notifications to a group, because my notifications get cluttered with random topics I’m not involved in, like someone’s casual mention of @MATE or @Arch (btw), but might be worth keeping enabled for private teams like “Best let one of the @mate-mods know.” so they get a .
Just a suggestion from someone who admin’d the Ubuntu MATE Community and saw the potential of groups, but only ever really used them to recognise Ubuntu members, Canonical employees and developers (via email addresses), but not for the group messaging feature.
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