A totally inconsequential blog post. Because I can.
A total key to learning how to work with / deal with the discourse discussion software we are using for the Udg Agora project (hey there was a BLOG POST on this) … has been the discourse meta site.
This is where the developers hang out, and people trade ideas and complaints and how the heck do I do X discussions. There is something worth noting in the dog food eating department that they are using their own software in support of it.
Meta, get it?
Geek humor.
I must say the response to my questions, especially n00bie ones, was incredible quick, and helpful. Most of the time I got a response in 30 minutes. When was the last time some commercial software company gave you a response that quickly?
Anyhow, last week, while trying to work out the kinks of the bulk account creation, I posted there asking if there was some way of seeing a count of the number of pending invitations and the ones that had been redeemed by users. The only way I had done it was by scrolling the whole list and counting the number of finds in the name of a button that is in every line.
Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood gave it a thumbs up within a few hours, an in less than a week, the code changes were pushed to github. And the latest update to discourse (for which Tim helped out with) rolled in my suggestion- now when I look at my invitation displayed, I can see the counts right there in the column heading.
It’s hardly a world changing feature. And this is pretty much old hat for open source software.
But it feels pretty damn good to ask an idea, have it discussed, and see it appear as a feature in a system I am using. Within a week. When I make a suggestion in an Apple forum, all you hear are the plinks of small stones falling down a bottom less well.
What if school worked like that?
What if?
Top / Featured Image credits- emailed to me my Tim Owens, ask him where the heck it came from. Or just read the freaking graphic. That thing on the bottom? It’s called an Earl. There is a badge generator site, you don’t need Mozilla
Thankya for getting the bulk invite feature fixed. We’re implementing it for the OERu and I used the bulk invite tool a few weeks ago. It was a little wonky then, but the rest of the software is just what we need. Encouraging to see such a quick response.
I can’t say I fixed the feature. It *seemed* to work okay, all the indicators were that it worked, but we had a lot of people reporting the never got the emails. No real pattern.
I resorted to opening the registration up, and adding a field for a secret phrase so I’d know they got the invite. Manual processing invites.
I will be excited to watch this develop as I have installed Discourse but never really used it yet for a class. I have liked playing with Discourse in a few spaces around the Web.
I gotta tell you it’s a whole different kettle of fish running it than using it!