That’s probably doable. Though I think getting posters to actually apply the tags with any degree of consistency will be a challenge.
The emphasis above is mine, but it’s a point I want to touch on …
To my knowledge, none of our regular reviewers are receiving product for their reviews. Loan units, as part of the community preview program, sure - but those are available to anyone willing to put forth the time on the site and write up their impressions on the gear that have/try, and sometimes loan units from manufacturers, but that’s it.
No one is keeping those review units unless they buy them for themselves.
Yup I should’ve been more clear on the word “Receive”. I did mean receive for review even if it’s not to keep it for themselves.
This is something I do truly appreciate about this site. It has one of the best loaner programs I have ever seen.
Even with that said, there’s still a disconnect between reading a recommendation for a product and having it be way outside your price range. Imagine you’re just exploring home brewing coffee and looking for good coffee makers. You find this awesome site with a ton of discussion on all the different parts you can buy. But as you start researching, you find that most of the reviews and discussions are for machines costing $2000+, and the price isn’t talked about up front.
Sure they’re nice machines, but you’re never looking to spend so much making coffee.
It turns out that you cannot use any special characters in TAGs on the Discourse platform, so any tag-based cost denomination would be non-obvious.
You wind up either with explicit and long tags “100-500 dollars”, or what will appear to the uninitiated as effectively random numbers such as “100-500” (and I’m not even going to attempt to do education on that matter … can’t even get the vast majority of users, across the vast majority of sites, to do a simple search before posting/creating threads).
Here’s some feedback for the headphones.com site in general and this really pertains to Reviewers more than others.
I think the Reviews blog/site on the main headphones.com page should just remove the comments section and force people to join and reply to the forums where the linked associated product forum page is. That’s easier to reply to and people’s questions may already have been answered. It also doesn’t require a moderator to approve (once they’ve been vetted), and gives the OP/Reviewer a notification. Otherwise, I dont check my reviews very often but I come back and I have a bunch of questions that I never even saw from site guests.
This is something I’ve been talking with @Andrew about since I put my first review up on the main site.
We’d talked about replacing the “Comments” section, with an inline, active, encapsulation of the relevant “Official Thread”, so that comments could appear in line, but be part of the normal forum conversation.
I’ve been ending my reviews of late with a statement that I won’t read or respond to comments and providing a link to the appropriate thread for questions/comments (not sure it helps, but if the reader doesn’t read/follow that, then I certainly don’t feel bad about ignoring their comments).
But even ahead of that, I’d agree that the “Comments” section is just an annoyance for me. 99.99% of the comments made are spam anyway and that’s just overhead to deal with. So I’d vote to remove it entirely.
@antdroid I’ve always wanted to do this (embed a forum thread to handle comments) and I know it’s possible with Discourse. It’s really just the technical implementation hurdle that’s held it up.
As for @Torq’s vote to remove comments entirely I’d support that but wondering if we should try the embedded forum thread as an experiment first. If the signal to noise ratio is bad (which I suspect it might be) we could scrap comments completely.
In the meantime (until we get the embedded threads implemented) I think we should turn off comments in their current form.
I just meant turning off the current “comments” functionality until the ability to embed forum threads in their place was available - so we’re on the same page.
I’ve looked at doing the embedding in the past. There’s no simple, native, way to embed a single Discourse topic, that can be posted to inline, to another page.
You can do it with a combination of CSS, HTML, a little JavaScript and enabling the embedding functionality in Discourse, but it’s a read-only view - so the user has to navigate to the actual forum itself to make a post.
It’s possible via the API of course, but requires creating your own posting interface as part of the implementation. Or at least that was the case the last time I looked.
Sadly things don’t work properly if you just use a simple iFrame embed. And various other tricks result in different levels of “ broken”.
I need to get back into “code” been 10 years since I “really” did anything… but it is so useful… maybe time to start reading up and learning again…get out the rust… plus limited knowledge lol
Are headphones.com and forum.headphones.com accounts shared? If so, then the API solution should get a lot easier. Otherwise, not sure if Discourse has any solution for sharing Auth tokens that can be sent along with a “comment” to treat it as a thread reply.
Shopify (Which Headphones.com is on) doesn’t offer a SSO solution so the accounts are not shared. @andrew has been trying to come up with a solution for it for a while now.
Notwithstanding the completely different platforms that headphones.com and forums.headphones.com run on, the problem goes beyond authorization.
With the available API and embedding options, and once you had auth/SSO taken care of, you still need to implement a post editor … which is non-trivial even if you use an existing rich-text web-base editor component for the core.
Okta can do it, but it’s not cheap. Discourse OpenID connect plugin can allow Okta to act as the IDP for Discourse, and Shopify of course has built in SAML integration with Okta. But yeah, not cheap =/
One thing I would like to see for this forum, would be to pin the Topic: “New Here? This Is The Spot To Introduce Yourself.”
I would like to see this topic pined to the top, so new members will be able to see this thread, vs having to scroll to find it. As I feel it would be beneficial for all new members and might encourage new members to post and introduce themselves.
Maybe a more elegant solution, if discord can support it, is to have a badge for posting in the introduction thread specifically. @andrew is this possible?