URL for community rules / welcome

[afuna]

Title:
URL for community rules / welcome

Area:
communities

Summary:
We recently added a feature where community moderators could designate a specific entry to show to community members when they join the community. I'd love to have a canonical URL, consistent between communities, to review this link.

Description:
I think that the most common use case for welcome entries like these are to put up posting rules, so http://examplecommunity.dreamwidth.org/posting-rules or http://examplecommunity.dreamwidth.org/rules would be the most logical place for me. However, it may need to be more generic, so maybe http://examplecommunity.dreamwidth.org/welcome could also be suitable.

If the posting rules are on the profile, we should either link there, or just pull in the bio text.

I think that this URL should be consistent for all communities. If there's nothing designated, then just have a friendly note to look at the bio or any administrator posts.

I'd like the post-join link to point to this suggested URL, as well, because it would be easier to go back to, for new members.

We could also link to here from the profile, but only if there's a value for the posting rules entry url.

We could maybe add a link to this from the update page, if you're updating the community using http://www.dreamwidth.org/update?usejournal=examplecommunityname

Poll #1840 URL for community rules / welcome

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
28 (70.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
3 (7.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (7.5%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (15.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[cesy]

That's a very cool idea.

[triadruid]

I really don't like trying to shoehorn every community's 'sticky' post into proceeding from a single common redirect. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works, but if they're already to be shown the entry, why do we need a redirect/canonical URL for it?

[cesy]

Because at the moment, you only get shown this particular entry when you first join a community, and can't then find it later very easily. In most communities, it may also be the sticky entry, but not necessarily. Some communities may have a "posting rules" entry, which is used for this, and a separate sticky entry, which links to a posting rules entry, a FAQ and a contact the maintainers entry, for example. If they don't manually link to the posting rules entry from somewhere else, the posting rules entry is only shown when you join the community, and can't then be found again by anyone other than the maintainer, unless you leave and re-join just to get shown it again.

[afuna]

the posting rules entry is only shown when you join the community, and can't then be found again by anyone other than the maintainer

This too! I feel anxious that I may not be able to find the posting rules entry again (logic tells me it will be linked to from multiple places in a well-managed community, but there's no way for me to confirm, without checking the places it would most likely be linked from).

[triadruid]

Gotcha, now I understand this feature better. See below for how I think it could work well.

[afuna]

I think (if I understand your comment correctly), mine is the other way around. I want to always be able to go to an easy to remember URL whenever I want to look up the community's policies.

This would (likely) be the same as whichever link a community admin wants a newly-joined user to see.

But my main reason for wanting this canonical URL is for any point afterwards, when I'm in the middle of writing an entry, and I want to look up something in the community's policy post quickly (posting template, tag to use, whether something is allowed or not, etc). Usually, I'd need to go to the community's profile and scan past the other profile information for any links to guidelines. Or I'd go to the community's tag page, and look for any admin/policy/whatever tag, and click through then scan for the entry I want.

I'd like to take out all the middle steps, and simply be able to quickly pull up the main policy entry with (hopefully) the information I need.

[triadruid]

Ah okay. I think I have a modification that would make it work better for me, then. Actually, two different ideas.

First would be an automatic link from the profile (and possibly the community style itself, if the style supported it) to that ...errr, 'first post' (I don't know if this has a canonical name). Maybe it's a tickybox, maybe it just happens if you enable the 'first post' feature, and links directly to that post, with either the title of the post as the link text or some custom text as link text. No real need for a redirect, as it would

Second option, which is a bit more resource/coding intensive but perhaps cooler, would be to give the community maintainer the option to encode a one-word redirect for this type of post. Maybe it's 'rules' or 'community-rules', maybe it's 'listenup' or 'newbies'. I don't want to shoehorn everybody into the same box, but I agree with you that it should be easily findable. Then this redirect is either automagically included in the profile (as described above), or at least becomes a human-readable link that the maintainer can easily link to without having to remember a string of numbers.

[triadruid]

Ack: that second paragraph should end "as DW would do all the coding for you.").

[afuna]

I think consistency is key here, which includes reinforcing
the idea that /guidelines or /rules, or whichever works no matter what community you are looking at.

That being said, I am not wedded to the idea of having the post-join link point to /rules -- though I think that would vastly help rediscoverability of the URL. However I do not like the idea of the URL being customizable because that introduces yet another factor of uncertainty, which is what I wish to eliminate ( or at least lessen )

[triadruid]

If this were the 'sticky' post, I'd say just have a redirect at community.dreamwidth.com/sticky - but since it's not, I'm at a loss as to a universal identifier. I don't think anything suggested really works, yet.

[afuna]

Hmm, any thoughts about /intro or /info? (I'm leaning towards /guidelines right now, but I'm not very attached to any of the URLs, as long as there's just one for each comm)

[triadruid]

Maybe /intro - /info makes me think of the profile page.

[denise]

/about maybe?

[afuna]

Hmm, I like that, but I worry it will be confusing with the bio section of the /profile.

[aveleh]

I like the idea of it being "welcome" and also being used for personal accounts. Lots of people like short profiles but a detailed thing for friends, and might as well put it at the same URL.

[ninetydegrees]

+1

[sky]

I have a hard time seeing how this is different from just posting a rules/link to the rules in the /profile page, which in my experience 99% of communities already do.

[afuna]

It isn't all that different, actually. But, some communities put the text directly in the profile, some link to a more detailed version from the profile, some have a sticky, some have tagged mod posts...

All of them are discoverable once you've poked around a bit, but I'd like to take the guesswork out of the equation and be able to look up the rules in one step, no matter which community I'm looking at.

[callaoressene]

What if--on community profiles only--you have not only a "bio" space, but a "rules" space as well? Then, when you're viewing the main page of whatever comm it is, there's an automatic link generated (like already happens with the "recent entries", "tags", "memories" etc.) to that specific spot on the profile page for the comm that contains the rules?

That way, it actually kind of forces a mod who is intending that the comm be used by several participants to actually think about the rules they want people to play by up front, and users become accustomed to just looking for, and knowing where to find that link when they need it.

I am not a coder, nor do I play one on TV, so I don't know how feasible the logistics of this idea actually is...