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afuna) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_suggestions2009-12-07 01:35 pm
URL for community rules / welcome
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
This suggestion:
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%)
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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.
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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.
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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 )
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