Problems with the forum "about" page…

(Incidentally posting as I’m sitting with @Andrew looking at the forum at SeaGL, and the one bad part of the forum he noticed was the /about page)

About - Snowdrift.coop Community Discussions is both the page we’d most expect to be editable at a forum and also the least editable page in all of Discourse, as far as I can tell!

Site description

The only place to change in the admin settings is the “site description” at https://community.snowdrift.coop/admin/site_settings/category/required?filter=

And, awfully, that description is not only used on About but is also used as the “meta description” in HTML! So, if we tried to make a longer description or a link to the main website or other stuff, that would get embedded into the meta HTML…

Nevertheless, it currently is: “Clearing the path to a free and open future!” but we should almost certainly change it to something more meaningful. Since it’s the meta description, we should decide what that should be.

For adding any more description to the About page, a search on the Discourse meta forum shows people resorting to bizarre CSS pseudo-element hacks to get some control to put more text there!

Other problems

Highlighting who is admin vs who is staff isn’t important for most users. But oh well.

About doesn’t make it clear how to go back.

Andrew was suggesting we consider hiding the About from most nav places and just have nav links to the welcome stuff since About is so awkward.

What should we do?

This sounds like a good solution to me. team - Snowdrift.coop Community Discussions serves a similar function and we can put more text in the description at the top without it being used as meta description in the html.

1 Appreciation

That’s a good suggestion! I noticed that the built-in groups like staff and moderators do not offer description text. I think we could link to the Team page but add a link in the description there to the moderators page (in order to distinguish that for times someone is looking for who the mods are for the forum).

Specific decisions about hiding the About links and where to replace them with what is a different question to work out.

I added an issue https://git.snowdrift.coop/sd/ops/issues/42

Any other thoughts about how to manage this situation?