The website platform that vuo.org is currently on, Drupal 7, is reaching its end of life soon, which means that we have to update a lot of things. We’re taking this opportunity to move the community portion of vuo.org — where community members can post and comment — to a platform better suited for community participation.
Key changes:
- Better tools for reading and writing posts
- Different procedure for voting on feature requests
- Badges for contributing to Vuo (publicly visible by default)
Read on for details.
New forum features
Discussions, feature requests, bug reports, the composition gallery, and other types of posts will be moving to a new site based on widely used forum software called Discourse. You may be familiar with Discourse from other community sites such as the VDMX forum.
The new site will have many features that the current site does not, including:
- @-mentions that autocomplete and notify people
- receive an email for every post, or only a daily/weekly/monthly summary
- receive desktop notifications
- follow tags (in addition to topics, categories, and people)
- reply by email
- customize colors, text size, language, and other preferences
- automatic dark appearance when the system is in dark mode
- earn badges for achievements
- delete your own posts (some of you have asked for this)
Changes to voting
There is one trade-off, which is that we need to adapt the rules for voting on feature requests to fit within Discourse’s paradigm. Currently you’re granted a certain number of votes in your vuo.org account, and you can allocate one or more votes to a feature request. On the new site, you’ll have an unlimited number of votes and be able to vote for as many feature requests as you want, but only one vote per feature request.
This is a change, although not quite as big a change as it sounds. We’ve already been considering both the number of votes and the number of people who voted when choosing feature requests to implement.
For those of you who have put a large number of votes on certain feature requests, we hope you’ll be amenable to this change. This trade-off makes it possible for everyone to enjoy Discourse’s nice features while allowing the Vuo team more time to spend developing Vuo instead of updating the website.
Badges for contributions
On many Discourse forums, you can earn badges for achievements, such as making posts that other people find helpful. In addition to those, we’ve created some Vuo-specific badges to thank people for contributing in different ways (and help us automatically build the list of contributors). Types of contributions include buying Vuo Pro, donating to Vuo, sharing compositions, reporting bugs, and being a Vuo Founder.
When we launch the new community site, any badges that you’ve already earned will be awarded automatically. If you’d prefer not to have any of your badges visible to the public, you will be able to go to your account preferences on the new site, go to the Interface tab, and uncheck “Hide my public profile and presence features”. If you’d prefer to hide only specific badges such as Vuo Pro, you can contact us to opt out.
Next steps
We expect to launch the new community site next week. When we do, the community pages on vuo.org will automatically redirect you to the new site. All of the user accounts, posts, and comments currently on vuo.org will be imported into the new site. You’ll continue to use the same username and password to log in.
After that, we’ll be going through the process of updating the rest of vuo.org to the latest version of Drupal. Meanwhile, we’re currently working on a Vuo 2.4.3 release with some new nodes and bug fixes and a Vuo 2.5.0 release with some highly-voted features.
