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Minor questions, bug reports, and tweak suggestions

James_B

When I first started using the LCL2 Discourse, I found a lot of seemingly trivial suggestions or questions that I wanted to help give feedback on or seek answers to without elbowing out more full and important discussions. I'm not sure if this is a good solution, but I decided to take notes anytime I found something. I am compelled to just put all the support questions as one post in Ask and all the suggestions/error reports in About these Forums. I don't want to run up a high daily post count on distracted participation on days that I have a numerous amount of trivial questions or suggestions (that I am actually interested in but seem trivial for wider purposes) and I don't want to flood a category's list of threads, but I also feel compelled to ask these questions and submit my observations.

What would be most useful for me to do? Cut down on what I submit based on examples like these, post in bulk as one post to the related category, post each individually but slowly over time, or other?

Some things I noticed about the interface, information and resources, or user functions (at least for new basic users):

I was assigned a name and later realized that was my posting name so I changed it. I then found out that editing the name does not update my @username in previous posts where others mention my @username before the change retroactively, and my old @username is still shown in prior posts when used with a broken link.

I quickly found there is a daily post count limit at least for new basic users. This is a useful function of Discourse, however I found that I could not save a draft to my account of what I had typed and tried to submit. Had I found a draft option (may have missed it), I would have gotten the message readily and reconsidered my posting habits while waiting for the next day. I later found that it looks like minimized edit windows save a draft that stays with you at the bottom of ever LCL Discourse page, but I could not find an option to manually save a draft for later.

Invites are listed on the site, but I have not found a function for them yet that I can access. It appears this is due to complexities of Discourse I do not understand, but it may not be something that is intended to be used here. Whether it has a use with LCL or not, on first view by basic user there is no explanation of what an invite is. Maybe bubble text here could help clarify things.

I have not been able to find an ability to delete my own post. I don't know if this is an ability that comes later or if it is not available. I could see pros and cons to allowing this. Some similar systems have seemed to benefit from an ability to only delete if a post has not been replied to yet. If there is a delete function I have access to for my own posts, I have not been able to find it. EDIT: It looks like you can delete your own posts but not a thread that has been replied to.

I recently changed my notification settings. I attempted to watch all categories, but I later noticed that some threads were still not labeled watched and I had to select them manually. I am not sure if this is due to the threads being threads I had started or because I already had the threads labeled something other than watched and the system was not able to retroactively change the notification setting for threads already labeled.

The license at the bottom of the ToS page reads CC-BY-SA with a link to WordPress's ToS but no link to the CC-BY-SA license and no indication of CC version.

Here are some questions I have:

At the http://discuss-learn.media.mit.edu/tos page, ML's ToS states that user contributions are CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0. Is this accurate, or should it be CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 now? 

Will we be able to remove restrictions on our own content, such as offer content through LCL Discourse as CC-BY 4.0?
pjtaylor

When saving some minor edits on a post I got the message that my post was too similar to an existing post. I wasn't allowed to save the changes. Any advice about what was going on?

James_B

@pjtaylor

From a reply I got at meta.discourse, it looks like minor edits should usually just save without even adding to the edit history if under 5 minutes from last edit.

It also looks like there are some minor glitches still possible, however. I would try editing your post at a later time and see if it works then, it may just be temporarily unavailable. I am still trying to track down the info myself, that was also an issue I noticed at one point. I don't know if it is part of an intentional feature or a glitch, to be honest. I am leaning towards glitch, and would advise just to try the edit later and see if it lets you do it at a later time.

pjtaylor

It worked this time. Thnx.