Decent Discourse Tutorial - TL0 [DRAFT]

Trust level 0 (New User) is the starting trust level for all new members. Your options for what you can do are fairly limited. You are primarily limited to seeing posts and getting a feel for moving around discourse. Youll gain more permissions automatically as you spend time reading posts and interacting with other members.

What is a trust level though? To quote discourse themselves - Trust Levels

The user trust system is a fundamental cornerstone of Discourse. Trust levels are a way of…

  • Sandboxing new users in your community so that they cannot accidentally hurt themselves, or other users while they are learning what to do.
  • Granting experienced users more rights over time, so that they can help everyone maintain and moderate the community they generously contribute so much of their time to.

Homepage

The homepage makes a great place to start off with because well its the first thing you see upon entering the forum.

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Going from left to right you can see different ways of filtering topics. You can filter topics based upon either the category, tag, or even both if that tickles your fancy. To filter for both categories and tags then you just select what category you want and then the tag to sub filter it by.

The latest section is the default view and will show the most recently updated topics. New is where all of the topics you have yet to enter will be filtered. Unread filters any topics with tracking status that have been updated. Top filters the most popular topics within a time period. This time period ranges from daily to all time.

Screenshot_20180803_133327

The last one is categories which just gives you a more visual representation of the latest section.


Navigation

At the top right of the screen is where you have the navigation buttons. This includes search, hamburger and the user section. The search function should be self explanatory. The hambuger menu is where you can access all of the forum related stuff. This includes stuff like the FAQ, tags, groups, etc.

The final one is the user icon which contains everything that is related to you. You can check notifications, goto your settings, etc. The top right corner of your icon will indicate how many notifications you have. These can be likes, replies, quotes, etc.

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At the top left you have your profile link. This will take you to your profiles main page. This is where you can access all of your “personal” stuff. PMs, likes, notification, etc

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Ok. TL0 should mostly be done now. Any feedback on things i might have missed, needs to be included, etc?

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Looks pretty good to me so far. maybe you could include a brief overview of the search function or how to create topics or are those more suited for later trust levels?

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Search function is fairly self explanatory but ill probably add stuff for how to search effectively. Create topics is going to be TL1 as that will contain stuff about replying to peoples post and more of the meat of discourse (Probably TL2 as their isnt much there in terms of new permissions beyond just relaxing the chains)

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Great foundation. You’ve covered alot of ground.

Suggestions for advanced level discourse part of tutorial [this would be after covering trust level:

  • How to create a linked topic to an old thread
  • How to make a Table of contents with Headings

Actually considering how long this tutorial will be maybe you should plan on having a table of contents for it. Up to you really. I’m addicted to TOCs.

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Expect that to be TL2

Mind showing me how? Never done it before XD
EDIT: That will also be TL2

Planned on it but is something to do last as I’m still trying to decide how I want everything split up. Is going to be a few extra tutorials beyond the trust levels that will cover BBcode and that type of stuff

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Sure, Ok to show you I’m go to have to use images cause discourse can’t show how to do it, I’ll also make this post a wiki so you can access the code.

The image:

headings

The example:

Table of Contents


Title 1

subsection

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im a admin on this site. I could be you if i wanted too XD

Thanks though.

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