# Stan Discourse improvements

**URL:** <https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stan-discourse-improvements/18436>\
**Category:** General\
**Tags:** discourse\
**Created:** [October 6, 2020, 4:00am UTC](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stan-discourse-improvements/18436 "2020-10-06T04:00:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![martinmodrak](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/discourse.mc-stan.org/martinmodrak/32/133_2.png) [@martinmodrak](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/u/martinmodrak)\
**Post date:** [October 19, 2020, 7:04pm UTC](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stan-discourse-improvements/18436/5 "2020-10-19T19:04:57Z")

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> [@syclik](#):
>
> What I don’t know relates to how this goes forward:
> 
> - if there’s overwhelming support and no objections, it’s simple and it can be implemented.
> - what happens if there’s active support and objections? Should it still be implemented?
> - what happens if there’s no support or objections? Should it still be implemented?
> 
> In an extreme case, it could be seen that it’s an announcement and it’ll be changed no matter what the community says. In the other extreme, if there’s not unanimous support, then nothing can be done. I think most things will be in-between and just having a reasonable guidance would help. Something that could be made concrete is we can have a thread and open for discussion for 3 weeks; at the end, the Community Manager can make the call.
> 
> In this particular case, I think it makes sense to change it even on objection. (compressing subject lines is useful, there’s no ambiguity in the updated subject line, the new one is equally programmatic.)
> 
> But I’m thinking about other things that we could do to make the forums better. How would we go about rearranging categories and tags?

I do think a lot of this needs to handled on a case-by-case basis. We don’t (as far as I know) have a steady stream of suggestions or a large number of people that actively work on this which would likely neccessitate a more formal handling. It is also important to consider the impact - so e.g. when I was adding the “Left Behind” menu item, I didn’t have a big discussion as I assumed it is easy to revert and unlikely to severely annoy anybody, so I’d rather have “post-publication” feedback than discussion before. For something as big as reorganizing forums I think a strong mandate is needed.

I think most of the rules mentioned in [Revised SGB proposal for voting on technical issues](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/revised-sgb-proposal-for-voting-on-technical-issues/17063) should apply, although those were not formally approved for changes to Discourse. If there is support and objections, we should strive to find a consensus - my experience is that more often than most people expect you can find solutions that make everybody happy, but it needs more time and creativity. If nobody voiced an opinion, my first thoughts are to ensure that the proposal actually reached the relevant people. Nobody engaging is generally a bad sign and I would generally not implement anything with medium/big impact if I didn’t get any opinions.

Finally, we could have some form of voting if consensus is not achievable.

While having something like “3 week period for discussion” as a guideline might help a bit, I think the important part is not the letter, but the spirit. I think the main factor is not time (though time is important) but trying to maximize engagement of affected users with the topic. If I post an important announcement at the same time there are elections for the SGB, an important technical vote and an update from the CoC committee, it doesn’t matter how long it is up, it is much less likely to be noticed. So I try not to do that. I try to actively tag people I find most likely to be affected by a proposal or disagree with it. If a topic doesn’t get reactions I try to bump it up (unless other important stuff is happening), etc.

On rearranging categories and tags: this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot and we had _some_ public discussion of this: [How to best support field-specific Stan communities on Discourse](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/how-to-best-support-field-specific-stan-communities-on-discourse/13321) and [Let's use tags for field-specific content and much more!](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/lets-use-tags-for-field-specific-content-and-much-more/14157)

Part of the reason I am not moving forward on reorganizing categories is that I fear I have not yet gotten enough feedback from the community (the other is that I am a bit overwhelmed with other stuff and this seems really high-effort, moderate risk task with only small to moderate payoff)

Does that make sense?

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