How open to the public will this system be?

Will this be partly or fully open to indexing by search engines?

Can we have a split between public areas and one or more members only sections?

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We have the ability to have a public and private section. Having the private section did help us considerably on the mailing list. We should probably copy that functionality to the forums as well.

Lets get some more conversation about it first before we make a decision

I think I’d like to see:

  • Public, indexed chat where people could post about projects and anything we’re happy to publish (vhs-general)
  • Private chat where we can talk about whatever (much of what goes on with vhs-members) without inviting public scrutiny
  • Private chat for Serious Business (what vhs-members was supposed to be, to my understanding)
  • Something private to replace the vhs-pr list

So kind of what we have now, with vhs-members split into essentially chat and low-noise admin sections, both private.

From there, if people could create their own sections for special interest groups like the electrical committee, vhs-arc or whatever, that’d be great! Or maybe not, if it ghettoized things too much. Not sure on that.

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I like that approach.

How should we go about granting existing/new members access?

It would be nice to automate that based on membership database, I can help with that part.

I think the same way we have always done it. When someone asks we add them to the private section. This way they will have to create an account first. We can even make a topic for people to make requests to see the private section. All moderators can add people to the private section.

Automation is nice but it would requires that we automatically creating accounts on here when someone becomes a member. That sounds like a nightmare to me.

I’ll do some digging on what the effort would be.

Another option would be to just automatically grant them “member” role when they signup and remove that role in the event of a change.

Is there currently a private section? Can we set one up, even if it’s just a temporary experimental section?

Oh, I guess it’s just a question of access rules set on categories. So we have some of that going already.

This thing is awesome. When are you thinking of making it public? i.e…as in publicizing on the general list.

Technically it’s public now.

Someone’s working on getting a certificate for HTTPS support, and we probably need to kick the tires on the email side of things for a bit; the goal is to allow users to be able to use the web interface or use email, as they wish.

NOW!
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