SourceCred in 5 minutes covers how to play SourceCred from a generic perspective, and this guide covers how to play specifically on this Discourse forum.
General Discourse Stuff
Discourse is an amazing forum software that lets you do all sorts of things. While it’s powerful, it can also be confusing. We’ll do our best to cover some the features that SourceCred uses the most, but if you’re new to Discourse we recommend the Discourse New User Guide.
To Do
trust levels
quotes
markdown
SourceCred Best Practices
Linking
Whenever possible give credit where credit is due. If you’re not sure how/why to do that, check out Chris Olah’s Collaboration & Credit Principles post.
Whenever possible reference/link the Artifact.
Using the search feature while composing posts is the best way to find content to link to without leaving the edit window for a post.
If you happen to copy the link from a topic on the Discourse homepage or category pages you’ll copy the link to the first unread post. Double check that your link goes to the top level comment in a thread unless you meant to link to a specific comment.
(meta: feel free to “clean up” this post at some point. maybe as a practice for these docs threads, we can invite people to post comments and improvements, and every once in a while we can “sweep up” the comments and move them into a side thread, so they aren’t lost to history or cred, but so new users don’t get confused by the noise.)
One thing we can mention in the Discourse/Cred user guide is about linking to topics vs linking to posts.
Every post has an individual link button, which creates a hardlink to that post in particular. If you click on the link to a topic in the main discourse navigator, you might expect to get a link directly to the topic (or, equivalently, the first post). However, in reality, Discourse links you to the first unread post. As such, often times when one is trying to make a link to the topic, they make a link to one of the latest posts instead, e.g. https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/please-help-organize-this-discourse/378/16 (post 16 in topic 378) versus https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/please-help-organize-this-discourse/378/ (direct to topic 378).
Since the links matter for cred, people should be aware of this so they can make proper topic links rather than accidentally choosing a post.
Finding topics via the search interface doesn’t suffer this problem (https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/please-help-organize-this-discourse/378).
Also, using search while composing posts and topics works really well and is really helpful.
