RFC: Renaming the top bar links

Currently, the Discourse top bar has the following three links:

I propose we rename the links to be more descriptive, i.e.:

  • “Welcome thread”
  • “Getting Started”
  • “GitHub”

This will make it easier for users to understand what these links actually mean.

Status: Draft / out for review

Nominated reviewers: @burrrata, @wchargin

(Others are welcome to comment, review, or approve too).

1 Like

Yes, please. The top bar has been puzzling to me for a while; “Deploy” in particular I find pretty confusing.

“GitHub” for the GitHub link makes sense. The purpose of this link is to give users an easy way to discover the technical content of the project, which is important, and generally one of the first links that I look for in a project.

Why do we need two links for “Welcome” and “Getting started”? Both of these seem to be aimed at addressing newcomers who are trying to learn what SourceCred is all about, which is clearly also important. There should be exactly one clear path forward for users trying to answer this question.

Of the first two proposed link targets, the welcome thread seems more valuable than the Getting Started category. The welcome thread is a single piece of content that we can curate and get up to date. The Getting Started category is a floating list of posts, currently starting with a history lesson and then a discussion of “boosting”. It doesn’t actually say, “this is what SourceCred is, and this is why we exist”.

The welcome thread gets closer to addressing this. The second sentence of the body text there begins with “SourceCred is a reputation protocol for open collaboration”. Now we’re talking.

So, my counter-proposal:

  • “About” links to the welcome thread
  • “GitHub” links to the main GitHub repository

Feel free to propose a name other than “About”. I think that it’s valuable for it to be an unambiguous single word.

For context, most other Discourse communities with which I’m familiar have no top-bar links:

…so let’s try to keep ours short and sweet. :slight_smile:

@burrrata: The welcome thread currently has a publicly visible notice reading, “(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)”. I don’t know exactly what this means. Is the welcome thread at risk of automatic deletion?

edit: I still don’t know what this meant, but the notice no longer appears.

Happy to change the names of the links to whatever people want. In fact, @decentralion and @wchargin both have admin privileges so I encourage you to make those changes if you want. Then we can A/B test to see what we like better.

The Getting Started category is part of the SourceCred User Guides Initiative which is A) in progress, and B) has undergone several pivots throughout it’s brief history. As @decentralion keeps saying, we’re a train laying rails as we go so lots of things evolve together, and as they do, they adapt together. Agree that it would make sense for the Welcome thread to synergize with some of the getting started category content. That, however, is a comment to add to the SourceCred User Guides Initiative comments section as it’s a much more complicated thing than just renaming the top bar links.

If you have comments on the Welcome to the SourceCred community please comment in the welcome thread as that is separate from renaming the top bar links RFC.

The thread was binned globally as a banner topic. Now it’s not. The post withdrawn notice was with regards to the global banner pin, not the thread itself.