At present, our discussion page lacks any statistical data about the thread, a feature that is pretty common in most of social networks or forums. These platforms typically display a total count of replies, boosts, likes, and participants.

Take Discourse as an example, a platform with a great UX for productive conversations. Discourse displays the list of links shared in a post and provides a statistical box that details thread engagement. This includes also an approximation of the time required to read through the entire thread, if significant.

What are some meaningful statistics we must/should incorporate for the Bonfire 1.0 release? We are seeking to find statistics that can effectively foster engagement in discussions without solely promoting addictive behaviors. Any thoughts or suggestions ? #bonifre_feedback

@lne @ivan This does make me think though that maybe showing some metrics (like boosts and likes) as an aggregate for an entire thread (instead of for an individual post or comment) may be interesting indicator while being less connected to ego and addiction?

@mayel Happy to lend a hand.

@Oceane That bug is now fixed (but please note that federation is currently disabled)

@ivan Maybe show the number of flagged/reported posts?

Usually when I see many posts being flagged it's a sign of the thread going wildly off-topic or even attracting bad actors. I then stay away from that discussion. However, e.g. in Discourse I won't know until I have read through the posts. Having that metric on the top post would help me spend my time and engagement elsewhere.

Thinking of risks, maybe showing flag stats would attract more of the same? I would hope not in an otherwise functional community, but some people seem to gather around car crashes or houses on fire.

Hmm gotcha, I'm not sure if I did or not. They were green toggles. I see the new interface now for the custom roles and I no longer see the built-in roles.

@smitten Did you try actually toggling them? The UI might not be clear but they're read-only. We've only just deployed custom roles and the editable toggles there have a different design.

@mayel Did that just recently change? When I posted this I was able to adjust those permissions, I had a screenshot of it.

@mayel @ivan Activities, my feed, local, etc. look faster now.
Although trending topics are still slow.

Device: macbook m1 / Chrome 114.0.5735.90

@ivan @hec we've recently sped up the loading of feeds quite a bit... What pages seem slow and on what device/browser please?

@smitten just a correction: you cannot toggle the permissions on the default roles (interact, participate, etc) to customise them, you can only do so when you create custom roles.

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?????

@edumerco @mayel i like the idea, wonder how to represent the point in discussion in nested threads?

@ivan @mayel
This possiblity of a "visible only inside the instance" group may be quite useful for community work and coordination.
It will also put Bonfire in league with any channel based chat (CBC) but with a richer and more powerful feature set. 😉
Do you believe it may be a desirable use case? I can think of a few classic examples in our own case (an intentional semi rural community) and many others... 😁

@mayel @ivan
Quantity of comments is good and necessary and has already been discussed.

WDYT about including the "position" in the discussion?
It helps to understand the present comment/post in context.
This indicator has a simple structure: P/T where:

• P is position and
• T is total number of comments.

I know it's not that easy to count (do we count bifurcations and/or other open lines of discussion?) buy it gives some idea.

It is not the same to see "23 comments" that "comment 21 of 23" or "comment 4 of 23".

Ideas, critiques, hurrahs, anguished screams or other reactions to this? 😉