A need for a Starter section

Hi there,

As sonic pi first goal was children, it seems this forum needs a “starter zone” to avoid to afraid new users as mentioned by @Eli My first Sonic PI song, well .... tryout after reading the tutorial - #22 by Eli

The same feeling when I posted :

Some rules :

  • use of the internal samples only
  • commented code
  • short piece of code
  • use only the sonic pi syntax
  • copy / paste code into their sonic pi must work
  • the plus would be a audio player to listen to the result (yes this forum needs an internal audio file player without external service)
  • maybe not only English spoken ( to be mentioned into the subject tit le Français etc.). It can be difficult for a 12 years old to read English if it’s not its first natural language.

What do you think about these suggestions ?

4 Likes

Hello,

I am 100% for this idea! I want to see this forum keep flourishing and working for everyone from all walks of life and from all over the world :cherry_blossom:

I believe we would need content moderators for the new areas of the forum? Also, maybe the homepage should welcome children beginners by default (because Sonic Pi’s first goal is children, as you have said), with an “advanced users” section and an “interlingual users” section? Or! Maybe we could tag our posts and filter them too?

Thanks for making this suggestion! I believe that if we work to address the needs of users who are currently at a disadvantage, then the site will improve for everyone else too. Moreover, the success of this forum depends on both the number and the diversity of its users, because everyone can bring unique ideas.

2 Likes

Agreed that anything which improves in_thread’s accessibility and inclusiveness while still being easily manageable is a good thing :slight_smile:

Here’s a few of my thoughts about the above:

Some rules :

I’m not entirely sure how easy it would be to enforce any rules about what is posted or how; people don’t always read the rules :laughing:
In theory I suppose it could be useful to encourage limiting content in beginner-friendly areas or topics to a certain style (and/or the opposite, limiting ‘advanced’ content to certain areas).
It would as Daniel suggests most likely require content moderation!

yes this forum needs an internal audio file player without external service

This would be useful, but IIRC it is not going to be an option - as there would be financial costs involved.

maybe not only English spoken

I think not requiring English/facilitating other languages is quite a reasonable idea - Sonic Pi does have an international community after all! :slight_smile:
The only drawback is that if non-native speakers are interested in joining in on a conversation, they’d need to manually reach for something like Google translate themselves. (As far as I can tell, attaching an official translation plugin to the forum is only available on the Enterprise level subscription plan :sweat_smile:). Personally however, I think that’s perfectly acceptable.

with an “advanced users” section and an “interlingual users” section? Or! Maybe we could tag our posts and filter them too?

Either of those ideas sounds fine to me! Maybe tags could be slightly more flexible, since they would allow folks to have topics that, while all of an ‘advanced’ nature, really belong in different categories? :man_shrugging: If it was agreed that they are useful, I think Sam would need to enable them in the forum settings…

Discussion like this is definitely helpful in any case. What do other people think about all of this? any other ideas? :slight_smile:

1 Like

I fully support this idea. :+1: :+1:

  • Content moderation: probably needed. But we could start this category and later see whether there really is a need to move posts into other categories
  • internal player: from en educational perspective I would rather nudge people to actively use SPi than offering them a way to avoid it. Another point is the marketing section, where you can offer some recorded samples as a teaser. Maybe this would be an Played Examples category populated with links to recordings that already exist?
  • multi language: automatic translation of the content in this forum works moderately well. The real problem is the other direction, posting own contributions. Without some skills you cannot even assess whether the translated content expresses the same as you intended. I have no solution for this. If the forum splits up into many language dependent sub-fora the overall value is diminished.
1 Like

All this sounds very useful!

Maybe a consideration would be to have the “beginners section” not as a category, but also as a tag? This would allow for posting into the existing categories, but still label threads for beginners. Otherwise, people might refrain from posting into the beginners section in order to make their threads appear in their intended “topical” category.

2 Likes

Yes the tag system seems to be a good solution.

When I wrote rules it was more the spirit of this category and absolutely agree people don’t read rules and don’t like them :relaxed:

Tags have now been enabled - interested in people’s ideas for some useful examples as a first trial run :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Do I understand correctly (by trying to add tags to a test topic) that tags can only be created by admins, but not freely by “normal” users?

A good question. I’m certainly not an admin, but I am a moderator, and I have access. I’ll try to find out what the permissions are.

Sam’s fairly preoccupied at the moment, so I’m still not 100% sure of the exact roles and permissions around tags; but I assume for now at the very least that tag management is limited to admins and moderators. To try to make this a little less of an inconvenience for everyone I’ve opened a discussion up here so that we can try to get a reasonable set of tags defined soon. See:

1 Like

See here for the answer about tag permissions:

Thanks! Seems not so easy to become a regular :wink:

The guide sounds fair and it should help with managing the forum. Looking forward to seeing you around (maybe?) :smiley:

In other news, how are we going to moderate posts in other languages? I was of a similar opinion to @Nechoj on this, in that unless we have an effective interlingual solution, it might diminish the overall value of the forum… but I can look forward to learning and practising French, German, Spanish, Italian, and maybe even Japanese (since Sonic Pi seems fairly popular in Japan!) :blush: In the future, it’ll be difficult to become a regular unless you’re inclined to polyglotism!

(Assuming we are going multi-lingual. I’m not sure at this point :sweat_smile:)