Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5275700-20160823153141

Hello Elder Scrolls Wiki,

We are extremely grateful to this community for being an early adopter of the Discussions feature. Your use of Discussions, and your feedback, has helped us learn quite a bit about the feature. Atvelonis, Flightmare and Shockstorm have also been able to give us some outstanding perspectives over the last few months and they have represented your community well. I know there’s also been some trepadition about what’s ahead. The next month or two should be an interesting time, since today the “discussion categories” function becomes available. This will provide some structure to Discussions, which I know is much needed here and on some of the other communities with very active Discussions. This should also help to make it clear how the Discussions can function as a replacement feature for the Forum. There is still more to do before the forum content will be migrated, of course.

A few notes are below about some updates to the Discussions feature. Some have happened recently, some today, and others are going to happen soon. Always remember to update to the latest version of the Community App when it becomes available!

User badges

Users of the web interface have probably noticed that admins and discussions moderators now have small badges on their avatars, to make their role clear. This addition will come to the community apps in September (it did not quite make it into the app releases for August).

Post count on profile page

A Discussions post count can now be seen on a user’s wiki profile page, under the edit count. The post count is linked to the user’s Discussions contributions page. This should help make Discussion activity more visible to all community members.

Email Notifications

Users will start to get email notifications when their own posts receive replies and upvotes. This matches the push notifications that app users now receive. There will be a new email preference that allows you to opt out of these emails, if you wish. Further in the future (not this month) we will be adding more options for following any post and receiving notifications about it.

Graphics on the web layout

Admins will gain the ability to change the graphics on the web layout, both the square “community avatar” image and the wide “discussions header” image. Please see the Help page for details about image size.

Discussion categories

This is the most exciting update! Admins will be able to create categories for Discussions. Once this is done, every user will need to choose a category before completing a post. The latest versions of the Community App have full support for posting to categories and filtering by category when reading. Remember to update your app! And you can get news on feature updates from the Technical Updates blog on Community Central. 