Release notes are always worth reading!!
Here are some discourse plugins I saw referenced in 3.4.0-beta2 release notes that could be good:
- Discourse category experts. Great for product forums.
- Discourse AI. For features see Discourse AI Features | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
- ActivityPub. I don’t think this will work for cross-posting, I don’t think it’s fine-grained enough. But this could be useful for forums, tips and announcements to allow someone on Mastodon to follow categories - probably “first post” option is best. Threads doesn’t allow you to follow yet but it’s in their plan, Bluesky doesn’t really and don’t seem likely to achieve it any time soon.)
- Assign. Not one to allow everyone to assign, but could be good for moderators to assign developers to look at forum topics for example.
Thoughts @cynthiaoehmig @gsilvers @jboyd @a.estrada
2 Likes
Those are some great additions.
- Discourse category experts - this looks like a requirement for us since we will have multiple products in the community. Though to use this does it mean we must assign our products in a category? Meaning, instead of sub-sites they would be listed in navigation under Categories?
- Discourse AI - also very useful, the thing I would look forward to is the AI Search and the ability to determine something is “semantic textual similarity”.
- ActivityPub - I’m not sure I follow this one. It seems like an enhanced notification pushing out to Mastodon/Threads/ etc… Wouldn’t this potentially draw the conversation outside the space of our community? Maybe I’m missing the point of this one.
- Assign - another useful one, especially when used in conjunction with category experts. Each of our supported areas should have multiple ‘experts’ who can help. Getting attention by the right group or person sounds great. Seems like this is a good opportunity to lead to a Solution. My concern with this is we’re not trying to replace our official product support sites (at least I don’t think we are), so I’m not sure how to differentiate from a user perspective between this and official product support sites.
Categories don’t show automatically, you have to explicitly list them under “Categories” nav. They will be categories anyway, but category experts is probably mainly for forums.
ActivityPub is more like RSS or subscribing. It allows individuals to be notified there, but it’s a per-user desire. So it doesn’t move the conversation, the conversation is still here. It just means they don’t have to come here to be notified about it.
the AI to summarize conversations is a good one as I can’t keep up in real time with all the ongoing things 
1 Like