It's Offical - We're moving to Discourse

[Tony Iwane]

Hey everyone,

Sorry about the delay with this announcement, but we will be using a forum hosted by Discourse at https://forum.inaturalist.org/ as the official iNat forum and shuttering this venerable Google Group. Discourse is a lot easier to navigate, there are voting options, you don't need a Google account, and moderation should be a lot easier. It'll be great to start fresh there. So, what does this mean?

- If you participated in our Discourse trial, all of the content should now be at forum.inaturalist.org and you should still be able to log in and remain at whatever trust level you had previously. If you log in via iNat you may have to authorize Discourse again, and we've gotten rid of the previous permission, this one should only read "Access information relevant to sign in, like email address, username, name, and user icon" (there may still be a typo there we'll be fixing soon). Thanks, Ken-ichi, for getting that all ready.

- Try to sign up via your iNaturalist account if you can. If you don't want to or can't sign in via iNat, please use your iNaturalist username on Discourse. This will let everyone know who you are on iNat. Don't be a stranger. :-)

- I won't be artificially increasing trust levels anymore, so if you're new you'll have to invest a little time reading and liking things before you're able to do much posting. I think there's enough content right now (and we'll be adding more soon) that it won't take long to reach Level 1. Here's more about Discourse's trust levels: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/

- Let's figure out how to grow a healthy community together I think this new platform gives everyone a chance to start anew and to figure out exactly how best to build a civil, productive, and enjoyable community. Make sure to use the Forum Feedback topic to bring up suggestions and we can steer the course as a community. Not all settings and layouts will be optimal right now, I'm hoping to get things on more solid footing in a week or so, then invite the iNat community more broadly in a blog post on the site. But feel free to use it now so we can figure out what's working and what's not working. It will take some time before all of the kinks are worked out.

- We're going to be more strict here about civility, staying on topic, and making sure conversations are not dominated by by any one person or small group of people. Again, this should be a place for coming together about iNat and having constructive and, ideally, fun conversations that anyone can feel able to participate in. Disagreements are, of course, fine, but please disagree about ideas and do not attack anyone else. Behavior on this forum will affect your standing on iNaturalist proper as well.

- Which leads to the need for moderators. Please read this topic and if you want to be a moderator email he...@inaturalist.org.

- In about a week or so (we'll let you know the final date when we have one) we'll close this Google Group to any new content but it will still be available for anyone to peruse.

Tony Iwane

iNaturalist Outreach and Community Coordinator

[Ralph Begley]

Tony,
I've tried logging in to the forum without success.
Any suggestions?

[Tony Iwane]

Hi Ralph,

Without some sort of error message, it's hard to know what the cause here is. What error are you getting?

Tony

[Ralph Begley]

Tony,
Let's simplify:
Given my iNaturalist account, how do I log into Discourse?
I typically use the Facebook log in feature.
My username is ralphjbegley.

Thanks

[Tony Iwane]

Hi Ralph,

In your browser, make sure you are signed in to iNautralist. Then, go to forum.inaturalist.org and click on Sign Up. It should take you to iNat so you can authorize the connection between Discourse and iNat.

Tony