Would you use a chat client on The Club?

[simon_tomes]

Thanks for all the helpful feedback. Team MoT really appreciates it.

Since this topic was originally posted in November 2022 we’ve spent the end of 2022 and the start of 2023 refining all the “products” that Ministry of Testing keep available and plans to evolve. There are plenty of exciting opportunities!

There have been a number of updates to The Club and you can read how they’ve evolved via these two topics.

Updates Coming Soon to The Club in 2023

Hey folks, Discourse, the platform that powers this very excellent place, has recently released some brilliant changes. Read about the latest changes. Ministry of Testing’s ambition for 2023 is to make The Club the defacto place for testing discussions and chat. And eventually, bring all of that onto ministryoftesting.com. Call it “The Home of Testing”. So expect changes to The Club soon. I do like the look of that customisable sidebar view, and the opportunity to create real-time chat chann…

What do you think of these new discussion categories and chat channels? – Changes to The Club coming soon w/b 30th Jan 2023

Here’s an idea for how we might restructure The Club. It introduces new discussion categories and new chat channels. What do you think? [The Club restructure idea draft 2] Note “chat channels” is a new piece of functionality that we’ll soon switch on. Existing categories will be marked as archived and folks will no longer be able to create new topics. I’ll likely move over some recent topic conversations into the best-matched new category.

Today we switched on a real-time chat client for The Club. There are seven live chat channels to keep things focused and ten discussion categories (some with sub-categories). It’s a solid step in a direction that encourages conversations to shift between faster-paced chat and slower-paced discussions. For example, you can now turn a live chat conversation into a discussion topic to go deeper.

We’ve noticed the community moving away from some social media platforms – Twitter being a big example – and we hope the real-time chat on The Club is one way for folks to easily connect and chat with each other in short form.

Where does that leave live chat via the MoT Slack? Ministry of Testing doesn’t see a place for the MoT Slack instance in 2024 (or earlier) and we plan to shut it down or find a way to hand it over to another entity. It’s on a free plan and we’d like to remove our dependence on free 3rd party apps.

The goal is to get folks onto the MoT site so they can discover all the amazing community contributions. For example, there are many talks and articles to discover! And this instance of The Club – now with live chat enabled – supports our goal to bring it all onto ministryoftesting.com. You’ll see that we’ve enabled discussions at the bottom of some articles - the discussion is powered by The Club. We imagine a future where people will just come to “the home of testing” (ministryoftesting.com) for faster-paced chat, slower-paced deeper discussions and many learning opportunities. A consolidated way for community members to decide how they wish to contribute to the community.

I hope this makes sense. We’re a small team and wanna make the best use of our efforts to serve the goals of the community and Ministry of Testing business.

Maybe I’ll meet some of you on The Club chat!