Add Discussion to Community KB on website

[ann0see]

During the creation of the KB we prepared to add commenting abilities to the posts. I've now found a GitHub project which adds synchronization with GitHub discussions: https://giscus.app/ what do you think? Should we include this? Adding it seems quite easy.

[mcfnord]

Yes we should. I like retaining context and easy discovery of feedback and discussion options. We could always turn it off it isn't right.

[ann0see]

It needs access to the organisation or at least to this repository. This has security implications.

[ann0see]

@gilgongo what do you think about adding the ability to comment on posts from the KB via GitHub discussions?

[gilgongo]

As long as it doesn't promote the problem we've had in the past, which this is fragmentation of channels. At one point, we had Facebook, SourceForge, GH Issues, GH Discussions and GH Groups. We didn't have enough people to monitor/reply to all of them, so we reduced that to just two channels and managed to get unfocussed stuff out of GH Issues.

So it might depend on the way it works. I wouldn't want to check/admin both GH Discussions and the KB for support requests, etc. if we could avoid that.

[ann0see]

No. The discussions will show up here.

[ann0see]

@gilgongo @mcfnord I've now enabled it by installing the giscus app on this repo, creating #3088 and doing some changes to the website. The live discussion on the site can be seen here: https://jamulus.io/kb/2022/01/26/Routing-JACK-Windows.html

I think the privacy page needs an update that we use giscus in the KB.

To add a discussion to a post:

1. Create a discussion in GH discussions
2. Copy the number of the discussion to the file in the _posts/...posttitle.md file as you can see here: jamulussoftware/jamuluswebsite@22b9248

[mcfnord]

This looks really cool. I think the privacy implications of commenting are self-evident. I don't quite understand posttitle.md. The commit you show just adds a discussionnumber metadata item. I hope it's that easy!

[ann0see]

Ah sorry. posttitle.md is just a placeholder for the actual file containing the content of the KB entry. And yes, you just need to add discussionnumber.

The privacy implications are not self-evident - at least in the EU we should be cautious.

[mcfnord]

Just one discussion per post? Ideally, many could appear, but I bet just one can.

[ann0see]

I don't think multiple discussions can show up, but I don't think that's needed as there are threads like here which allow multiple discussions.

[mcfnord]

It doesn't look like there's any interactivity until a discussionnumber value has been added to the page. Now that the feature is on, is there value to connecting existing Discussions up to existing web pages where the discussion provides supplementary details? Or should we consider adding a blank discussion to every page in one step?

[ann0see]

I did both for testing.

I think if there's a strong link to an existing discussion it's worth linking it. Otherwise just open a. We'd just open a new one and link it.