Home page organisation

I guess the home page should be very simple and easy to read. I think:

• we should not have too many categories: 5-7 at most?
• we should sort categories to promote some at the top (presentation, beginners, …)
• we should display categories and recent messages, not just recent messages, to let users choose their own interest: language for example

For the categories, I would display:

• Presentation, to let people present themselves
• I’m beginning!, to let people feel comfortable if they are afraid of asking questions
• Contributing
• Using
• Countries (with countries as sub-categories) or Languages?
• Announcements
• Uncategorized

I suggest to have an Open Food Facts introduction there on top of the category… to introduce OFF, then users can naturally introduce themselves in return below

Countries : it could be named “Open Food Facts (in the) World” or something like that.

If we can have translation/multilingual setup, a split by language does not seem the best one.

I think country based sub-categories allow local communities to gather.

(I need to had the vote feature)

Introductions is a better word than presentation. Or to remove any possible confusion: “Please introduce yourself!”

Yes. I changed it.

(Just noticed we can’t reply to a post with less than 20 characters. It’s a bit weird, should we keep this limit or not?)

It’s a good rule, to avoid to use the forum as a chat

If you agree, you can also simply “like” the post.

Discourse default are quite well balanced to keep the forum in good health. There’s also restrictions for newcomers, like 1 picture only, 1 link, etc… this helps fighting spam.

When we moved OpenStreetMap France phpBB to Discourse, we reduced spam moderation by 99.9%

Some additional “branding”…

• quick and dirty favinco added (it is the bottom part of the logo extended to a square)
• colors reused for each category (same order)