I agree with @jan that as long as there are private or topics that are un-readable to the general public we should not be advertising this wider.
@grahamperrin, looking at the flagged post I’m not sure either why it was flagged. Can you unflag it please?
I personally think 2 is fine. Especially if they are trust level 0. We try
to encourage users to read as much as possible and also to be patient with
responses since it is asynchronous communication and spamming @ mentioning
a bunch of users is not good behavior. But feel free to customize, since
every forum is different.
I think what’s different for Open Source Design and this specific situation is that we’re on-boarding a large group of users - who have past experience with this community and know its cadence and doings - all in one go. Maybe we can relax this standard for the next couple of days and then move it back up?
Too much to read, sorry. Maybe there is nothing new in my first impressions:
Great work anyway! A lot of cool helper tools :-).
A huge thank you to @bnvk for making the site public! Transparency is the Open Source Design way!
I’m a little troubled that a post above by @jan was flagged as off-topic and hidden since he is one of our founders and helps set the tone for the Open Source Design community. He linked to a topic ( https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/t/site-administration/42/14 ) that remains hidden. Censuring of a core member and secrets posts are completely outside of my of experience hanging out with this fantastic community for over two years. It’s a real head scratcher.
I’d sincerely like to thank the new people (@grahamperrin and @studiospring from what I can tell) who have worked so hard to set up this installation of Discourse, but it’s extremely important to remember that Open Source Design is an existing community, a well-functioning community with a strong sense of shared values and purpose. This new medium is off to a very rocky start with lots of drama and I blame the fact that it didn’t start open, which is our way. I’m hopeful that now that light and air are reaching this Discourse installation, the community will imbue it with our values and attract like-minded people. Now that our leaders, the core members, are admins, we can feel more assured that this forum will represent our community. Thank you!
Hey @htietze, it looks like @evalica restructured the home page to show both categories and the most recent posts (without all the image overload). What do you think?
Much better, although I don’t get the colors. Some minor mysteries makes the page interesting. 
But can’t we go with some kind of accordion or a tree and show the latest posts after one of the categories is opened/expanded/clicked? Plus, the filter above with ‘latest’ and ‘top’ could be implemented as a sort like Reddit does. Meaning you don’t see the 5 latest posts on click at the category Lounge, for instance, but the 5 hottest if the respective sort button is toggled on.
The header is still too empty when no topic is selected. I would show OSD in that case. And perhaps keep it as breadcrumb to go home.
Home was a topic and is still; not sure if clicking the logo is really bad but often it is prohibited by guidelines. And users may not be aware this link without any label (would be better with [OSD] next to the icon). The blue box with “Welcome to the Open Source Design forum!” misguides me to another page. I expected the link to stay on this page but never to load another site.
Do you mean, to have the phrase Open Source Design alongside the square logo?
(Something like the first two of the three screenshots at preparations for use of Discourse for discourse.opensourcedesign.net · Issue #79 · opensourcedesign/organization · GitHub but with the square instead of the hexagon – @htietze, please, do I understand correctly?)
I see your more recent comment,
Exactly, perhaps with no wordwrap. Either we replace the text by the chosen section (First Impressions, for instance) or we take it as root for a breadcrumb in order to improve the navigation. Clicking the brand logo is not recommended in general; would be an abuse of the basic identification for silly navigation.
to get it a bit more illustrated:
You mean this, I assume:
I agree that it does look “empty”.
There is the alternative you talk about:
(being a snippet from the discourse prep github discussion )
If we include it also in the discussions, it could look like
Although, some arrangement like
could also be possible and take less space. (btw.: upload-from-clipboard is supported!)
Please review the pull request at https://github.com/opensourcedesign/opensourcedesign.github.io/pull/111 where I add the needed logo.
@jdittrich such level of customization is not possible – and I also think not really necessary. Maybe you want to get involved in Discourse UX?
Closing since all the initial feedback has been addressed. For further feedback, we can always open more topics in this forum feedback category.