Jobs boards down

This is good to know. Thank you for your input! Please keep it coming. Knowing our options will help us make decisions :slight_smile:

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I could not find a form plugin but there are post templates in discourse since almost 10 years. I wonder if that, together with a moderated topic (topic/settings/“Require moderator approval of all new topics”) might suffice?

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My only thought is that your current submission form is open to the public, no sign-in required. If it was on GitHub/Discourse that might deter some without credentials?

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One of the objectives of our OSD jobsboard is 0 friction involved in posting a job. Nothing is required to post a job - no Github account, no Discourse account. Nothing.

Unless the Discourse templates can be completed without the requirement for signing up to our discourse, I completey agree with @Ian.

Requiring some credentials will deter people, for many reasons, the most common being just unnecessary friction.

Our goal here has to be to recreate the jobs board with 0 friction for the poster.

PS: Also nice to see you here again @Ian. :wave:

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Hello @bazylevnik0 and welcome. No need to apologise for being a newbie. We’re all newbies somewhere. :slight_smile:

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Hello, I might know someone who can help.
Do we have the current code that used to be in Heroku? Is it in any repository?

Hey @ei8fdb :wave: !

The repo is opensourcedesign/jobs. From my rudimentary knowledge:

  1. The form at Submit a Job fires a request to https://osd-staticman.herokuapp.com/v2/entry/opensourcedesign/jobs/master/jobs which is an endpoint provided by a Staticman instance running on Heroku. Now that the Heroku plan has ended presumably this is where things fail.
  2. Staticman has access to the same jobs repo and reads its config from staticman.yml. It simply creates a new PR in the jobs repo I think, with all the submitted data written to a file, e.g. pull #853.
  3. From there a human can vet the PR and if it’s accepted then the static site is rebuilt and deployed, thus the new job appears.

There do seem to be some Heroku alternatives (Render) that still have free tiers so it might be possible to shift staticman to one of those and update the URL on the job form. Or maybe someone else knows a new/simpler way to create a PR in a GitHub repo from a public form…

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Thank you so much for all you replies. They are really useful.

I am still keen on fixing the current implementation. It means people don’t need to create a Discourse account to post a job (low friction is good in this case!).

I am also keen on getting someone to do things well, instead of relying on a volunteer contribution. If anyone is interested in sending a quote for the job, please do so. The quote should include documentation and some time for training community members on the technical setup and troubleshooting. We need to be able to maintain this ourselves! :slight_smile:

You can either post your quote here (if you don’t mind it being public), or you can email me on belenbarrospena at gmail dot com if you rather keep it private.

This is just my personal take on things: the community will need to decide on a final course of action. But I hope that gathering some details about potential costs will help decision making.

Thanks again to all those who replied here!

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I can just copy existing project from heroku to codesandbox(also if it need edit something then edit),it is also going to be as opensource(everyone can see source) in page of project. It can be in any environment(like a in the heroku). But if you have some private information as a app keys, it is not a good solution.
*if it on JS)

A quick update on this.

Someone suggested that we look into upgrading our Heroku account to a paid subscription.

Sadly, it looks like Heroku only takes payments by card, and Open Source Design doesn’t have a card we could use as an organisation. So I guess this means Heroku is jut not a good option for us :confused:

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As a makeshift solution, here a link we can provide for people to create a post on discourse:

template link

  • It basically mirrors the form
  • has a tag showing that it was created with this link

We could put it at the place of the current post-a-job button (with the disclaimer that it needs a discourse account) until we have a better solution.

(I tried to find the relevant place in our website repo, but could not locate where to do the change if needed)

Two ways:

  1. Direct Job menu entry to a sub-page briefly explaining that it needs a discourse account and links to both the job board and the job-template.
  2. Direct Job menu entry to discourse category directly and explain how to use it in the header text of the category and set a category template (I prefer this, less indirection)
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Thanks @jdittrich

This is certainly a possible interim solution. The only thing to iron out would be moderation. I think there is value in looking at the jobs before they are posted to the world.

Is it possible to turn on moderation for new forum posts within a category? If yes, who can be set up as a moderator? Just forum administrators? Everyone?

I’ll do a bit of digging about this, but I still think the priority is to get that form fixed!

Just thoughts after month call:
We can solve a coding problem with no-code way, I tried for example bubble.io (it is can works with backend API’s but with paid subscription… ).
This way will drop a finding a coder, and we will can make it ourself, it is not really hard.

@belenbarrospena I did a bit of research and found that it’s possible to moderate forum posts within a category - Category Group Review/Moderation - announcements - Discourse Meta

I think the forum admins would suit the job well. If delegated to members outside admins, maybe some criteria would help not just for moderators but for job posters.

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Yes, its in forum settings
lable: Moderation Checkbox: Require moderator approval of all new topics

I put new topics to be moderated and pinned a post with a brief explaination (which I made wiki, so we can easily change this):

What I could not do is pointing the website link to the post instead to the defunct form – is someone could do this, the makeshift solution would work coherently and without users going to functions that don’t work.

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Open Source Collective offers virtual cards. Could this maybe be a solution?

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May I suggest a slightly different (temporary) approach? Currently the link in the main menu points to the post/thread on how to add a new job, which doesn’t provide an encouraging view of activity. What if we

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make the post/thread on how to add a new job as ‘banner’. This can be done only globally (across all categories) unfortunately

Yes – this is why I linked to the pinned post instead of the category; I think it is not great to have a global banner with information for one category/use case of the forum.

We could solve it via the website and put the post’s text on a page that explains and links to both forum and new post (it could potentially even pull jobs via RSS and show them). This avoids the discourse-specific clutter around the info. But thats additional work, I don’t know if it is worth it.

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Coming back to this topic, and @belenbarrospena’s original proposal:

It’s really a pity that one of the core features of the website (at least for me as a not-designer) doesn’t work. Open Source Design sits on quite a bit of money (on Open Collective). Would it be an idea to hire someone/some folks to improve the job board design & functionality, and fix the Heroku dependency?

(Completing (desing + code) the Landing Page Redesign would also be welcome I guess, to give more visibility to the jobs. But then it would start to become a lot.)

Now, I know that’s not what the community voted for in '21. But the situation has changed since the vote, so it might be acceptable.

The timing to pick this up might not be ideal, I’m happy to contribute with time, if it helps :slight_smile: