Regarding general (or “off topic”) chit chat - one of the things I found worked well on my Discourse forums, is to have “opt in categories”
We had “geeks”, “politicos” and a few others. Topics in these categories were accessible to people who had joined the relevant group i.e. to see “geeks” posts you joined the “geeks” group.
The advantage of this approach is it allows people to freely create as many “off topic” topics as they like, without causing the forum to visibly stray from its original purpose.
Casual visitors and new members only see “on topic” topics, helping to keep a consistent curb appeal for the forum.
Might be an idea worth considering for this forum.
Yeah I guess it’s a similar approach to subreddits.
Unfortunately the Discourse software doesn’t allow normal members to create their own groups yet, but that’s a feature I’ve been pushing for over on meta.discourse.org (where we discuss the open-source software that powers this forum)
I think this could work well, although I would ideally also like some kind of “auto opt-in to all” switch, so all new posts would show in the latest list for me.
That’s just because I suspect that some of the outside of Fintech topics might be very interesting!
