Following this discussion regarding improving the forum and new users.
I’ve just received the “Read the Guidelines” badge. Went back to my first email to find link.
BTW I am not a new user.
Out of curiosity if I want the “Certified” and “Licensed” badges where do I find the tutorials
The Read Guidelines badge has a link, but I can not see any others
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A lot of things have gone dormant this year, especially with the effects of the Coronavirus. John Overall is even considering shutting down his weekly podcasts at the end of this year, after nearly 500 weekly episodes.
Rearranging the deck chairs is probably not going to bring in a deluge of new forum members here. I think there is just not enough interest in WordPress/ClassicPress, as John is finding out himself.
Why, I don’t know. Whether it’s people using other platforms or they just don’t care enough to get involved is hard to tell.
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Thanks for your thoughts, @Aussie.
When I mentioned the classicpress.club forums being dormant, I was referring to the last post being made nearly a year ago. Your blog still remains active. I suspect there was a desire for such forums, just not an actual need for them. Nonetheless, your effort is commendable and I hope it eventually does become well-trafficked.
Re: the podcast, it’s been in decline for a long time. If you look at the viewing stats, the vast majority of the videos get fewer than 25 views and, looking at the dates, you can see that is a very longstanding pattern. I can list at least 5 possible reasons for the low viewership without putting much thought into it, however, enumerating those things is not my intent here; the effort is commendable either way and I wish him the best.
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Not that I’m aware of. Why would I? What is onboarding?
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When you joined the forum, the very first message you got in your forum inbox was from @discobot. It contained an interactive tutorial that walked you through a whole series of forum tasks.
Because it teaches you how to do a variety of basic forum tasks without having to read the manual.
The process of bringing a new person up to speed with how things work. It’s a general term, not necessarily just a forums thing. For example, when you start a new job or hire a new employee, there’s usually an onboarding process.
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!!!
For the first time in my life I’m tempted to write WTF !
Discobot?
Yes. Maybe you deleted the message. It was the first one on your box…and it was from “discobot”.
Ah. Who is discobot?
I’ve never heard of that. Is it different to induction or orientation?
It’s just an automated bot built into the forum.
Pretty much the same thing… to familiarize with.
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This last bit of discussion brings up a point. One thing I think would improve the forum is if things were more obvious.
So the home page could have a link to the Onboarding. But instead of calling it by an obscure name, call it “How to use the forum” So in order to find you don’t have to somehow magically know (or remember) to send a message to somebody called discobot.
Also a link to rules/guidelines. I found them the other day and they are really well written and useful. But I can’t remember how I found them and I can’t find them now.
In fact there seems to be quite a bit of obscure terminology such as meta and governance. Those are categories which need to have a description to tell you what those terms mean. I would be infavour of just using straightforward plain English or it just seems like jargon.
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Ah, found it in the second (mobile) menu on the home page.
@anon71687268 just put together a good tutorial, conpleting both the basic onboarding and the advanced will give you those badges 
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Also good points about the forum guidelines, we will include a link in the welcome message to that too
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There’s no need to guess what discobot is… It is explained in the welcome message that every user receives. It also put a notification on your avatar to make it more obvious that something was waiting there. You may have deleted or overlooked it.
Open source communities revolve around software and, since that isn’t your primary focus, there’s going to be terms you have to look up. It would be the same for me if I picked up a saxophone and wanted to play it and have it sound anything like music. I don’t know every term mentioned in every post here…but, if I’m interested, I look them up. Those terms you mentioned – onboarding, meta, and governance – are a prime example. You may not know what those things mean, but, looking them up will reveal that they’re actually common terms and are not specific to forums, or software, or ClassicPress.
Let me try to give this some perspective.You teach sax, right?
If you had a new student, I presume you wouldn’t refer to a saxophone as “that golden horn with all the pretty embellishments”? More likely, you’d call it an alto saxophone (or whatever) because that’s the term for it. It’s up to the student to either already know it’s a saxophone before they contact you for services, or, at the very least, to look it up (or ask) and find out what it is. It’s the same thing here…we call things what they are…and some of us have to look things up from time to time. 
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OK, I was just trying to be helpful and suggest how to improve the forum as requested, not have an argument.
I didn’t get that
Nor did I see any explanation.
This is the message I got, which just tells me to learn more I should click on the ellipsis.
So I did that and all that happens is an X appears next to my name and a plus sign then shows next to Add or Remove Nothing about a series of tasks
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Do the advanced tutorial.
Also it would be useful to have pages, in order to get to that very 1st message I got, I had to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…
Yes, this is what I have referred to above. The default message isn’t clear that you are starting onboarding by bookmarking the message.
If you click the ellipse and then click the bookmark icon another step will start.
As mentioned previously, I understand that isn’t clear so I have since updated that message to provide more context.
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It must’ve been lost in the scroll as more sub-topics were added to the thread.
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