[Long Term] New Channel Types

[alzalia1]

Problem

First off : this is by no mean urgent. Thanks a lot for all the work produced !
Also, english is not my main language so I excuse for the weird sentences.

Right now there are three channel types :

• Text
• Voice
• Link

Per the roadmap, forums, threads and stage channels are also part of the plan.

On the long term, however, I believe it would be interesting to integrate even more channel types.

Caution

Those suppositions are, as their name suggests, purely theoretical. This list is purely here as a suggestion, I am not able to assess the feasibility of those proposal. Please, if one (or all) of the proposals seem inconceivable even in a distant future, notify me so I can remove it. My intention is merely to give ideas and to help group ideas of channels in one issue. By no mean do I intend on putting pressure on anyone !

Proposed solution

• Calendar : To plan events on a calendar, with each channel being its own calendar

Description : We can further imagine each event to be its own "thread", in a way : a place to discuss the event, list information... The content of an event could be spread in two parts : a "header", compiling all the "main" information (a title, a description, a date, maybe a location (of type channel or text), and then maybe some custom fields) and then a second part, the "body", the discussion part, functioning just like a normal text channel. While a message in the body would belong to a specific user, the header could be modified by anyone with the permission to do so. Whether to set those permissions on a calendar or event basis can be debated.
Use cases : Let a team organize meetings ; gamers organize play sessions ; communities plan events in general
See further discussion of the Calendar Channel on this comment

• Kanban : To organize tasks more easily

Description : Just like the Calendar, a task could be split in two parts : a header with the main information (title, desc, image, other fields) and a body to discuss . A task would then be a card on a board that can be moved between different categories, defined by the user. Just like the Calendar, the header could be modified by people with the permission to do so while the body would be filled with personal messages. In fact, Kanban could probably be a view type of the Calendar, although I think it would be preferable that the two are dissociated (Or a channel where you can enable / disable each view ?)
Use cases : Let a community plan its next posts on social media ; gamers plan out the next phases in their factory building ; communities keep track of what they need to do in general

• Documentation : A blank page to write and document

Description : A page, maybe with tabs, where you write but no answers are expected. Maybe this can be thought as an html canvas where one can build some sort of mini website (with no javascript of course) ? Or maybe a more controlled environment where you let people build with predefined components. Overall : somewhere you are free of the constraints of a normal textual channel, where you can arrange elements in a nice way to make an informative (or not) page. Editing would be restrained page-wide to those with permissions.
Use cases : A content producer presents oneself ; a community exposes rules in a nice way ; someone show a tutorial on how to make a good mock-up
See this comment for further discussion on the Documentation Channel

• Photo Album : To share photos in a nice way

Description : In the spirit of a forum, a nice place to share images. We can imagine the ability to comment on images through threads (or not).
Use cases : A cosplayer shows their art ; friends share memories from a trip ; people show off their linux rice

• Forum : To talk about various subjects

Description : A simple forum channel, in the type of discord's, with topics and discussions about that topic.
Use cases : A user asks for support ; an activist launches a debate ; a developer plans his API
See this comment for further discussion on the Forum Channel

• Bio : To present onseself

Description : A channel where each member has their own "subchannel" where they can present themselves.
Use cases : Many servers have a "presentation" channel, this would be a built-in way of doing it !
See this comment for further discussion on the Bio Channel

• Guide : To guide users

Description : A special channel, not in the channels tree, to guide users through the use of the server and fluxer in general
Use cases : A user new to Fluxer discovers it ; a new user in a server is lost
See this comment for further discussion on the Guide Channel

Notes (optional)

If anyone wishes to add on this, whether by adding on one of the already mentioned proposals, or with a new one, please, do !

This issue is bound to be edited as ideas come and go.

If creating such a "large scale" issue (in a way, I mean idk) is a problem, I am very sorry for the inconvenience caused :/

Checks

• I searched for existing issues and didn't find a duplicate.

[Freeplayg]

The channels list already feels like something that can become cluttered quickly, so one thing I don't really like are the link types. It feels like they could be placed inside of an "information"-type channel instead, or what the documentation type does

[alzalia1]

I agree a server can quickly become cluttered... I have made the experience myself X)

I would say, maybe additional organization features, like sub-categories that can be closed / opened (maybe closed by default ?) could be interesting to reduce visual clutter ?

But at the end, I feel like, no matter how much you try, if you have a lot of needs, then you'll have a lot of channels and thus a lot of clutter :/

[RoyAwesome]

Clutter is managable with hiding channels, muting, and copying discord's channel subscription system.

[RoyAwesome]

An idea for Calendar channels:

Basically, You have a page that has a calendar on it and a list of events. The events are tied to that calendar, and can be quickly observed that way. You can create new events by either hitting the "New Event" button or clicking on the day/time and creating a new event similar to the flows on any standard calendar app. Give it a starting time, ending time, set up recurring events, a description, image, etc. This information could become the top post for the integrated forum thread.

From there, you have the "I'm Interested" flow that discord has for it's event system. Hitting the bell that you are interested automatically subcribes you to a thread for that event (if that is enable in the calendar settings), and you are notified when the event starts (creating the event gives you reminder options). There should be options for recurring events as well.

This is very similar to a forum in discord, and with the stated roadmap goals of exporting forums to web you could export the calendar too if you want.

(Note on the image: I clipped the current fluxer UI to do this example, so I'd recommend removing the ability to send messages to such a calendar channel. It's essentially a fancy forum display, allowing you to have threads with date/time information. The subscribers to the thread are the people interested in the event)

EDIT: I think there is benefit to keeping calendar events channel based, using channel permissions. In discord, Events are tied to the guild and there is no way to restrict who can see certain events. By keeping events channel-based, guild owners can create things like a "Leadership Calendar". Games where you coordinate with variously trusted individuals you can limit who sees raids or operations (ie: with the game Foxhole, You generally want to invite members of allied orgs into your discord to coordinate, but you dont want to give them full access. Also you may have members in your guild who play against you for a match and then come back, so you want to limit their permissions). This is also useful for guilds that have mixed local IRL friends and internet buddies... you can have a place for just the IRL friends to organize events without every person on the server having access to information like people's physical addresses if they are shared in calendar events. You could achieve Discord's "Events" category by showing the user every event they have access to.

[RoyAwesome]

yeah, that looks a lot better than I was thinking. I am also not a designer, i just clipped random screenshots and tossed them together in my Obisidan notebook's exaclidraw plugin :P

I wonder if it would be worth it to have a way to toggle views for the main calendar panel between a weekly layout, a monthly layout, or agenda list? Kinda like what google calendar has.

Also, we should probably stick a month display above the main calendar panel to allow users to move to a different month in the display.

[RoyAwesome]

Oh, there should probably be a "Create Event" button on here somewhere. I put it in the quick display on the bottom right, but I wonder if we should have a header above the main calendar panel with some controls there including a "Create Event" button

[RoyAwesome]

Should note, in google calendar, the mini calendar is always on a day-of-month display, not a month-of-year. the reason for this is you can change what type of display for the main panel (daily list, weekly, monthly, agenda mode) and the mini calendar always shows you a reference where you are in time.

[alzalia1]

I see ! Lots of interesting stuff, I'll see if I have time to make the changes to the model today !

[ShiningVenus]

I think a calendar channel would be pretty cool to add! I think being able to like add your Google calendar or calendar from other sites/apps would be useful too. You could add upcoming community events, birthdays of members, etc.

[evoandroidevo]

I like the idea of a calendar channel and doc/info channel that can be just a markdown edited document

[jhoshy]

Just adding that some matrix clients do this, like Commet (https://commet.chat/), which has the "calendar" and "photo album" channel types, and these can be useful for some communities/groups.

[alzalia1]

Interesting ! I'll add the "Photo Album" channel type to the main proposal !

[coldreindeer]

The calendar that @RoyAwesome done is a lot better imo. Would be interesting to have a photo album channel though. I think some album software apps have ways to resize how they are displayed etc.

[Probioticz]

I think a Hub/Board Channel Type would be very nice to have (just like Discord's forum), for Developer servers a Hub Channel type would be good for searching projects from other people.

[alzalia1]

Hi ! Sorry for the long waiting...
Yes, I didn't include the Forums because it was mentioned on the Roadmap, but I can still add it to the list if you wish ! Also great icons !

[Probioticz]

thank you!

[Probioticz]

and also the icon concepts

[coldreindeer]

Instead of a number maybe it could be a letter C?

[Dark-Aeon]

as #530 got closed with the note I should move here. Which I do with this post :-)

Problem

In 2: Threads and forums in the Roadmap there was asked for ideas for Threads and forums.

Proposed solution

Reddit as type of Forum was already mentioned
A flarum type forum (https://flarum.org/) would also be really nice :-)

perhaps its even possible to use an extension to sync the forum inside fluxer to public flarum forum.

[alzalia1]

Hello !
I didn't know about flarum ! That's a cool discovery.

I'm more than willing to add this idea to the main message, but could you first explain maybe a bit more what a "flarum type" forum involves? A (very) quick look at it and I'm under the impression it is like a discord forum, with tags that you can apply and then filter with ? Is your proposition more about features or display style ?

Thanks a lot !

[Dark-Aeon]

Hi

okay I will try to explain what I mean. I think what I mean is a mixture of both feature and display style. I try to keep it short but if it becomes a wall of text I apologize in advance. English is not my native language, so if i write something nonsensical please ask for clarification I will try to rephrase then :-)

Starting with how discord does the forum. honestly its visual style is cluttered, unclear and I find it hard to find the right forum threads.

I am not sure if just visually changing the display would make it better. I compared the discord style to the flarum forum style to see the difference.

here a screenshot side by side of a flarum forum and a discord forum to compare:

The Flarum forum has less white-space compared to the discord forum. It adds in categories which is nice and shows who and when has replied to the thread instead of just showing part of the thread starters first sentence.

The flarum forum shows the avatar of the thread starter which saves on space making the display more compact and makes the different threads visually more distinct from each other.

A discord server can have multiple "forums" which is a cool feature. But sometimes on a discord with lots of channels its hard to find them all. The first ideas come to mind is to have a button that just hides every channel except forum channels.

Another idea would be a forum view. It switches to a view similar to flarum and converts the different "forums" and "forum groups" into flarum Categories/sub categories and shows just the threads.

screenshot what I mean with forum group and forums:

and the last part: a bridge to a public flarum forum option:
Making it possible to connect the internal forums of a community to a public forum either all or only some (configurable by Admins/mods) This could be made with a flarum plugin that enables a fluxer bridge.

The route of a plugin for a forum software would also make it agnostic to which forum software is used as people who dont want to use flarum as their public forum could just write a plugin for the forum software of their choice and connect the internal forums of their own fluxer comunity to another forum software like phpbb, discourse etc.

I think I could write a lot more paragraphs but that would likely go to much into detail how something should look or implementation. I hope my rambling makes half way sense :-)

[alzalia1]

I see ! So, to try and recap (tell me if I'm wrong) :

• Make forums more compact
  • Remove useless whitespace
  • Display things more "inline"
  • Remove useless information
• Add more complex tags, so that you have categories
• Add forum groups
• Ideally, add flarum bridge

If I understood correctly, that indeed seems interesting ! I added this discussion to the main message as part of discussions about the forum channel.

Edit: Don't hesitate to expand even more on your ideas ! It can be helpful for devs if they end up wanting to implement this :p

[Dark-Aeon]

yeah that sounds good :-)

Your recap feels like a good baseline :-)

I will think how to expand my ideas more. Thanks for considering my ideas :-)

[slrgt]

is the Documentation channel type for a Wiki style channel? Because having a Wiki on fluxer would be incredible and let us avoid relying on Fandom

[coldreindeer]

I completely agree on that, although I imagine it would be a massive project to add smth of a similar quality to it.

[coldreindeer]

It would be especially game changing if it was easy to set the stuff up for CSS stuff etc for the cool looking things people can do, which on fandom is seemingly rather complicated. Or if it had some kind of built in wiki to show how to do basically everything on it. That brings me to another idea.

[alzalia1]

In my idea, this channel would pretty much be a place you can input html and css and just render it. No javascript or any scripting language for very obvious reasons, just raw HTML x CSS, which I believe would still allow to do a lot ! Maybe I can make it a bit clearer in my proposal ? I'll add this discussion as reference for the documentation channel.

Or maybe there could be two modes to a documentation channel : a "simple" mode which would be a markdown editor, and then an "advanced" mode where you can do html and css ?

[slrgt]

It could just be a markdown so regular people can use it. Html and css is too much for the average person, a markdown file lets you get all the features of wikipedia people need for their own wikis

[alzalia1]

That why two modes could be interesting ! The default would be markdown, so that anyone can use it, but then an advanced mode would let people use CSS to make their own personal themes and such if they want.

Although, I do have to recognize that an HTML mode would probably be more work to implement than just a markdown mode. But I still think the two can be interesting !

[coldreindeer]

Feature request: Built in link in bio channel type.

Proposed solution: It could look smth along the lines of this perhaps.

Tbh, I don't have huge hopes for this actually being added, given there are many link in bio sites out there but having one built in would be cool!

Notes (optional)
Would be useful for servers with several YouTube or content creators. Suggestions are welcome.
Checks

I searched for existing discussions and didn't find a duplicate.

[alzalia1]

Hello ! It does look like a very good idea, especially with how many servers have a "presentation" channel ! I'll add your idea to the main message.

[coldreindeer]

How about a built in guide book. Could probably add a small guide book icon in top right or smth like that.

The guide book could take you to a screen showing how to use different things on Fluxer. It could have guides to showing how to use the CSS Fluxer uses for themes, maybe even how to use different channel types added. Etc.

[coldreindeer]

Well.. I'd be down for it to be a channel type if it wasn't just a thing in top right only for Fluxer to use. Could be cool if it were for both.

Could be like an actual book thing with pages that turn or smth.

[alzalia1]

So would the servers you're in be able to edit the book, like add chapters / pages ? Or would this only be a global fluxer thing ?

[coldreindeer]

It could be both. A channel type that works like how the one that is shown in the app would theoretically work.

[alzalia1]

I added the channel type in my original message, as well as a link to this discussion. If you want to expand on your idea here, don't hesitate to !

[coldreindeer]

Ok

[vkyfox]

Document channels

TL;DR — As a compromise between a fully-fledged in-app document-editing tool and some way to go beyond markdown. I propose a very simple PDF-display channel.

Hampus — Today at 3:53
yeah, before you know it you've reimplemented Google Docs
there are so many features people want when having a WYSYWIG editor for long-form text like that, including real-time collaboration and an edit history and stuff
I went down that rabbit hole a long time ago trying to figure out how to implement that into Fluxer
I feel like I need a more well-defined scope first :P

Lilith — Today at 3:55
halfway to google slides with latex rendering

North — Today at 3:55
Collaborative WYSYWIG in a chat app seems misplaced. But I guess I could see value if it was a standalone channel?

kulupu sewimonsutatenpo — Today at 3:57
i do agree WYSIWYG is within scope for fluxer given discord has it. i just dunno if a reimplementation of gdocs is worth it

Hampus — Today at 3:58
Discord doesn't have what I was referring to though: document channels

k_tan — Today at 3:58
sounds great, it would be good support for collaborative works like notion, slack, or asana

Hampus — Today at 3:58
i.e., here's a canvas to write on
but what if others want to write on it simultaneously?
and what if you want to revert to an older revision in history?
it just spirals from there

Lilith — Today at 4:01
hot take Chat apps that build their own implementations or link other implementations of WYSYWIG into their app (looking at you slack, teams, and a few others) all tend to suck. I have yet to see any that don't make the app feel clunky or bogged down

Hampus — Today at 4:01
yeah
I really don't want to have that, it's just massive scope creep
what we could have though is a middle ground
where you still write regular messages

Lilith — Today at 4:10
Agreed - if we ever do go into the realm of expanded wysiwyg - It will likely just build bridges that other open source projects can use to connect to (not even display in app).

To follow-up on this discussion that took place in the FluxerHQ; I wanted to propose what I think would be a very good middle-ground — A Document channel, as Hampus coined it; which would be a very basic in-app PDF viewer.

I know this might sound very lackluster compared to the scope evoked in the discussion (trimmed for your convenience); but hear me out!

0. First off, I think the production cost of an in-app PDF viewer should be very cheap, especially compared to the idea of full-blown collaborative editing; given that Fluxer is a webapp first and most web browsers feature a native PDF viewer (but I might be very wrong on how easy that should be).
1. PDF is probably the most broadly supported format. Pretty much every software in existence has a way of exporting to PDF, be it text apps, drawing software, etc. etc. and if worse comes to worst, everything that is printable can be saved to PDF.
2. I personally think giving users the opportunity to display their end-result rather than offering the tool to create it has the advantage of giving them the freedom to use whatever they need. As Lilith and Hampus highlighted, we are bordering on out-of-scope territory in making a fully-fledged collaborative editor in Fluxer and many other options already exist for that. By giving the ability to simply display PDFs, we give users the possibility of going beyond simple markdown with their own, preferred method. Call me old-school but I absolutely adore LaTeX, and I can't count the number of times I would have wanted to be able to share my nerdiness right there in-app rather than having to host and link to it.
   • The — moderate — downside is that the document channel is only updated as you re-upload the PDF; but I personally don't think that's really a big deal? If it's important enough to be a document rather than a chat, you probably don't want to share it mid-edition.
   • As mentioned the biggest upside to me is the ability for the user to scale their tool to their need. Want a simple text? Write it on LibreOffice and be done with it. Want a portfolio? Export it from your favourite software. Want to work on a full technical book? Host the LaTeX project on git for extensive versioning and collaborative editing. Etc, etc.

Here is a proof of concept of what it could look like

Sorry if the pixelate effects hurts your eyes, I only had a private document on hand :(