Discussion about this site, how it works, and how we can improve it.
I am a first time user. I do not understand how to use the site. There are no hints or basic instructions. Also, am I supposed to automatically know what the various colours/pictograms/glyphs mean? So, having been invited to be part of the ‘community’, I’m left wondering how to engage with it. Some simple and explicit explanation would be appreciated. As a ‘product’, I wonder how it would rate if tested by Choice.
Hello and thank you for the feedback.
Here are some instructions on how to use choice.community. They should have appeared when you first signed up, but may have got buried as we saw so much activity in the first couple of days.
This community is an experiment, but we did look comprehensively into all the readily available forum software and this one (Discourse) is the most powerful and usable around, although it’s clearly quite a way from perfect. As it’s open source software CHOICE plans to contribute improvements to make it easier to use, so your suggestions are genuinely important to us.
The instructions on how to use choice.community responds with
Sorry, you don’t have access to that topic.
Where does it get the information about whether the topic you are entering is similar to a topic already in place?
I was entering a new topic “Personalised number plates” and up came Your topic is similar to Attention Telstra customers and Electronics and technology. First time I knew phones had number plates. 
It’s just a search engine match - hopefully it will get smarter as we get more posts for it to look at.
Still shows the page with “Sorry, you don’t have access to that topic!”
