Hi all! We’re very excited to share the renovations we’ve been working on the past few months. This is a big step forward for the Rebus Community platform and we can’t wait to hear what you think.
One of the biggest changes is that we have retired the old forum in favour of this new discussion space that can be more closely integrated with the work happening on your open textbook projects. This is in response to a significant gap we found with the first release of our platform, where good communications features were missing for both individual projects and the community at large to collaborate and support each other (which is what it’s all about!).
We have worked to retain nearly all the content from the old forum, but you may notice some things have moved or are missing. If you have any concerns about missing content, please let us know by replying below.
Here’s a running list of known changes, bugs, etc.:
You may receive some old notifications when you log in for the first time – you can ignore these or take the chance to revisit old friends!
Direct messages from the old forum were not migrated (due to software compatibility), but we have these stored elsewhere. If you need access to any old conversations or data, please let us know below and we can arrange to share the text with you.
Some old forum links may not work - we’ve done our best to keep them connected, but you may run into some errors if you’re clicking on old links. If you do, either use the search to find it again, or try find the category it might live in. Worst case, let us know if you’re stuck & we’ll try help out. And if you’re the one who created the old links, be sure to update them!
If you notice anything that is out of place or not working as it should, or you’d just like to share your thoughts on the new platform, please comment below. We look forward to hearing what you think!
Thanks Sourav! That’s really great to hear. It’s definitely a different approach to connection/community than the ‘following’ type platforms, and we like that about the software we’re using. We’ll soon have a concept of project teams involved to create mini project communities, but the connection is collaboration, rather than social. Glad you like the badges, too! A couple of people have commented on them. We’re going to have a lot of fun creating new ones specific to OER work
Aha, right you are! Looks like the clickable area isn’t the full width of the button, which is not ideal. Noted and will get it into the bug backlog. Thanks Leigh
Hi @zoe, I just noticed that you cannot right-click on subcategory cards (eg: Find Out Who’s Here in Get Started) to open in a New Tab, for instance, or to Copy the Link Address. This behaviour is possible on the category cards on the main page.
@apurva@LeighKP Pleased to have a couple of updates on the bugs you reported:
The ‘new topic’ button on the homepage is now fully functional! Turns out I had inadvertently covered it up with an invisible box (really) when I was playing with the alignment on homepage banner, but this is why we have an actual front-end dev to do these things now. Thanks @cesar
The subcategory cards turned out to be not within our control, and not a bug exactly. Cesar looked into it and for whatever reason the category & subcategory cards don’t have the same underlining structure, but I reported it to Discourse and they’re going to change it to make them consistent. The fix should come down the pipelines to us soon, but don’t have an exact ETA.
Thanks again for reporting these! Let me know if anything else comes up.
@zoe I havne’t been able to load an image of our cover to the Rebus project home. I linked to the Pressbooks site hoping it would pull the book cover now that it’s public, but alas. I also tried linking to a public file hosted in google drive. What do I need to do to get the cover file to display?
Hi @michelle.reed! To get the cover to appear, you need to enter the link directly to the image file, which you can get by right-clicking on the cover on the PB homepage & selecting ‘copy link to image’. I’ve gone ahead and done this for you, because I know there’s a lot of promo going on right now so speed is of the essence. HUGE congrats on the release!
Hooray! It looks great-- thanks @zoe! And thanks again for all the support you and @apurva provided as we put this book together. Y’all are just super.
Thanks, Michelle! Congrats and kudos to you, @jessica.kirschner, @scrissin for your hard work over the past year (and a bit)! It’s been our pleasure to see you three work your magic.
