Thanks for pulling this together @tgeddy!
Did you see if Zebras use pinned topics at all for onboarding? seems like the behavior is pretty helpful:
Pinned Topics and Banners
Note that pinning topics does work a little differently in Discourse:
- Once someone reads to the bottom of a pinned topic, it is automatically unpinned for them specifically. They can change this via the personal pin controls at the bottom of the topic.
- When staff pins a topic, they can pin it globally to all topic lists, or just within its category.
If a pin isn’t visible enough, you can also turn one single topic into a banner. The banner topic floats on top of all topics and all primary pages. Users can permanently dismiss this floating banner by clicking the × in the upper right corner.
To make (or remove) a pin or a banner, use the admin wrench at the top right or bottom of the topic.
Also thought this idea from your writeup was worthy of dicussion:
Posting can go to one of several places, all flow into the “stream” → Newsfeed. (Similar to Discourse in that specific sections like Categories, but I don’t know if Discourse has an overarching “Stream”)
The single home for all content was one of the things I actually didn’t like about Hylo. It made it confusing to me as a new user what the difference between all the different types of posts were. But your question does point to the need for a ‘How to Discourse’ type guide, perhaps both in a youtube tutorial as you suggested, plus as a pinned onboarding topic. To answer more directly, I think if you can use the Topics view to see new posts, and I also find the notifications view (top right corner, click on your avatar, then the notifications bell) as a good place to see new things that are happening.