[Incubation] SCP-TBD Migrate Shapeshift DAO's forum back to Discourse

[0xean]

Summary

This proposal seeks to move our governance discussions and community forum back to Discourse (a reversal of SCP-101) due to the continued production issues and poor user experience with Metaforo.

Abstract

If approved, this proposal will enact two major changes: 1) The official forum platform of the Shapeshift DAO will be migrated back to Discourse and 2) due to the lack of support for FOX weighted voting Ideation votes will occur on Snapshot per the specification outlined in SCP-97

Motivation

Metaforo’s platform has been a constant source of governance user complaints since adoption in SCP-101. Support requests from our Moderation workstream have gone unanswered

• https://www.metaforo.io/g/MetaforoOfficialDiscussionGroup/thread/polls-45108
• https://www.metaforo.io/g/MetaforoOfficialDiscussionGroup/thread/moderation-2-42088

https://www.metaforo.io/g/MetaforoOfficialDiscussionGroup/thread/odd-spot-when-banning-spammer-45106

• https://www.metaforo.io/g/MetaforoOfficialDiscussionGroup/thread/quote-issues-reply-42072

for more than 3 months. Mobile browser issues, such as links not working, were reported to the team on Jan 3rd 2023 and are still presently an issue seven months later as of September 8th 2023.

Basic forum functionality, like the ability to quote a user, still isn’t available and currently the state of the text editor is unusable, with most contributors choosing to draft text in a separate application prior to pasting the information into Metaforo.

Shapeshift Governance passed SCP-101 in September of 2022, and the metaforo team has had an ample opportunity to retain us as users.

If passed, I will act as owner of the migration efforts to coordinate the move back to Discourse. There are some unknowns at the moment around our ability to export data from Metaforo into Discourse, but I believe we can work through them in parallel with getting this proposal kicked off. A minimum acceptable outcome would be an archive of all metaforo based discussions that is publicly available.

The DAO is facing a critical juncture in its existence and spending additional time struggling with basic communication on governance issues is a distraction that our community can easily remedy.

Specification

This proposal would kick off the following actions

A migration of our official forum platform to Discourse. The Fox Foundation is able to cover any additional costs of this migration that are unable to be absorbed by existing workstream budgets (for reference Discourse pricing available [here](https://www.discourse.org/pricing?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=google_search_geomix_brand&utm_content=Main&utm_term=discourse&matchtype=e&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwjOunBhB4EiwA94JWsJggZYTKlZE0m2gaY9xJ0Gq5iaalIXn04qjPmhd3JsIVx2NtJB6poRoC46UQAvD_BwE

1. ) and we expect the 100$/month tier to be sufficient)
2. Modify our DNS records to point forum.shapeshift.com to the Discourse based forum
3. If possible, resurrecting our previous Discourse build if not, creating a new Discourse build.
4. Export of Metaforo data into a historical, publicly accessible archive. To ensure that the exported data is never tampered with we can hash the data and provide this as proof of validity on the new discourse forum.
5. If technically possible this data will be imported into Discourse
6. Migration of all users to Discourse and deprecation of Metaforo

Benefits

1. Moves the Shapeshift DAO back to the de facto standard for DAO community forums. DAO participants from other communities will be familiar with our forum tooling and not encounter additional friction when interacting with an already complicated governance process.

2. Discourse is a mature open source platform with support, documentation, on-demand data dumps and several other features that should give us more confidence that our critical conversations on governance will persist into the future.
3. Removes user friction associated with the most basic interactions in our governance process.

Drawbacks

1. Switching may require users to re-register.

2. No token weighted polls available directly in discourse
3. Historical posts from Metaforo may not be available directly on our discourse forum, but will be available in some form for reference.

[Fireb0mb1]

Gm, thanks for putting together this post!

I agree that Metaforo has some rough corners that deserve work, and that some of our requests were not met, especially the text/content editor. The good news is that they are about to improve this exact area, pasting a screenshot Metaforo shared with us regarding this on Discord:

Benefits

[…]

3. Removes user friction associated with the most basic interactions in our governance process.

I disagree, we would be adding friction for the most basic interaction: signing up/logging. Discourse does not provide a native way to login with a wallet. They have a third-party plugin (relatively maintained based on the comments/issues people seem to have with it) which allows to do it but still requires an e-mail address.

Lastly, one of the main advantage of having the Ideation vote where the discussion happens is to engage people in it, there are people who are literally only interacting with us on Snapshot (unfortunately), if they want to give their input at the Ideation stage now they need to visit our forum and witness (and maybe participate in) the discussions in progress to vote.

For these reasons I am willing to endure some bad UI/UX. But maybe we can find another alternative that has the best of both worlds, web3 and great UI/UX?

[Fireb0mb1]

Eying at https://commonwealth.im/ / https://docs.commonwealth.im/ for example, it seems to have similar features than Metaforo for the user (web3 sign-in, token polling, NFT support, etc.). They even have support for Cosmo wallets apparently. I’ll need to dig deeper, but I thought I’d share here if others want to investigate. (EDIT: Big plus they have threaded comments like you’d find on reddit, makes separate discussions in the comments way easier to follow in my opinion)

I think it misses a very nice feature Metaforo has, they store each message/comment on IPFS/Arweave (see the small “a” next to the date of the message)… It’s not essential but it is a nice way to refer to a message and know it has an immutable version (that could be used in a proposal for example).

[0xdef1cafe]

Strongly support. I’d vote yes, but apparently I can’t.

[Fireb0mb1]

I’ve read more about Commonwealth, unfortunately there are few communities that also migrated from Commonwealth to Discourse ultimately due to bad UI/UX and accessibility issues (dYdx and OSMO recently).

I guess if Metaforo doesn’t improve in a satisfactory manner quickly Discourse might indeed be the best alternative in terms of UI. It’s a shame that we’d require people to make an account and not use a web3 identity.

If that move happens, I’d like to suggest to add a requirement in the Governance Process for all Ideation Snapshot votes to start with a short Call To Action text to direct voters to the forum thread to discuss the text and ask for changes, and make clear to voters that they can still affect the way the final proposal will be formulated. A simple link alone to the Ideation forum thread doesn’t make this extremely clear enough in my opinion, and we dearly need to get people on the forum anyways.

On a side note Metaforo apparently also improved the mobile UX, they’ve announced it today in the Metaforo thread on our Discord (posting the screenshots they have shared):