F.A.Q. / User Guide

I About Discourse
II Structure
III Mobile / Notifications
IV Personalization
V PMs, Tags
VI Functions: Polls, Tourneys, Calendar, Marketplace
VII Site Feedback
VIII Tips and Tricks

I About Discourse

Discourse is a modern, open source community organization tool. It takes some getting used to, but after that it should be quite intuitive to use. There are some things to know though: for example, it’s structured on levels only. There are main- and subcategories and then just topics (threads)
This means sorting mostly works by tags and using the search function. Discourse is a fairly popular platform and many of the answers to questions you might have are probably out there, try googling it, check meta.discourse.org or ask us here .

II Structure

We set up seven main categories. They are called ‘discussions’, 'tap out, ‘tournies’, ‘clubs’, ‘marketplace’, ‘rookie corner’ and ‘site feedback’. New (sub-) categories can only be created by admins. If you have a request, please post here

‘discussions’ is about any polo related topics except the ones who have their own main category. Chat about how to better organize your club, EHBA, equipment and so forth

‘tap out’ is everything not polo related

In ‘tournies’ there is one sub-category for all the main topics of each tournament with the most important infos. There’s also a topic in the main category with the list of all upcoming tournaments and a link to a calendar. The calendar automatically displays any events created on the whole forum - which is why we restricted creating events to a certain trust level (time spent on the forum). The list on the other hand has to be kept up to date manually. Find out how to create an event for your tournament down below. All other topics (e.g. ‘hosting Mazza d’Oro 2021’) will be in one other sub-category. If you play Mazza d’Oro, search for it’s tag to find all topics about this tournament.

‘clubs’ includes all the subcategories of the individual clubs. If you want a private category, you need a user group for your club set up and add all your players to it – you can do this directly via an invite link. Ask an admin to create your club-subforums. You can only see private subcategories if you are in a user group that has a permission.

‘marketplace’ has subcategories for your different types of used stuff, as well as one for brands. It should be quite self-explanatory

‘rookie corner’ is poloverses’ children’s table. We don’t really know what’s going to happen there but we are ready to clean up the spaghetti and tomato sauce.

‘site feedback’ is the place to discuss poloverse. Most admins should be watching these topics, so please use them! You have a bug to report, want a new subcategory, or think the design should be adapted? Please go for it!

III Mobile/ notifications

Discourse works great on mobile! There are apps for it (here’s the links for Android and iOX.), but they basically just open it in the browser. So you might as well create a browser shortcut. It looks like an app and you get a button on your home screen. You will get browser notifications and or mails for PMs and new messages in topics you are watching and new topics in subcategories you are watching.
You are automatically watching topics you either post in or read for at least four minutes – you can change these settings though. Setting these parameters to your liking is going to make a huge difference in your user experience and it is very easy. Just click on your user button, then the little head-icon on the right and then preferences.

IV Personalization

If you joined via invite link you automatically become a member of your club’s user group, which allows you to see their private subcategory. Along with your avatar Discourse will then display your club’s logo. We would like you to use a name by which you can be recognized and fill in your club, along with your username - or just go crazy on your profile page…

V Pms, Tags

Pms: you can text anyone privately as well as several people. What’s pretty unintuitive is that you can have several conversations with the same person and the fact that you need to give each convo a name. This can get very confusing if you are looking for some info someone sent you in a pm. What you can do is just naming the convos the names of both participants and make sure you stick to one convo per person. We are still looking into other solutions…

Tags: as explained above, the way discourse is structured it makes a lot of sense to use tags. For now anyone can create tags, but please be considerate about this and use existing tags where possible. If admins find several tags with different spellings for example, they might just delete some. Perfect example for where they can be useful is tournaments: we want to have one tag per tournament – so instead of putting all topics concerning a tourney in the same subcategory, you would just search for the topic and find all its topics like that.

VI Functions: Polls, Tourneys, Calendar, Marketplace

Polls: When writing your post, click on the cog wheel icon to the right and then ‘build poll’. By clicking on the next cog wheel you get more options.
Tourneys: Each tournament has an associated event post (where you can rsvp) and a unique tag. You want your event topic to be linked on the tourney list and the displayed on the calendar? Here’s how: create a new topic in the ‘upcoming tournaments’ subcategory. Name it. Click on the little cog on the right and then ‘create event’, fill in the dates and times and, again, name it. It will magically appear in the upcoming events calendar. BUT: only after having spent some time on discourse and moved up to a certain trust level you are allowed to create events. This is a precaution for the calendar not to get cluttered as it will display any event anyone created anywhere on the forum.
Don’t forget asking an admin to add a link to your tournaments’ main topic to the list.
As stated above, the marketplace should be self explanatory. Each item gets a topic. Just like anywhere else, please post in the appropriate subcategory, remove your topic once you have sold it. If you are a producer of bike polo goods, you can create a topic for your brand in the ‘polo brands’ subcategory.

VII Site Feedback

Please use the site feedback category! This forum can only work if it’s everyones. Give feedback on the design, the structure, report bugs and so on…we offer you a simple base and we want you to make it into a beautiful place for the community.

VIII Tipps & tricks

Use ctrl. + F. instead of endless scrolling. Use the invite link to automatically add users to your club.

And finally here’s our code of conduct- please read it, and please behave