Community forums are now live: Let us know what you think

You'll notice a change in the site's homepage today: A "From the Community" section that features, at the moment, nothing but a few test stories. Yes, that's the long-promised community stories feature. If you're an Uncharted Blue member, you can start using it right away.

Here's how it works. Uncharted Blue is now connected to our own Discourse forums; the first time you click on a forum link, you'll automatically be logged in from your Uncharted Blue account. Hopefully. If all goes well.

From there, you can write whatever stories (called "topics" in Discourse-speak) you want. Publish them there, and they'll appear on the homepage here. It may take a minute or two for each new story to be displayed, that's normal.

There are going to be bugs, I'm sure. Here are the parts I'm watching most closely:

• Does the automatic login process work? Are there certain usernames it doesn't work for? Will it work reliably with Ghost's rather finicky "log in by clicking an email" feature?
• Is the story-writing process acceptable, for authors? The default Discourse editor uses markdown, the "better" Discourse editor is rich text enabled, and both should allow both stories and their comments to have images and embeds.
• We've got built-in chat and messaging features now. Will people use them responsibly? If not, you've also got the ability to "block" other community members—and auto-moderation is back, Discourse-style. Spammers should be dealt with quickly.

This is not the "final version" of Uncharted Blue that I've been working on; it's the placeholder meant to test what works and what doesn't. The "real" version I've been working so hard on won't be ready for quite a while, because it integrates a lot of features that other websites simply ... don't. At least, not all together.

But this version ... isn't bad, as long as it works and we don't find any huge, site-breaking bugs? Give it a test spin and see what you think.

Stories by staff writers will, for now, continue to use Ghost comments instead of Discourse comments. If Discourse-based comments prove popular we'll switch them over too.