Anyone else feels it’s time to split up and dispatch posts from the unique “General” category ? We don’t want to ‘go crazy’ and create many empty (or one-post) categories, but going from just one to 3 or 4 would strike a good balance, I believe.
I’m going to spend a few days playing with the discourse configuration. Seems the “add custom section” admin button is the one to use (?).
At least, the “edit categories” button does not do anything useful for me here. Using FireFox, I cannot add new categories at least.
Based on posts created so far, I’m thinking of creating categories like…
Hardware (improving existing – and extending to new – hardware support)
I agree that being able to filter the forum by category would be a great benefit. It does not matter if some of the categories are not well populated so long as the homepage remains “flat” rather than being reorganised into into a tree structure, which would be inappropriate with current post volumes.
I think the tags could be used more effectively than I have seen in other forums. For instance in addition to your proposed hardware category there could be tags for x86, ARM, RISC-V, POWER, USB, WiFi, GPU etc.
Sounds like it would make it easier to later return to a topic by searching for it, i.e. make the forum a bit like a “knowledge base”.
Is tagging something that is done moderator-side, or user-side ? I do see “tags” buttons here when visting a Category (or the “All categories” page), as a mod.
I’ll post more in depth when I’m on my laptop, but I think this is a good idea. Imo the best part of categories is to be very visible and communicate what type of posts are encouraged. As in, there’s a ‘projects I’ve been working on’ category so people can see that and decide to post their cool project. If we add a ‘general programming’ category we might have posts about that, but as-is its not clear that like, programming techniques or static verification type things are on-topic.
So its kinda a question of values, what sort of things do we want to see?
Tags seem useful for categorizing the site as it is actually used, so people can filter for things that specifically interest them, and yea for searching later
Good point on having a category explicitely named “Help” or “Tech support”, better than relying on people asking for help in a section named more generically “Genode & SculptOS”… Those in need of help should feel welcome requesting that. Would the “Using Sculpt” category be somewhat duplicate, then ? Or maybe, let’s put it this way – genodians generally need help in 3 ways:
end-user help (where to click), which necessarily relates to SculptOS
system composition (and debugging it) (like hamed’s recent posts, or my questions from last year), which necessarily relates to the Genode framework itself
programming help, which would go to “General Programming” (“developer’s corner”).
One could argue that system composition help does not need its own category and can go in the programming (or let’s use the more generic wording “developement” ?) category.
As to the others, I went with slightly different wording, we could change it too.
and good point about where composition fits being ambiguous, I could see it going either way. Kinda like the whole ‘programming via XML’ sort of things, is it configuration? Is it programming? Is there a difference?
I think it must be done moderator-side, unless it is something that requires elevated user privileges.
If it is the latter, and because Genode probably attracts a more savvy audience, I would suggest the moderators set a lower threshold for being able to create new tags. Edit - on the same basis perhaps turn off the “you’ve just earned your first quote/like/post edit badge”!
I prefer the idea of tags, categories by comparison seem a bit “old-skool filesystem tree” and whilst a conversation has to go in the “best-fit” category, I think it can have several tags.
So I moved most posts from General into their respective categories. Fairly happy with the result as it’s balanced – just wish I’d find the right wording to differentiate the Help / Tech Support and Genode and SculptOS categories, i.e. express that questions which are general in nature can go to Genode and SculptOS , whereas troubleshooting questions specific to a given user would be a better fit in Help / Tech Support
Moderators (me and Spencer) can now click the ‘edit title’ and access the widget to create/add tags. Added arm and arm64 so far for testing, looks like it works.
Adding tags to a topic might require less privileges than creating tags though, any of you folks see the add-tag widget ?
As to creating new tags, please do go through Spencer and me.
