Categories Brainstorming

Misc
1

What should be the categories on the XWiki Discourse?

  1. Copying the lists:
  • Users
  • Devs
    I think these are too cryptic and don’t mean nothing. Also I see that the “Uncategorized” was renamed as “Users” - I think this change needs to be reverted, since ‘Uncategorized’ is the default, but I don’t think ‘Users’ describe it well.

  1. We can also have hidden categories for a particular level, so we could also replace the committers list with a “Committers” category.

  2. We can activate also tags in order to not spam with too much categories. Tags can also be user added and these can grow organically.

  3. We could use categories for the repositories, like

  • Platform
  • Rendering
  • etc. still these are also technical.

  1. We could have a “Contrib” category to ask questions / send repo requests for the contributed extensions.

  2. We could have categories for the Flavors we will create and one for “Applications”/“Extensions”. The problem here is for users to not confuse the Discourse with an issue tracker and report problems and support questions here.

  3. We could have a “Development” category with subcategories like

  • “Roadmap”
  • “Votes”
  • “Proposals”
  • “Releases” - although these should be covered by the website

  1. We could have categories also for the XWiki.org or the localization l10n website.

  2. We might need also a ‘GSOC’ category, or maybe just a tag, or maybe we don’t care.

Other ideas?
If you want some examples of how other communities are using Discourse you can check out

2

BTW I’ve already created a category (Users) which was the only one we needed IMO, assuming we agree with what I proposed at http://markmail.org/message/mbfucokxnyecd6lb

I’d use tags for everything else.

But we’ll learn how to use it as we use it. I don’t think we should over-engineer it ATM. Tags seem good enough since they’re created on a need basis.

WDYT?

3

Without providing categories, users will not know what this forum is about and what topics can be approached. Also it will look very empty.

4

I don’t understand the relationship between categories and empty. It’s not categories that are displayed on the home page but topics.

Could you explain?

5

BTW this topic is not correct and should not be in this forum since this forum is for users discussions ATM and not for devs so all this should be discussed on the devs list…

6

Also, I’ve pinned https://discourse.xwiki.org/t/welcome-to-the-xwiki-forum/8/2 so all users will see this one which won’t disappear.

7

Another idea is to look at gradle and copy their categories and their customized home page which looks nice: https://discuss.gradle.org/

So:

  • Help / Discuss
  • Meta
  • News
  • Roadmap
  • Contribute
  • Events
  • Sponsoring

But I’m worried about having too many categories.

Since you seemed to have looked into it Caty, could you tell us the difference between Categories and Tags and what would be our limitation of using tags?

Thanks

8

This is customizable, we can select which view should be the default. Some org use Latest, other Categories, etc.

Tags can be added by users (the trust level for users is also customizable). The default limit is 5 tags per topic.
Categories are created by admins. We can put an order and colors to make them distinct. We can also create sub-categories.

So it all depends if we want the ‘sorting’ or topics do we made by users when they create the topics, or by us after (in case of tags with a higher trust level);
or if provide an initial ‘sorting’/structure from the beginning in terms of categories, while allowing extensions (or not) in terms of tags.

9

ok I see. I hadn’t realized that the gradle discouse home page was using the Categories view. I thought they had customized something. Just clicked on Categories and indeed it’s quite nice.

ok so we could start with a small list of category and let users add tags; that’s probably the most sensible.

I wouldn’t create categories by domains of XWiki but more larger topics of discussions. From what you proposed, I like:

  • Users but "Help / Discuss"s sounds nicer IMO
  • For “committers” we have “staff”. We can check if we can rename it to “Committers” but it’s the same one IMO
  • “Contrib” sounds good. In short it means topics on stuff not manager by the xwiki dev team
  • a “Translations” category is ok IMO
  • “GSOC” is dev ATM so the devs list for now

So I’d add what I proposed (copied from https://discuss.gradle.org/)

  • Meta
  • News
  • Contribute
  • Events
  • Sponsoring ← maybe a more generic for all topics related to Companies. “Training / Consulting / Products” or “Companies”, “Commercial”.

Note: I’ve removed roadmap which is dev ATM.

WDYT?

1 Like
10

ok I’ve now created the initial categories. We can tune them later on if need be.

11

Hi,

What do you think of a «Feedback» category ? I think that if we present a dedicated part of this forum that allows the user to post his feedback, he (the end user) will be more prompt to report any issue / good surprise he had when using the platform.

Also, the «Feedback» category is used on https://discuss.gradle.org/.

We can also use Tags in the «Help / Discuss» category in order to mark feedback posts.

Thanks

12

I don’t see any feedback category on gradle’s discourse. Maybe it would be too much. I think for now I’d prefer to have that in “Help / Discuss” but add a “feedback” tag as you mentioned. That’s a good idea. Thanks