Tell us what you think about our new forum

Well, Its an amazing platform to learn more knowledge. And hope will be best in future conversation.

1 Like

I love Discourse as a forum software and appreciate you are using it, but I think more categories would be good (have suggestions for this ?) and also maybe lowering the barrier for promoting users would be good at least in this early adoption phase?

Hi Z. We always planned to have more categories once we saw what people were posting on and we can look into that for sure. But as a frequent poster, it would be good to get some thoughts on what categories would be useful? How many is too much? I see some easy common ones like RIPE Atlas, RIPE Database, RIPE Meetings, etc. And then I see a range of topics that kind of cover anything and everything. So help and input would be appreciated.

Maybe frequent poster, but not well informed on local dynamics and personal+group interests…so subjectively from my niche:
I see there is no off-topic and social categories, which I think are important for creating social fabric of community beyond work.
I see there are no discursive tags for topics like #diversity, Sustainability, #outreach, #solidarity…though they are obviously part of your work from what I saw at RIPE86 (RIPE 86 and 87 should have categories).

IMHO categories should be as general as possible and not overlap while tags as specific as possible and freely overlap. I would not look at total volume of categories (could be 5 or 15 serves you well) or tags (where I think 15 is good start)…anyway doing activities over cultivating forum use means likely that someone should follow ontological needs and promote content elsewhere. Maybe existing newsletters should be pasted here with links to provide more visual interface for collaborative commenting and discussion?

Hope this helps…no rigid recipes work for sure in doing community communication, just lots of different efforts and some will work for some, not for all :wink:

1 Like

Hi Z,

As one of the admins - thanks for your feedback. It really helps! I’m still trying to unravel the nuances between Discourse’s tags vs. categories and as of very recently, hashtags. From my side, I’m happy to create and add new tags as we see new conversations popping up…

1 Like

ok Ok OK
… I had no idea of Hashtags
Can you link to any documentation?
Were you thinking of this due to potential #chat overlaps if you enable chat? Hashtags are getting a #makeover - announcements - Discourse Meta (also see split-topic feature in action there just below)

Mind you another tag couple to add could be
obsolescence and it’s sub-tag #Right-to-repair?

My feeling is that for a category, you need to see a clear range of topics already posted that would make it useful. For tags, maybe the threshold is lower but seeing some action around the topic would be good. So categories would be added slowly, tags more quickly with both depending on more than a small number showing interest.

I see you and me are the only level 2 Forum users without NCC badge :slight_smile: Are you just not wearing yours or … me not seeing it?