Category suggestion for this Discourse

Hardware and software seem broad enough that they could become unwieldy. Would it be possible to have categories for activities people commonly do? For example, ‘Note Taking’, a task people can do on all Apple devices.
‘Photography’, ‘Illustration’, ‘Presentations’, etc.

Thanks,
John

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Makes sense to me. I imagine if they were too specific, an admin could always combine them. I believe anyone can create categories.

Give it a shot!

Discourse discourages setting up too many categories in a new forum. It can get unmanageable and too fragmented. I would suggest for now that you stick to the main hardware or software category and instead use tags to sub-categorize things.

Keep in mind that one of the benefits of this forum is the search feature. Much better than Facebook!

Also if you start to create a post on a topic that has already been created, you’ll be given suggestions of similar topics.

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This is exactly why we have these broad categories.

However we can definitely add tags for this kind of thing to help group like topics together - I started with some very basic ones, but we are willing to add more :slight_smile:

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I think it might be nice to have a more coding/developer focused category.

I think it would be great place for those of us with more dev experience to help others who want to pick up some understanding.

I’ve wondered about adding new tags. Can users at a certain level begin adding new tags to posts @JoeBuhlig?

They are able to after a certain trust level - but I’m more than happy to add tags as they are requested too!

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Thanks for addressing my question.
Tags make perfect sense, and, like markdown, are something I am growing to love.

How do you propose that we request tag creation?

I am new to Discourse and I assumed I could create my own while creating a post.

For what it’s worth, I’m just adding hashtags to the bottom of my posts. If someone searches, they will show up. They aren’t official tags, but that doesn’t really matter.

#hashtags #tags

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Unless you want to watch based on tags of course :wink:
Then you need the official tags.

But why the hash? When people search they would just use the text. If they used a hash tag they could miss relevant text which does not include it. What this is doing is creating a system without community wide need of convention where a pretty existing system with ‘better’(?) functionality exists.

I think if you want to include a string of keywords to help people doing a free text search to find your posts just include a line like

keywords: tags identifiers posting faq

I think all that’s missing here really is documentation of a process to enable people to submit requests to those who can add tags. It’s a taxonomy not a folksonomy is all so people just need a known way in to make suggestions.

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Just asking here is fine for now :slight_smile:
After a certain trust level members can create their own tags too, but we would like to avoid lots of “very similar” tags because that becomes overwhelming (and we are limited in the number of tags which can be added to each post).

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@RosemaryOrchard could something be added to or off the FAQ to cover this and perhaps a dedicated sticky(?) thread started for new tag requests with some basic guidelines (e.g. Nothing too similar to existing get tags, only in English, nothing defamatory)?

I’m just thinking that might help make it clear for both new and existing users.

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