Hey folks,
As I imagine many of you have already noticed, there are too many categories on our Discourse. To be blunt, it’s a dumpster fire and is overwhelming; especially to a newcomer. @ilvipero and I have been working towards a plan to clean up the categories and provide some much needed organization. With the Forums transition also taking place, it seems like a great opportunity to put our collective heads together and make it happen!
Here’s what we envision:
TOP LEVEL CATEGORIES: We’re working with our platform engineering team to enable 3 level categorization on our instance with the goal to consolidate on a small number of ‘top level’ categories. Something along these lines:
These are not set in stone, just a concept that we can tweak and workshop until we feel it’s ready. The end goal would be a much cleaner and easier to navigate hub.
GENERAL CLEANUP: We also need to look at the numerous existing categories that we have and determine if they’re still needed to keep around or would be better served as a tag rather than it’s own discrete category.
As an example of a Discourse that I think does this quite well, I would point to the Fedora Project instance. They have a pretty streamlined approach to categories and they make good use of the tagging functionality. I jokingly said to @Wild_Man and @irihapeti in our meeting that I’d like to shamelessly steal the best parts of their Discourse and do it even better.
I would love to get your feedback on this concept and any other ideas you all may have on ways we can improve the Discourse experience for our community.
There are two things I like about tags rather than categories:
You can have more than one of them per message
You can wait until you’ve finished the message before you decide which one(s) to use. I find that messages sometimes morph while I’m writing them, and what’s there at the end doesn’t match what I had in mind before I started.
Presumably, if you’re an expert in, say, the latest nVidia cards, you can just search for the tags to show you which messages you need to read?
More general comments: overall, I like the concept.
I could see a top category of Help and Support, and then sub-categories of Beginner/basic, Expert or advanced (for stuff such as servers, virtualisation, security) and maybe Development Release as a separate sub-category.
Would the LXD support fit in there somewhere, or would it be kept somwhere else?
I’m curious about the separation of ‘Projects / Products / Teams’ and ‘Flavors / Remixes’. Seems like a lot of overlap, so perhaps there is something I’m missing.
I wonder if Canonical wants to keep its upstream projects (LXD, Pro, Rocks, Juju, etc.), some of which generate revenue, in a separate category from Ubuntu-the-distro for any strategic, commercial, internal, or legal reasons of their own.
Documentation, Tutorials, and Support Forums all fall under different types of “Help & Support.” It would help to get representatives from each together soon to start figuring out how to make that entryway seamless and great for the waves of querents arriving soon. If there is a relevant tutorial or HowTo, then a help-seeker should be able to find it without asking. Some other potential stakeholders may be interested who are grasping different parts of the same elephant: Projects with their own documentation subcategories, and possibly the Open Documentation Academy.
Beyond that, the general concept (Help, Project, Community, Lounge, Feedback) seems clean and easy to understand.
I can see that my viewpoint has been a bit too narrowly focused on the forums type of support and I haven’t taken into account other varieties. I have to admit that I don’t have any immediate ideas about how to deal with that.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — just as long as one doesn’t think that one knows it all. We definitely need other voices.
@ian-weisser , to your point, I think the current strategy when it comes to these other Ubuntu family projects has been a bit disjointed. We have categories for some here where other projects like MAAS, JuJu and Snapcraft have their own dedicated instance. I believe the logic was some of these projects may have originated in our world, but are used well outside our local ecosystem, so there is some good rationale to having them be a bit more agnostic.
That said, having 6+ Discourses that don’t federate is not a very pleasant user experience. It’s possible we could craft our Discourse into something compelling enough that we can collapse some of them into it as well.
Perhaps a better top level title and structure would simply be:
Project Discussion
Ubuntu Desktop
Foundations
Kernel
Server
LXD
Web
etc.
I tend to agree with @irihapeti on the tags vs categories. I really want to cut down on the category overuses and tags are very flexible. We can even go as far as making “indexes” for common tags to make it easy to find a specific topics marked as such.
@ian-weisser I love your point about tying it all together into a more cohesive experience. I think we can start the conversations with our internal teams about our intent and provide them with some examples / templates to get started.
I think “project discussion” might be too loose and open-ended. Users might think that is the place to discuss your love/hate for projects. Instead, that is the place where we want low noise.
Maybe “Project Collaboration Spaces” or just “Collaboration Spaces”?
I would put locos higher, under help, and preferably extract the abbreviation: “Local Communities”
I would put documentation under Locos, so above the collaboration spaces.
I don’t see a need for flavor category. Instead, I would put them under Collaboration Spaces.
The official Ubuntu flavors have always been given support on the forum and are listed as such, so we can add them into the help and support category using tags if that is alright? I am not sure which ones are remixes?
Currently, the categories under “Flavours” are for (non-support) discussions around flavours. So basically a place where devs and the community can collaborate on that flavour. This is very similar to the discussions happening under “Juju” and the other Ubuntu projects.
So I propose to merge them all under a single
“Collaboration Spaces” category, containing all the subcategories where participants of one of the subprojects collaborate. Be that a flavor, a remix, another project, or a team of regular Ubuntu.
The support category should also have tags for Flavours, though, for specific support about those flavours.
Flavors should be their own category. Ubuntu Flavours
What remixes?
Ubuntu has none, only the official
Ubuntu Flavors.
“Project Collaboration” Could entitle any ongoing
project. Just loose the “spaces” part.
Would you agree? Derivatives
Could it be listed as “Derivatives”?
Renaming, moving categories, and changing parent-child relationships around is very, very quick and easy. Even moderators can do much of it using tools provided within the Discourse GUI.
Moving categories does not change the URL of any Topics. Moving or renaming the Release category doesn’t change the URL of any Release Notes.
Nothing being discussed here so far requires any permanent decisions.
Opinion: I’m looking at what top-level categories will help new participants find whatever they might be looking for…without paralyzing them with too many cryptic, confusing choices at once.
Documentation → Developer? huh? So, discourse about a particular project might be found in “Project” and then a presentation about current projects would be found under “Documentation”?
Indeed. I think top-level should reflect what users come to the forum for:
Do they want support?
Do they want to collaborate with other developers?
Do they want to find local community members?
Do they want to contribute to documentation? (note that discourse is only needed to contribute. Reading the documentation is on the frontend like The Ubuntu Community | Ubuntu)
This way, users looking for support don’t accidentally post in topics specific for developer discussions. And users don’t accidentally ask support questions below documentation pages.
But that means we’ll have some duplication of second-level categories. For example, both “support” and “documentation” will have a second level for “juju”. The first one is a place where users can ask support questions about Juju. The second one is where the Juju documentation lives.
Do non-working documents belong on a site for “discourse”? and if user comments/questions are not welcome (and/or must be herded) in context, then what is the point of this discourse? Is it for proclamation(s) only?
Do non-working documents belong on a site for “discourse”?
Discourse is the backend of many of Ubuntu’s documentation frontends. For an example, go to the matrix docs, scroll down and click on “help improve this doc in the forum”. This is a much easier way to write and maintain documentation than using GitHub or a Wiki.
and if user comments/questions are not welcome (and/or must be herded) in context, then what is the point of this discourse? Is it for proclamation(s) only?
User interaction on the forum posts is actually recommended. That’s why every frontend page links to the backend. But what we want to do is herd people to the format that works for them.
If a user has an issue and just wants support, they should make a post in the support category, so people can help them interactively.
If a user is reading the docs page and doesn’t understand something, they should comment on the documentation page post, so that we can clarify and update the docs. Discussions there mainly focus on improving the docs, not on helping individuals. If someone needs custom help with a specific issue, they will be guided back to the support category. Possibly by a mod extracting the comments into a new post.
Users that just want interactive support (i.e.; people that want to “talk to a human”) shouldn’t go straight to the docs post and ask their question there, because that will just clutter the replies and frustrate the people writing the docs.
I expect that the majority of people coming to the discourse.ubuntu.com main page will simply want support. So it’s important to herd these people to the support category as clearly as possible, to make sure the other categories aren’t flooded with users who are just looking for support.
I think there’s one relationship that isn’t explicitly mentioned (or well developed perhaps) in your posts and that is “time” i.e. threads. A thread can overlap any category organization and yet, it is an important perspective. Are there any plans to make provision for a thread perspective or are we just going to have to rely on cross links?
