On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 03:11:45PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > > Why can't we do all of the below in the Fedora Discourse instance with
> > > dedicated categories?
> > You can only have one level of hierarchy in Discourse. If we were going
> > to do significant stuff in Discourse, we're better off on our own
> > instance.
There is a config option (and something they provide in the Enterprise
hosting level of their SaaS) to enable category nesting up to three deep.
(I'm planning to use that as we merge in Ask Fedora — the current "Common
Issues" category there has "Proposed Common Issues" and "Archived Common
Issues" as subcategories. That will get lifted over to be three deep.)
But: I've become pretty convinced that deep category nesting in forums isn't
usually the right approach for seperating what we might have as topic-based
mailing lists. For that, tags have some nice properties — like, you can
tag a post with multiple subjects, making easy to cross-post.
I think different categories are better when there are big, high-level
functional differences in posting permissions, moderation teams, tagging
requirements, priority in search, and so on. This is how we have the Fedora
Discussion site structured now.
> I don't get it. Please bear with me, because I am definitely not
> conversant in Discourse.
>
> We have centos/ today. There is nothing that says we can't have
> centos-SIG/ as a category, right?
I'll let y'all come up with the structure, but if we keep it on the one
site, I'd put it all under #centos. Possibly:
#centos/
announcements
user help (tags for versions and for hardware/networking/security)
project discussion (tags for sigs here)
social (maybe... or share the Fedora water cooler...)
I see advantages and disadvantages to both this approach and the
separate-site approach. A shared site, obviously, makes collaboration and
cross-communication easier. A separate site would allow for more flexbility
of structure (maybe y'all don't want to organize the site like Fedora does
at all) and of things like "which categories are subscribed by default".
Plus, of course, you can show off your own purple branding more
dramatically with a separate site. :)
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader