Note! April 2023…
I need to update this with the merge of Ask Fedora. That adds some complication. I’ll do that update soon. In the meantime, the following applies to the rest of the site…
Overview
Fedora Discussion is organized a little differently from many forums you may have visited. It’s structured around tags rather than a deep category hierarchy. These tags aren’t just decorative flair as they often are on social media, though. They actually act more like “subcategories” — or, you can think of each tag as equivalent to a mailing list.
The main category on this site is 
Project Discussion. In this category, most tags represent specific teams. “Watching” a tag is like joining that team’s mailing list (whether you’re primarily getting email or on-site notifications). I encourage you to do that for teams and topics you’re interested in.
Other categories have their own rules, and own sets of tags — these sets are called “tag groups”, and you can see the list on the Tags page.
Where do I post and what tag do I pick?
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Does your topic relate to a Fedora Team, like the Fedora Workstation Working Group, the Websites and Apps Team, or Fedora Council?
🡆
Project Discussion, with the corresponding tag. -
Is your topic about Fedora Linux development, but you’re not sure what tag to use?
🡆
Project Discussion, tagged with engineering. -
Is your topic about the “beyond building the bits” parts of Fedora?
🡆
Project Discussion, tagged with mindshare. -
Do you want to chit-chat, soclalize, or share something fun?
🡆
The Water Cooler — pick social, off-topic, or just go with random.Also consider
Fedora Chat, our Matrix-based platform for real-time conversations. -
Do you have something to announce that’s going to be relevant to a large set of the Fedora user and contributor community?
🡆
News & Announcements — pick from project-news, social, events, polls, test-days, or releases as appropriate. (Note that this category is moderated.)(What if it’s more specifically “inward-facing” news for Fedora contributors? Consider a Community Blog post, which will get mirrored to the Community Blog category here.)
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Something specific to a particular team workflow which doesn’t quite fit the way the rest of the site works?
🡆 Your team may have a subcategory under
Team Workflows. Fedora Magazine’s article submission process is a good example here? -
Need help solving a technical problem, or want to report a bug?
🡆 Visit
Ask Fedora. (We’re looking at merging the two sites, but aren’t ready yet.) -
Need help with this site, want to report a problem, or have a suggestion?
🡆 This category,
Site Help & Feedback — pick from Site Help & Feedback, problem, or idea. Or, help others by contributing a new guide!
Cross-Posting with Multiple Tags
Most categories require at least one tag from that category’s main tag group. You can also add other tags — that’s a good way to broaden a topic if there are multiple facets — for example, something that touches both design and docs, or cloud and server.
Tags Across Categories
Note that some tags exist in multiple categories — this is intentional, and lets you follow a topic like cloud across project discussions, announcements, and even proposed Fedora Magazine articles.
Subscribing to Tags
You can adjust your notification settings for each tag. Watching means you’ll get a notification for every new topic and for every reply. Tracking means you’ll see a counter of unread replies, but you won’t get individual notification.
Tag notifications can also be managed all in one place in Preferences: Tags & Teams:
I recommend Watching all tags for teams you’re involved with (or interested in), just like subscribing to team mailing lists. Or, if you find that too noisy, try Tracking — that way, you won’t get notifications for each post, but topics with new activity will show up on your Unread list.
Subscribing to Categories
You can also watch a whole category, which will send you everything that you haven’t more specifically demoted to a lower-level of notification (via tag or individual topic). The interface for changing your notification preferences for Categories is similar to that for Tags.
I strongly recommend against setting Project Discussion to Watching. This is like subscribing to every possible mailing list and will be overwhelming. If you want a broader view, there are separate mindshare and engineering tags meant for general discussion — think of the latter a little like the traditional Fedora Devel mailing list, and the former as an equivalent for everything on that side of the org chart.
Since other categories have different overall functions, they have different defaults. As a new site user, you’ll be set to Watching First Post for News & Announcements, and to Tracking for the Podcast and Community Blog subcategories. If you’re interested in following Fedora more closely (but don’t necessarily want to hear about every comment on each blog post) you may want to change the Community Blog setting to Watching First Post as well.
Subcategories under Team Workflows are Muted by default. Each one there has its own specific purpose — you’ll know if you want to follow one of those.
Subscribing to (or Muting) Individual Topics
You will also find a bell icon to the right of the messages in each topic thread. You can use the settings there to watch (or mute) an individual topic, overriding the tag and category default.
In general, more specific notification settings override the more general ones, so if you set a topic to Watching you’ll get notifications even if it’s in a Muted tag or category — and vice versa, so you can mute a noisy topic in an area you normally watch.