I wanted to continue the Adding `-team` to (almost) all of the tags in Project Discussion thread, but Discourse kindly asked me to not do that, as the topic is resolved, and that’s a good thing.
So I am starting new one.
Since we use tags as primary navigation tool, it makes a lot of sense to me to add a specific structure for them, so that they are not just treated as collection of words (like hashtags in social media) but are visible separate and look special, explaining their purpose.
That’s why I support having explicit -team, -sig, and -wg suffixes, even if some day tags will be namespaced by a category.
I think we need to take a one more step in that direction, as we have couple of tags left in unclear state.
In particular the #engineering, #mindshare and #council tags have special meaning in Project Discussion category but it is not clear from the name of the tag.
So I propose to introduce the -room suffix.
Pros:
- It is clear that this are special important tags, yet they are not completely hardcoded, we have a flexibility of changing room names, or introduce new rooms if we need that.
- We highlight that you don’t have to be a member of the specific team or have a specific role to participate in the room, yet you need to be aware that it is a room, with the specific audience, not just a hashtag to mark a content.
- We can set Auto-tagging rules so that posts which mention specific room keyword get tagged into them automatically. This will help with “Create topic by mail” functionality.
- Room tags would work as almost direct replacement of large mailing lists, which will help people with the migration.
Cons:
- It might be confusing that a topic can be sent to multiple “rooms” at the same time.
- People might use only the room tag and do not add any topical tags at all, which makes topics less discoverable.
Alternatives
We can go back to introducing Engineering, Mindshare and Council as subcategories in Project Discussions. While we want to be able to cross post between them, it might be more trouble to highlight the importance of these three tags if every thread in Project Discussion should always have one of those three labels.