In which I elaborate on the virtues of the tag-based approach
Okay, so… I think this is actually a case of “a tag-based approach on Discourse requires thinking slightly differently”. The tags are actually stronger structures than they might appear; it isn’t just like a twitter label. You can actually treat them like a subcategory … see for example
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/commblog
With this approach, the tag defines the “specific area” you might want to keep up with. Just like with a category, you can watch, track, or mute posts in a tag (which controls your email notifications if you have that set up). And teams can link directly to “their” tag.
Unlike categories, though, you can cross-post easily — tag something both cloud and server, for example. Or development and java.
In this model, categories are functional distictions rather than subject-matter ones. What does that mean? That really comes down to discourse features which can apply on a per-category basis, and those include:
- different permissions (announcements come to mind, or the “protected” newbie/join zone)
- areas where we want topics to be wikis by default
- commblog comments
- the copr integration
- specific workflow like the Fedora Magazine proposals
- specific tag requirements (for example in a support area) or even tag sets (podcast category as it is now)
- new topics should start with a specific template (see idea for Common Issues over on Ask)
- whether “solved” and/or voting plugin are enabled
Oh! And actually there’s another obvious one. We could have a category for meeting announcements and logs. Waving aside for a second how they get tagged properly (I have ideas), that category could allow incoming messages from Fedocal. If you want to review meeting minutes, like Making sure you're not a bot!, you could go there — but also, when you looked in the council tag, you’d see both regular discussion and the meetings and any related announcements.
I think we’d want to do a significant revamp of existing tags, so we have a formal structure as e.g. used on Discourse Meta.
CPE has a test instance of Discourse installed for helping with the webhook integration and group SSO stuff. When they’re done, I might ask to take over that and make a demo site so you can see some of this in practice.