Users tend to mistakenly create topics in the "Community" category

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Users tend to mistakenly create new topics in the community category.
Is it possible to adjust category sorting or rename category IDs to solve this problem?

3 Likes
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Soooooo, one thing we could do is retire that category entirely, and instead help people feel comfortable bringing such conversations over to Fedora Discussion. This fits with @ankursinha’s vision for the site articulated in a comment earlier this year

Discussion.fedoraproject.org is for regular community discussion. You’ll see that many Fedora teams use it for their daily workings. The common language for community discussion is English, so Discussion.fp.o does not have different categories for different languages. On the other hand, Ask Fedora is for troubleshooting, which is mainly “drive-by”. People ask a question when they have a problem, hopefully solve it, and then don’t return until they have the next issue. So, Discussion.fp.o is ill-suited to troubleshooting—it’ll be very confusing for people not well versed with the Fedora community to use. They won’t even know what category to ask questions in. It risks disrupting both troubleshooting and community developer discussion. Ask Fedora, similarly, is not set up for daily discussions. It is set up with categories etc. to give users the simplest possible path to getting help when they run into trouble.

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But, I guess the other thing
 also for @ankursinha now that I think of it :slight_smile: 
 I asked the Join SIG on that mailing list around that same time if maybe a Discourse category would be better place to land people expressing interest in joining the project than the mailing list. At that time, the general sentiment was that the mailing list is fine. I’m wondering if that’s still the case.

As part of the general reorganization of Discussion, maybe we could make a “feels safe for new users” space there? Or, if that feels too much like dropping people in the deep end of the pool, we could replace the Community category here with one specifically focused on getting involved, and make that the place we point new folks to start?

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And just make it read only for the moment, would not solve the problem too?

I guess it would make sense bring ask.fd.org and discussion.fd.org somehow together that it is not needed to create a other account. The confusion, where to look for what, makes it more difficult as it already is to find discussions and topics.

When we are already on community, why we need two logins for two different Forums?

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Since both sites use the Fedora Account System single-sign-on, you don’t really need a different account, at least not at the password / login level.

I do think the distinction generally makes sense, especially if we keep this more focused on troubleshooting and end-user help.

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We use that category for:

  1. Anounce new releases
  2. Anounce test days ex. Kernel test

Regards.,

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So maybe it should just be “Announcements” or “News”?

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The accounts, configurations, batches, bookmarks, everything we do have double. That was the point.

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Can Discourse allow to set a default category for new posts?

If yes, set it to Ask in English.

No matter how we name the categories, people will still post to the less perfect place anyway.

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that can occurs if we don’t allow post in that category.

I don’t see any settings to acomplish this task.

REFERENCES

https://meta.discourse.org/t/default-category/34481/34

NOTE

Let’s see if there is a component to allow this
, not component found.

Regards.,

1 Like
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Blocking posts in a category results in confusion for the user as you can’t see that posts are blocked in the new topic window until you try to actually submit the new post. Then the user is left with an error message that isn’t always easy for them to understand.

Rather than blocking, I thinking renaming it to something more clear as suggested by @mattdm above would be better from a usability perspective.

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This is not precisely true, in security category you can filter by $USER level when the $USER click on it, and Also you can give a custom messages for that purpose.

The settings are follow:

  • See
  • Reply
  • Create

I’ve also tweaks the Category Message:

Please use this category for discussions related to the Fedora community, For troubleshooting issues use the categories below.

Regards.,

1 Like
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If we are referring to the same thing, that message only appears if you view the category and then create the topic from within the category. If you just click “New Topic” and then select the category from within the new topic window you don’t see the message. Or is there a way to make the message appear in that case as well?

I suspect many people don’t browse to a category and then try to create a post there but instead try to create a topic and then choose the category. Because of this, they never see any explanatory text, they just see the name of the category.

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This topic clashes with the request to create more categories discussed in some other topic :smiley: If people tend to write in the wrong one now that we have two categories, think what it could happens if we had dozen of categories. :smiley:

Apart giving another name to such category, that it is fine for me. I don’t see a big problem. If some people don’t care too much to the category when posting a new topic, we can’t do too much. When moderators spot a topic in the wrong category, moving it to the right one, imho, it is not a huge effort.

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One thing that might contribute to selecting the wrong category can be seen in this image.

b5738f3825e39d850b8b3afa90e70ee0cff78651.png

I selected new topic then category and the first 2 lines are both community related discussions. Other categories can be seen by scrolling. As you can see, the pop-up shows “help con” on the second community line but it is impossible to see what the rest of the entry is.

I think if there is some way to control the size of the popup that it should be full window width, not half the window width as is the case with my browser. The narrow popup in the window prevents reading the entire text.

1 Like
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Good point. There’s not a setting for the width; that suggests shorter category names wold be better!

However, there is a setting which will sort that dialog by activity. We have that off, keeping the list in the same order as the front page. I’m going to try turning that back to the default (which will sort the list by activity). Let’s see if that helps, or makes it worse, or causes other problems. (We can always put it back!)

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 so now:

d349c47856fef3155d1167ca228878bb7cf636ad.png

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And, poll time :slight_smile:

We should rename the “Community related discussions category” to

  • News
  • Announcements
  • Either of the above
  • Something else (explained below)
  • Leave it as it is
  • I don’t care but want to vote

0 voters

Regardless of name, we should

  • Move the news/announce/community category to be a subcategory of New Users! Start Here!
  • Move New Users! Start Here! to be a subcategory of the news/announce/community one
  • Leave both at the top level
  • Actually we should merge both into one top level category
  • I don’t care

0 voters

The ‘help contributing to fedora’ category should

  • be removed (questions moved to Ask in English)
  • be moved to a top level category (maybe renamed “Join Fedora”)
  • something else
  • I don’t care

0 voters

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IMHO “New users start here” is intended to give help/guidance to new forum’s users. It is not strictly related to Fedora, the announcements or the community.
Another idea could be to rename the “Community” category to “Join Fedora”.

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In that case, there’s not necessarily a place for the general announcements (like “there’s a new Fedora Linux release”
 but maybe that’s okay? we have plenty of places for those kind of announcements already). And I think test day announcements actually could fit in Join Fedora, if we think of them as “ways to get involved” announcements. (Which is, I assume, why they’re here in the first place really, right?)