Categories, and how I would like to use them.

tetricky
Feb. 7, 2023
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    Members 155 posts
    Feb. 7, 2023, 1:05 p.m.
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    I appreciate that "you can't. Ever." may be the response...which may be for technical or philosophical reasons...but I mention this here in the spirit of feedback.

    I'd like to be able to attribute more than one category to a thread (and retrospectively add categories as a thread develops). I appreciate this is a 'how long will your piece of string be' problem. but it has advantages.

    We are a community that follows a particular football club. We have 'club' discussions, but also specifically 'match' threads, club 'news' threads, but also we 'discuss' and share 'media' links. We also have these discussions about 'football' and also 'sport' in general. As a community we also have general discussions about 'media' 'news' and 'tech'.

    So some 'news' might be club news, or general news, or general news of some sort that triggers a discussion, it might be news related to a 'match' or another 'club'.

    To create categories with sufficient sub-categories to adequately differentiate all threads would lead to a lot of (sub)categories. It would also mean that searching a specific sub-category would exclude related events, that are categorized under a different main category, but otherwise have a related interest.

    I would prefer to be able to assign multiple categories, and thereby eliminate sub-categories. If I could then search by single, or multiple, categories it would enable finding specific, and related, threads.

    For example,

    news about our club match: 'football' 'club' 'news' 'match'

    news about another clubs match: 'football' 'news' 'match'

    discussion about a match in another sport: 'sport' 'match' discuss'

    All feature differently in searches for 'club' or 'football' or 'match' or 'news'. Searching for 'club' 'match' filters discussions/news/reports/ surrounding matches our club is involved in.

    May not be possible or desirable, but that would be my personal best case. I could then have relatively few categories, but combine them in powerful ways, not excluding related threads, but adequately differentiating them.

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    Project Lead
    Feb. 7, 2023, 3:28 p.m.
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    I know where you are coming from. I have forum about programming it would be great to have threads in both "Django" category and "ORM" category.

    Short answer for this is that to support it, you need to design and build a whole software for it. And the UI supporting thread having multiple categories is simplest problem of all that need to be dealt with.

    And even if you build an UI and backend to handle it, there's also a massive human problem involved that was ultimately a reason why user-created tag clouds have died in Web 2.0. Users sucks at tagging content. Non-technical users suck at tagging even more than technical ones. A lot of people will pick first category from the list because they don't really care about proper tagging, but only care about getting their thread posted and visible to others. People will argue that something belongs or doesn't belong to a tag. Discussions will evolve and drift, provoking further discussions if old tags are relevant or not anymore, provoking further discussions about need for categories to be user-editable for existing threads. Etc. ect.

    So the solution that internet forums have settled at over the years is "well, that sucks but its best solution for the problem we've got and that easy solution you are proposing is not as easy as you think". Discourse tried to fix this by including separate hierarchy for threads with tags. But result for this was predictable with people not using those at all or using them incorrectly or demanding this feature to be exapnded, which would kill the performance or cause other of aforementioned issues.

    On sidenote, if 90% of threads on forum belong to a "football" category, is that category even useful? Seems like this forum should have "Misago" category then and collect 99% of threads into it ;)

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    Members 155 posts
    Feb. 7, 2023, 4 p.m.
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    You might imagine. We are a community, formed around a niche interest, but not defined by it. Currently, of our most recent ten threads two are our club related, one football related, and the other seven (including the most recent five) general interest threads (2 quizes, two news/current affairs, two ephemera, two club, one sport, one general discussion). Our most active thread is "Mundane Moments".

    More than 50% of the threads, and around 50% of the posts, are non-sport related.

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    Members 155 posts
    Feb. 7, 2023, 6:52 p.m.
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    Would it be possible to have tags, not categories, but pre-defined, searchable ( singularly or in multiples )?

    A way to formalise search criteria?

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    Project Lead
    Feb. 7, 2023, 7:54 p.m.
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    Maybe? Predefined tags like Discourse is something I've considered in past, but I won't commit to doing until I am sure I want to keep them in v4. Otherwise I would spend months implementing a feature only to drop it in next version and that's guaranteed to annoy plenty of people.

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    Members 155 posts
    Feb. 7, 2023, 8:08 p.m.
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    That's fair enough. There are pros and cons with everything. As things are, the pros outweigh the cons for me, and It certainly works as is.

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    Project Lead
    Feb. 27, 2023, 2:46 p.m.
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    I am cautiously onboard with idea that it's useful to have two separate thread categories. But it's not going to happen anytime fast :D

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    Members 155 posts
    Feb. 27, 2023, 5:47 p.m.
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    No problem. I am very aware of the level of work that just keeping things ticking along involves. The suggestion is purely in the spirit of feedback.

    Misago is very good. You've done an amazing job here.

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    Project Lead
    Feb. 28, 2023, 11:09 a.m.
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    Yup, main blocker for this change IMHO will be new permissions system, so sometime after 2.0