Certain add-on support sub-category

Meta
#1

As far as I know, discourse allows only two levels of categories: categories and sub-categories.
Currently, we have a sub-category “Add-on Support” in “Add-ons” category.
My proposal is to have “Add-on Support” as a top-level category so add-on authors can request creating sub-categories for their certain add-ons.
pros:

  • Such sub-categories (as well as any other sub-category) will have its email so add-on authors can post it as “Support Email” on AMO.
    This is the main reason why I want it.
  • Topics in such sub-categories will be “real” topics about certain issues, not single huge $addonname support thread, so discussions will be more structured.

Any thoughts?

1 Like
#2

At the moment, there are only a handful of add-on support threads, so creating a top-level category seems like overkill to me (there are plenty of inactive categories in this forum, but that’s also a problem in my opinion). It’s also likely that posters will be confused between the two categories and we will have to be moving posts around. I think the disadvantages are greater that the benefits.

I see your point about more structured conversation, but I think only a couple of very active developers would benefit.

#3

The whole point of discourse is to evolve categories when needed, so if there is a point where the traffic of specific add-ons topics are high enough, they can be moved to new categories.

#4

I agree with the point about wanting to not have a single topic per add-on for support. I’m not sure what the right solution is though. If you’re adept with Discourse you can reply as a linked topic. Moderators could also move questions to their own topics. I’m not sure how we could automate this while making sure the add-on author gets notifications. For now I think it needs to fall to moderators to make sure the author is @ mentioned and the topics are split up and/or linked. We could offer tags for moderators as well.

Maybe a web form would be the best user experience?

And yes, we’ve intended for some time to review the existing categories, this has been waiting on some housekeeping around policy and ownership (and we could also use more hands).

#5

That’s a problem, true.[quote=“Kensie, post:4, topic:7255”]
Maybe a web form would be the best user experience?
[/quote]
You mean a web form on a separate server which is not connected to discourse in any way?

My point is to have a add-on support by email while keeping it public and to involve other users into a discussion.
Of course, some users would prefer to keep their report/support request private so I have to leave a private email along with public one. This raises one more issue: AMO allows to have only one support email and there is no way to add a note like “email you send will be publicly available” but it could be resolved by providing support info only in the add-on description (where mailto: links a broken, by the way). But all of this is other issues.
I’ve looked to other add-on support threads and tried to estimate a number of posts normalized to add-on users number. And it seems that there is less posts here on discourse than I get by email. I’m afraid that some part of the users just give up when they see a prompt like “please, sign up”.
So, if there is any way to post to single thread by email (for unregistered users) I thing that I could bear with single thread for multiple issues.

#6

Why would I mean that?!

#7

@leo - Thoughts here? This is a good point about having add-on specific email addresses as a benefit to doing add-on support.

Obviously this would be a good case for category “categories”, could a single sub-category have multiple emails that feed into it? I have a feeling implementing a form would be simpler than that though…

#8

I just didn’t get what do you mean by “web form”.