Improve Discourse categories organization

Meta
#1

I was looking on the home page and I saw that few categories can have a better organizations.
Discourse usage is growing so organize better can be important to improve the use.

We have https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/communities but there are outside:

I think that https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/mozweekend can be removed because are years that we are not doing them and the section is empty.

Also https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/participation-leaders I think that can be inside https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/participation.

Also https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/mcws can be inside https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/participationsystems

Also inside https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/campus-clubs :

Probably also this https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/connected-devices can closed or removed.

In that way the homepage is more organized and we can remove stuff (maybe create a section Graveyard and put the dead section like on bugzilla can be another step).

Also in that way is better to configure notifications, because I have too many section silenced for local community that are not english.

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#2

Reorganising some of our categories is certainly in our backlog, and has been worked on in the past. It’s one of those things which requires constant revisiting, however, so thanks for the reminder! :smile:

We were a little constrained by not having tagging enabled, which will now allow us to reorganise a few more categories into a better hierarchy.

We are still slightly constrained by tagging not being supported through email, and not having a level of categorisation above categories.

At the moment this is necessary for communities wanting their own subcategories. In future my plan is to give all local community categories their own top level category, and remove #communities as a category altogether, as it doesn’t need to exist as a category in its own right.

It was flagged for deletion the last time we did this so I’m not sure why it hasn’t been. I’ll add it to the next round of reorganisation.

I asked @nukeador about this last time. Is this category still necessary? Can it be archived, should it be merged into #participation?

I think it’s sufficiently different to not live in there. Also I know @majken and @tad wanted to experiment with using Discourse for project management, which they’d probably need a subcategory for.

@Christos with the launch of OSSN, which student/clubs categories can we archive and which should be kept?

I identified this in the previous round, but never found an owner I could ask about what was active/what should be archived.

We already have an archive: #archives

I’ve been working on the scope of an opt-in style of category subscription upstream, and it’s on its way!

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#4

@Mte90 I strongly agree that all the communities should go under
https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/communities

this helps in easy segregation of topics in the more organised way.

@leo Homepage has a purpose and giving all communities a top level category will just spam the homepage. Accessing them under communities looks more clean and organised.

#5

It would certainly be a mess with the current homepage, but even if all the communities were under /c/communities, the homepage would still be a mess.

I think the problem here isn’t the organisation of categories, but the organisation and design of the homepage.