The thread on Learning web development: marking guides and questions is clearly a success, with 262 replies, and over 8800 views.
However, since it is such a long thread, it can be hard to see which replies are answers to which questions, or to find past discussions of a given exercise or question. It seems like it would be helpful to give learner discussions more space on this board than a single thread. I can think of several ways to do this, which are not mutually exclusive (we could combine two or more of them):
- Split out a separate thread for each lesson (and link to them individually from MDN); have a thread for “other” learner questions.
- Encourage the use of the “learning” tag when a learner starts a thread. I’ve experimented with adding this tag to some threads. Note that when you click on the tag, you see all threads with that tag across Mozilla’s Discourse, not just those in the MDN category. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, but might confuse newcomers a bit.)
- Create a subcategory for learner discussions, such as “MDN/Learn”. This would essentially create a separate discussion board, even though it is “under” the MDN board. You can see an example of how subcategories show up in the Add-ons category. A potential down side of this option is that a newcomer who clicked through from MDN to the subcategory might not discover the higher-level, general MDN category.
- Other options that I haven’t thought of?
What do you think? I’m especially interested in hearing from folks who came here for the learning thread, and then stuck around.