This is a petition to add more categories to the forums. Right now everything is under general. Could we at least create a code forum. A beginners forum? The “General” category is so broad that its completely worthless. Tags aren’t much help. You might say well there isn’t enough discussion to facilitate a new forums, and that’s like trying to help my writers block by removing creative restraints. Constraints actually facilitate discussion.
For example, if I wanted to make a post about a new kind of F# powered piece of software, is it appropriate for the forums? Let’s check General. Hmm I don’t see any posts like that maybe this forums is really about “asking questions”. Where else do I go, Oh I guess there’s nowhere else. I guess I’ll go to the Slack.
Please post below what categories you want to see so we can escape the tyranny of “general”.
I would personally like to see Game Development because I periodically see activity in the slack but it gets washed away and we lose important information.
I feel that tags do not solve the problem because rules (and cultures) cannot be created on a tag by tag basis. The category is too broad to actually build any community around. For example this post I just made is TECHNICALLY against the rules for this forums , but also not exactly appropriate for the Foundation forums. My post is an outlaw at birth. Tags are good for finding content, but you can’t build a home in them. Give me a “random” forum, a game dev forum, a code forum, a beginners forum and we can at least have some room for discussions to grow and relationships to form outside of slack.
In essence while Tags and Forums are nearly the same construct, they are wildly different from a UX perspective in the way that Tags and Folders are nearly the same construct but are wildly different from a UX perspective.
Edit: Spoke to Reed a bit after this in person.
I understand better why they made this decision and I think perhaps my vision for the forums is not in line with the foundations intentions for this forums.
The forum is disorganized because everything is in a heap. The heap is searchable via tags but still appears disorganized. Tags don’t affect how the main page looks, unlike categories, and don’t affect browsing, so don’t create order.
I am totally new and would like to understand more about functional programming via F#. I have found other communities like Julia, RStudio, Stan, all with more granular categories, easier to “participate” at a way most comfortable to myself as time goes, eg, initially just read posts, later make posts that believed to be not too stupid, and finally feel confident to answer questions to share what I believe to be worth sharing.
As I am totally new, I have little idea what tags to search to find something that should be most interesting and most useful to myself – at least I don’t find this very cost-effective to me.
