Category Reorganization 2022

Meta Moderation
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@fricklerhandwerk raised the issue with me that we probably have too many categories on the NixOS Discourse. For example, we have a Development>Documentation and a Governance>Documentation Team, each with very few posts. It seems like it would make more sense to combine these two and then people interested in improving documentation only would have one category to follow.

The Governance category was originally made by me without much discussion, and it seems like they are not being used much. I suspect this is because most governance-related discussion happens on GitHub and Matrix.

The Special Interest Groups categories have also seen very little activity and I think should be moved into another top-level category.

Given all this, I propose the following changes be made:

  • Merge Governance>Documentation Team → Development>Documentation
  • Merge Governance>Security Team → Development>Security
  • Move from “Governance” to “Development” and rename
    • Moderation Team → Moderation
    • Marketing Team → Marketing
    • NixOS Release Team → NixOS Releases
    • RFC Steering Committee → RFCs
    • Infrastructure Team → Infrastructure
  • Merge Special Interests Groups (SIG)>SIG Worflow Automation → Development
  • Move and rename Special Interests Groups (SIG)>SIG Deployments → Development>Deployments
  • Remove Special Interests Groups (SIG) Category
  • Remove the Governance category

Please let me know what you think of these changes. I’m not particularly set on doing it the way I’ve proposed, I wanted to have something to start the discussion.

I’ll hold off on making any of these changes until 2022-07-14T07:00:00Z to give people time to comment.

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In addition to these changes, I would probably remove the Uncategorized label, which is where most posts that probably should be labeled as Learn end up.

I know we talked about this previously and your fear was that forcing categorization would inhibit posting, but honestly I don’t think anyone would actually not post just because they can’t find a label - especially once we reduce the number of labels.

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Depending on how the defaults work, I guess one way to test this suspicion would be to either disable the default (force a choice) if possible, or else change the default category (either to Learn or to some gag category such as I didn't pick an appropriate category), without removing/disabling Uncategorized.

If thoughtful threads keep ending up in Uncategorized, I’d see it as a good sign that people who are trying to be thoughtful are failing to find a place where their post fits (and might be dissuaded by its absence). If the posts in it aren’t appropriate at all, it’s probably net-good to remove it.

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While we’re at it, Meta could also be merged into Moderation.

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I haven’t really gotten any push back on my original proposal and it is past the time I said I’d wait, so I’m going to start implementing it now.

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