Iiuc that would reduce the number of categories quite drastically. Besides the effort of recategorizing my main question would be if a Help âsuperâ category would still be helpful for filtering and searching. If 80% of all posts would then be in the âHelpâ category, that would IMHO render the categories useless.
Just my 2 ct.
Thank you for starting a discussion about this.
Here is a (in my little head) well-thought-through alternative proposal:
Super-Category | Sub-Category |
---|---|
Community |
|
Technologies |
|
Help (mostly individual requests) |
|
Market |
|
Meta |
What would it mean for some real-world topics?
Recommendations for MP3 player apps that display album art? (individual request, now software) â Help
Is SailfishOS ready for daily use? (individual request, now #software:alternative-oses) â Help > AltOSes
Microsoft "goes Open Source" (= acquired GitHub) (now #community) â Technologies
đ©đȘ đŹđ§ Aktuell | Austrian Fairphoners (now #community) â Community > Local
â List of Fairphone 2 Resellers + prices (now #community) â Technologies > Fairphone
Sailfish OS 2.1.4.14 alpha6 release (now #software:alternative-oses) â Community > Developing
â FP2 modem firmware (now #software:alternative-oses) â Community > Developing (or Help > Guides)
Edit: @paulakreuzer I gave some more reasoning above.
Edit2: @paulakreuzer And I saw my mistake with the Is SailfishOS ready for daily use? topic.
I also posted a follow-up description here:
Okay, I see there is a lot to discuss.
I donât get this one.
Wouldnât that be Technologies > App Tips in your proposal?
Why move this out of AltOSes?
I think this would make more sense in market.
This is a release ready for use and the topic is not about developing.
Iâd like to see this from a forum visitorâs perspective:
- I need help with something â Category Help
- I want to discover new things â Community (for things that concern Fairphoners) or Technologies (for things that concern the electronics industry or the internet, etc.)
So when I need help with my SailfishOS installation, I go to Help > AltOSes. When I want to find out about the various OSes that I can install on my Fairphone (this is before the trouble starts ) I go to the Community > Developing category. I wouldnât see this category as solely for software in development, but also for releases (is software ever finished?).
Yep, and I hope that others also take a bit of their time and give their thoughts, so that we can reach a better result together.
Iâm with you up until here.
I just think it makes more sense to say:
- I need help with an issue I already have â Help
- I need help with finding out how to install another OS or finding out whether itâs even what I want to do â Operating Systems (I wouldnât look in Community for that).
- I want to meet, join or discuss something âoff-topicâ with the community â Community
I think it makes sense to keep topics where developers discuss the development in Developing and topics where users discuss the usage of the usable operating system in Operating Systems/Alternative OSes (whatever the name).
Be honest - you just want it to be an even number of categories! Joking aside, here is a proposal that takes into account your critque:
Super-Category | Sub-Category |
---|---|
Community |
|
Operating Systems |
|
Industry Change (?) |
|
Help (mostly individual requests) |
|
Market |
|
Meta | [âŠ] |
Ad an earlier proposed âTechnologyâ category
@paulakreuzer You said you didnât understand my proposal for a category called âTechnologyâ. My aim was to give the #community category a sharper profile. Thus Iâd like to find a new home for these and similar topics because they do not directly concern the Fairphone community*:
- Microsoft "goes Open Source" (= acquired GitHub)
- Other phones that are fairly fair? (e.g. Shiftphone)
- â List of Fairphone 2 Resellers + prices
- Lush UK chooses Fairphone from Phone Co-op!
- Light Phone 2 (e-ink smartphone lasting 5 days)
At the moment they are just âparkedâ in #community because we put everything there that doesnât fit somewhere else.
Ad Developing category
Iâd like to make it more visible that the developers are also part of the Fairphone community. Thus my idea to move the sub-category to the #community category.
Ad Operating Systems
If we have Help categories for the OSes, we donât need respective sub-categories in an Operating Systems category, IMHO. There arenât so many general discussions per OS. Plus, unlike Help topics, in general the topics in the current #software category and its sub-categories are well-described in their title and it is clear which OS they are talking about.
Ad âIndustry Changeâ (?)
Maybe we just have to define the #fairphone-road-map category a little bit broader to also allow for (smartphone/internet/electronics) industry related topics. Then we might not need a sub-category specifically for Fairphone. It wouldnât hurt though, IMO.
PS.: Please also letâs not forget to revise the category slugs. They are inconsistent and also quite long in the present form: #fairphone-help vs. #fairphone2help etc.
* I see the #community category more like a âmetaâ category, where we discuss about the community, their work, their opinions etc.
This makes no sense to me. What do apps have to do with Operating Systems?
Why a super category with only one sub-category?
This doesnât make a lot of sense to me either. Why do we need sub-help categories for the individual OSes? If there is a bug in an OS it should be discussed in the bugtracker, issues not caused by the OS can be discussed in a more general help category and if you just have an issue because you donât know how to use a function of an OS it should go into OSes.
PS: I missed the lower part of your post.
That explains the super-category for roadmap/fairphone.
I just think there will always be topics that donât fit anywhere else, so some kind of âoff-topicâ category should exist. I donât mind that not being the community category.
In other categories there is the possibility to post topics without specifying any category. Maybe that would be an option for us too? At first I thought it looked strange, but Iâve gotten used to it.
I like the idea.
Yeah because the general discussion takes place in a few long topics instead of lots of short topics.
Okay here is my new proposal for super-categories based on what you want your intention is for posting/reading on the forum:
- you want to ask for help â Help
- you want to find guides â Guides (would include all guides, all topics should be 1-post-topics and it would be structured by cross-linking and tagging)
- you want to meet, join or contribute to the community â Community
- you want to talk about the company â Fairphone/Company/Roadmap/whatever
- you have a general questions â General
- you want to discuss something unrelated to Fairphone â Unrelated
- you want to buy/sell â Market
- you want to discuss the forum itself â Meta
That way there could be OS specific help-sub categories like you suggested while guides on installing/updating/using the OSes would be in Guides.
General would be for questions/discussions about the product (including all the âshould I buy it?â and âdoes it have function x?â topics), an OS (âdoes x work on this OS?â, âis this OS ready for daily use?â) or any other general questions related to Fairphone.
General + Unrelated could also both just be uncategorized or joined with the Roadmap category in a super category.
In the early days (Nov 2015) the #fairphone-road-map category was called âFairnessâ and the #community category was called "Fairphone CafĂ©.
What about a new Café* category alongside the #community category? I imagine it could work a bit like this**:
Super Category | Sub-categories |
---|---|
Café |
|
Anything thatâs not directly connected to any of the phone products (FP1/FP2), the company itself or an OS/apprecommendations would go into the super category.
Revised proposal
Iâll copy in a revised complete proposal:
Super-Category | Sub-Category |
---|---|
Community |
|
Café |
|
Help (mostly individual requests) |
|
Guides | |
Market |
|
Meta | [âŠ] |
Note that Repair, Hardware, Roadmap and Software categories would be most affected by this (I think ).
Testing with real topics
Remaining Questions (FMPOV)
- Do collections such as â List of local repair shops that are familiar with Fairphones (by City) also go into Guides?
- Why is nobody else interested in such a big decision? @moderators should give their opinion, and I also invite @trust_level_4 and @trust_level_3 to share their views. Otherwise this happens (this is a threat! ):
*Actually something very Austrian:
** Though I would avoid the namings âGeneralâ and âUnrelatedâ because they are not self-explanatory.
Weâre getting closer (to finding common ground among just the two of us ).
I just have a few points of criticism left.
E.g.: I donât feel the articles for the CafĂ© sub-categories. Especially âThe Softwareâ.
Why do you think we need this separate from FP2 help?
To avoid confusion (is this a guide or not?) we could make a super category for all wikis and a sub-category for wikis.
I fully agree with these. I think the rule should be: Fixing something that got broken â help. âFixingâ/Improving something that doesnât work for everybody the way it is designed â DIY.
I also agree with the rest of your examples btw.
Since you asked: I canât make myself care about it enough to spend time on it.
Ok, thanks for the honesty! Im just worried that in the end people, who are accustomed to the status quo, are confused or point out inconsistencies that @paulakreuzer and me hadnât considered.
I donât feel a need for change, but if you do, feel free to act, Iâll just adapt .
Do you want to discriminate the little article??? Iâm not insisting on it, but at least for phone and company it would make it clear that the category is not about each and every phone, but about Fairphoneâs product. Iâm fine without it, too.
Oh, do you mean that we simply should have a structure like this, where issues with the Google-infected OS and with the hardware go into a âgeneralâ FP2 subcategory of help (like it is now with FP2 Help)? Visual:
Super category | Sub-category |
---|---|
Help (mostly individual requests) |
|
I first thought that there should be one Android 6 category and one hardware category, but this setup is probably better from a non-technically-inclined FP2 userâs perspective (reason: how should one know from the first moment whether it is software or hardware failure?).
Since the â List of local repair shops that are familiar with Fairphones (by City) is not a guide per-se, Iâd put it where people in need would find it helpful: the Help category. The Help super category should host all such topics that arenât guides, but are still relevant for both FP1 and FP2 (canât think of many other topics atm).
Let me post another revised structure
Super-Category | Sub-Category |
---|---|
Community |
|
Café |
|
Help |
|
Guides | |
Market |
|
Meta | [âŠ] |
Please give feedback on the remaining question marks (?).
I do care, but thatâs not something Iâm good at. I trust the people who are mods and use the forums a lot to take care of this. I never even use the categories TBH. I just look at my notifications and the recent threadsâŠ
I suppose it is important the categories work well for the new people, but also for regulars and moderators. I take it you can see the viewpoint of all 3 interest groups. I mean, someone whoâs really new here ainât gonna read this specific thread.
Iâm with @AnotherElk
I like the latest suggestion for Help and Guides super-categories, preferably with having the same subcategories for both.
I would also support the suggested Hardware sub-category.
- Lately Iâm far more limited in the time I can spend on the forum. Iâm just not finding time.
- I personally hardly interact with the categories system. Iâm curious how many people actually do. In any case, the opinion of the current users is more important than mine. My limited use is not because the system is lacking, it is more that other tools already help me get to where I want to go.
I think if we wouldnât have the categories there would be chaos on the forum. I at least use them a lot:
I agree with @johannes in every aspect.
Yet, there is just one point, that makes me wonder:
Why the âsuperâ-category Cafe?
I can understand, that itâs a local (Vienna) thing, but in general this name lacks the explanatory factor, that all the other super-categories have. Plus, just from the name, there is no evident distinction between Community and Cafe, as both names imply a social meeting point.
Therfore I would opt for another name. If I understand correct, that this category is for topics around Fairphone, but not Fairphone in itself, itâs something like a Fairphone Orbit? (Well, that - as a name - would not really be more explanatory, just more different from Community.)
The categorisation of the forum just doesnât excite me
I personally wouldnât expend so much effort on trying to have a clean & tidy forum. While the sub-cats are useful, I donât think that means we should always have them for each super-cat. It just means you (I say you because I never move or categorise topics) spend loads of time doing something which doesnât necessarily mean very much to everyone.
#'s are the future
#YouAsked
The name âCafĂ©â was initially @anon90052001âs idea. He is from the US, not Austrian. I think that CafĂ© is pretty omnipresent, except in Germany, maybe:
Community might be a âsocial meeting pointâ in its use in German speaking countries. Wikipedia describes it as follows:
In my head Community is for discussions about the Fairphone community and Café is for everything else that Fairphoners want to discuss.
An alternative name for CafĂ© could be âLoungeâ and for Community it could be âMovementâ. (Iâm not saying that we have to change both.)