Users tend to mistakenly create topics in the "Community" category

that can occurs if we don’t allow post in that category.

I don’t see any settings to acomplish this task.

REFERENCES

NOTE

Let’s see if there is a component to allow this
, not component found.

Regards.,

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Blocking posts in a category results in confusion for the user as you can’t see that posts are blocked in the new topic window until you try to actually submit the new post. Then the user is left with an error message that isn’t always easy for them to understand.

Rather than blocking, I thinking renaming it to something more clear as suggested by @mattdm above would be better from a usability perspective.

This is not precisely true, in security category you can filter by $USER level when the $USER click on it, and Also you can give a custom messages for that purpose.

The settings are follow:

  • See
  • Reply
  • Create

I’ve also tweaks the Category Message:

Please use this category for discussions related to the Fedora community, For troubleshooting issues use the categories below.

Regards.,

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If we are referring to the same thing, that message only appears if you view the category and then create the topic from within the category. If you just click “New Topic” and then select the category from within the new topic window you don’t see the message. Or is there a way to make the message appear in that case as well?

I suspect many people don’t browse to a category and then try to create a post there but instead try to create a topic and then choose the category. Because of this, they never see any explanatory text, they just see the name of the category.

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This topic clashes with the request to create more categories discussed in some other topic :smiley: If people tend to write in the wrong one now that we have two categories, think what it could happens if we had dozen of categories. :smiley:

Apart giving another name to such category, that it is fine for me. I don’t see a big problem. If some people don’t care too much to the category when posting a new topic, we can’t do too much. When moderators spot a topic in the wrong category, moving it to the right one, imho, it is not a huge effort.

2 Likes

One thing that might contribute to selecting the wrong category can be seen in this image.

b5738f3825e39d850b8b3afa90e70ee0cff78651.png

I selected new topic then category and the first 2 lines are both community related discussions. Other categories can be seen by scrolling. As you can see, the pop-up shows “help con” on the second community line but it is impossible to see what the rest of the entry is.

I think if there is some way to control the size of the popup that it should be full window width, not half the window width as is the case with my browser. The narrow popup in the window prevents reading the entire text.

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Good point. There’s not a setting for the width; that suggests shorter category names wold be better!

However, there is a setting which will sort that dialog by activity. We have that off, keeping the list in the same order as the front page. I’m going to try turning that back to the default (which will sort the list by activity). Let’s see if that helps, or makes it worse, or causes other problems. (We can always put it back!)

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 so now:

d349c47856fef3155d1167ca228878bb7cf636ad.png

2 Likes

And, poll time :slight_smile:

We should rename the “Community related discussions category” to

  • News
  • Announcements
  • Either of the above
  • Something else (explained below)
  • Leave it as it is
  • I don’t care but want to vote

0 voters

Regardless of name, we should

  • Move the news/announce/community category to be a subcategory of New Users! Start Here!
  • Move New Users! Start Here! to be a subcategory of the news/announce/community one
  • Leave both at the top level
  • Actually we should merge both into one top level category
  • I don’t care

0 voters

The ‘help contributing to fedora’ category should

  • be removed (questions moved to Ask in English)
  • be moved to a top level category (maybe renamed “Join Fedora”)
  • something else
  • I don’t care

0 voters

IMHO “New users start here” is intended to give help/guidance to new forum’s users. It is not strictly related to Fedora, the announcements or the community.
Another idea could be to rename the “Community” category to “Join Fedora”.

In that case, there’s not necessarily a place for the general announcements (like “there’s a new Fedora Linux release”
 but maybe that’s okay? we have plenty of places for those kind of announcements already). And I think test day announcements actually could fit in Join Fedora, if we think of them as “ways to get involved” announcements. (Which is, I assume, why they’re here in the first place really, right?)

I think the “help contributing to Fedora” category also should be renamed. I don’t have much opinion on where it should go after being renamed.

Looks like

  • rename to Announcements
  • leave New User, Start Here as is
  • move posts from “Help contributing
” to Ask in English

I guess in the latter case we should tag with contributing if not already, and close any topics that aren’t really announcements or questions.

I can do some of this tonight, but other admin, mods feel feel to before then or pitch in. (I’ll post on the Matrix channel when I’m going to start so we can coordinate.) I’m not really in charge of this site — it’s all of us — I’m just an enthusiastic busybody. :classic_smiley:

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@mattdm no problem, take a break after these two days, I will charge of it tomorrow because is night here
 I will notify when the works end.

Regards.,

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Cool! If you need me to email Discourse Support to make bulk changes in the database, let me know.

Works done, I fixed all the problem


Regards.,

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Oooh, I thought of another thing to do here. I changed the default for the announcements category to “watching first posts”, which will cause a notification when we have a new announcement.

Changing that setting only changes it for new users.

Should we also change it for all existing users?
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

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