Forum purpose & categories

From the Admin Quick Start Guide:

Don’t create too many initial categories

  • Clearly define your community’s purpose in a pinned or banner topic.

So, let’s do that. It would help also to identify relevant categories. I would say we have this forum to allow users to

  • get support: [Support]
  • share ideas & brainstorm about app improvements: [Features & Development]
  • discuss project management & related issues (e.g. communication, translation): [Project management] - this can be added later
  • share anything else podcasting, AntennaPod or Open Source related: [General]

I was thinking to start a topic about the logo, with updates about the process in the first post, and using the rest of the thread to let users share their thoughts. I’d put this in the ‘General’ category. What d’you think?

Sounds great!

Lounge can probably be deleted. Discourse created that one automatically. Staff and Uncategorized need to stay, I think (system categories).

General could maybe be Uncategorized instead (can not be deleted). Maybe translations could be their own category (also, awarding translator badge).

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Launge I think is only for users with trust level 3, so we could delete it but there’s no big harm keeping it either.

Uncategorised could be used indeed instead of General. It feels a bit less correct/welcoming, but ok.

So then we have:

  • Support: get support
  • Development: share ideas & brainstorm about app improvements. Subcategories:
    • Bug
    • Feature request
    • Improvement
  • Project management: discuss project management & related issues - this can be added later. Subcategories:
    • Communication
    • Translations
  • Uncategorized: share anything else podcasting, AntennaPod or Open Source related (can we edit te description of this?)

If you agree, could you apply these categories (or make me admin)?

Oh, and I like the badges, like contributor & translator! :+1:

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I would vote to simplify the structure (no sub categories):

  • Support
  • Feature request
  • Bug report
  • Project management
  • Translations
  • Uncategorized

Sure, also works. :slight_smile:

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I created the categories. What do you think about making this thread public in #project-management?

Great, thanks. I’m fine with publishing it :+1:

How about adding

  • Alpha/Beta Testing
  • Announcements - lock down to the admin, moderators to post new topics?
  • ‘User Community’ or ‘Podcast Discussions’ - since there are a lot of users, we can let them discuss non AntennaPod and build a community
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I would do announcements on the website (soon) and on Twitter. The other categories look good to me.

I assume we would retire Google Groups?

Yes that’s my plan. I would not delete it but add a big warning that users should go to the forum instead (just in case we need to switch back at some point but I hope that this does not happen).

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  • A/B testing: yup, good one
  • announcements: indeed, better on the website
  • community: I like the idea of encouraging Podcast-related talks - I can imagine that getting it’s own, dedicated category. For other talks by the user community, there is already the default category Lounge (which requires I believe trust level 3)
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@ByteHamster @tonytamsf

I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but a couple of people on GitHub have created some relatively simple scripts to pull data out of Google Groups to be imported into Discourse. I can appreciate if you want a clean start, but can also appreciate the other side of wanting the history and previous work.

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I will let @ByteHamster decide.

My recommendation is not to pull in the archives

  1. it will junk up the forum with inactive threads
  2. the original participants are not part of the conversation so we won’t be able to get timely response
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That’s my personal preference too. However, I didn’t know if you were aware that could be done.

I was not aware that this is possible but I also think that importing is not useful in our case. Most of the comments there are solved support requests with pretty short answers. I hope that this forum can become a bit like a knowledge base where you can also search if you have questions. For that, the answers should probably be better than the ones on Google Groups.

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Brilliant. That’s what I was hoping to hear!