Hi Jeff,
Honestly, I don’t have a lot of experience, but I sense that some communities work better when the content is very specific. If I am an Elementary School teacher, I don’t want to read content about college entrance exams. And vice versa.
But they are not totally independent communities either because there are some topics that may be of interest to all of them (although not too many). I come back to my example to answer your question. I have 3 big categories “Elementary school”, “Middle School” and “High School” and I want to post a topic on “Scratch, a fun and easy programming language”.
I can create the topic and tag it as “Elementary School” and “Middle School” but where do I put it?
- If I create a “General” category, I will soon have a mixed bag, where some users will publish things that would be better in other categories. I’m not a big fan of “General” or “Miscellaneous” categories.
- If I create a more specific category such as “Programming languages” or “Coding”, many users will not subscribe because they are not too interested in the world of programming, although they might be interested in Scratch if you present it in its natural category (ex Elementary School)
I know that it is possible to create sidebars (using discourse-category-sidebars) and put tag links in them. It would be a solution, but it would imply that the users correctly tagged each of the posts. And it would have two entry points: the category (Elementary School) and the tag (Elementary School) with different contents …
I hope I have explained myself well. Thanks for your attention, Jeff, it’s an honor. And I will not miss an opportunity to tell you how great your platform is.