You two have made this topic look like the start of a tutorial with your clear and informative posts. 
I’ve made this long response because I’ve been thinking about how we can think about setting up new forums. So I thought that I’d experiment with your issue to see if I could actually prepare something and see if you find this useful.
I agree with considering tags instead of putting everything into categories which is what I’m doing myself in some private forums. But you need to be aware that, at present, there are two clear advantages to categories:
- Categories are essential for controlling access
- Plug-ins allow much more customization of categories
You may want to look at Is anyone else using tags on a Discourse forum in a big way?
New tag features are frequent developments at present and will be a large step to making tags easier to use. These include:
The key issue here is which of your requirements should be handled as categories rather than tags. But we don’t have to decide that at first. We design the categories which are heavy features and then look at what can be converted to tags.
The decision making process
There’s more than one way to approach designing your categories. When not considering tags as the primary mechanism then I would go:
- What categories are needed?
- What categories require separate user access controls?
- Do I now need the default categories?
Here a different route than would normally be used because you can see the minimum default categories that might allow you to do everything else with tags.
- Do I need the default categories?
- What categories require separate user access controls?
- What other categories are needed that don’t require user access controls?
A. What is the overall requirement?
First, what is the rationale for the community that will be used to develop the forum structure - community and forum are different.
From your first post I can say that you have the following requirements for your community:
- The main purpose is support
-
Support is driven by product i.e. no products means no customers and no support required.
-
Support is segmented by customer status i.e. customer vs non-customer
-
Product has an additional feature request - from customer and non-customer
Additional requirements for the forum are that:
-
Department manages product - but customer/user interacts through product
Notes:
- Support might be managed by department but the customers/users probably relate to the products they use. So I wouldn’t complicate the forum by including your organization structure unless your departments are brands or subsidiary companies that the customers and users will almost exclusively identify with in their normal dealings.
- I use Customer here because there should be a caveat on the use of VIP. It removes the option of creating a VIP subgroup of customers later on. I have seen this problem before in a forum for community professionals, so I would reserve VIP for further segmentation.
B. What are the minimum categories to achieve the overall requirement?
1. Do I need the default categories?
I consider all the default categories to be essential but you might not. Just be aware that the defaults are set with a lot of consideration for the requirements of the average forum owner and forum users:
-
#lounge
By default this is for Trust Level 3 (TL3) users. I suggest that you retain it as a perk for your most active non-customers. You might be tempted to use it for your VIP category by renaming it and reduce the minimum TL to access it. Don’t: keep your VIP group and category separate from the default groups and categories.
-
#site-feedback
For all users to suggest improvements or point out issues in your forum.
-
#staff
For admins and moderators so not visible to most users.
-
#uncategorized
The default setting is allow uncategorized topics.
You may want to disable the suppress uncategorized badge setting to make such topics more visible in topic lists so they are more likely to be assigned to a more relevant category.
- This makes a bit more work for moderators and high TL users but makes it much easier for new users who can’t decide on a category.
- This category is the default
shared drafts category which is another reason for keeping it.
Example
At this point your minimum categories would be:
- Lounge
- Site Feedback
- Staff
- Uncategorized
2. What categories need user access controls?
The only definite requirement is that:
-
Support is segmented by customer status i.e. customer vs non-customer
You want to separate users and customers so categories must be used for this. Any other method will be oh so painful.
That means that you need customers and non-customers each in a separate Group with at least one category where:
- Customers have CRS (Create, Read, See) access
- Non-customers have only S (See) access.
Example
At this point your minimum categories would be:
- Customer
- Lounge
- Site Feedback
- Staff
- Uncategorized
3. What other categories are needed that don’t require user access controls?
Your requirements are:
-
Support is driven by product
-
Product has an additional feature request
Even without your requirements, the structure so far looks decidedly inadequate because it is not clear where to put product support requests. So you need at least a product support category which then requires a Customer sub-category. I would leave a high level Customer category as a place to address issues that are only shared with and probably only visible to the customers.
You can rank product feature requests by using the Feature Ranking plug-in. This works by ranking topics in a category so you need at least one category. Then you might have two options to display the rankings by product:
- One category with views filtered by a product tag.
AFAIK, this might be a show stopper now but I haven’t tried it.
- One
Feature Request sub-category per Product category
Whichever option is chosen, it will be easier to place the Feature Request topics in a sub-category.
Example without individual Product categories
At this point your minimum categories would be:
- Customer
- Lounge
- Site Feedback
- Staff
-
Support
- Uncategorized
Example with individual Product categories
At this point your minimum categories would be:
- Customer
- Lounge
-
Product 1
- …
-
Product 100
- Site Feedback
- Staff
- Uncategorized
Now comes the question of the relationship between products and those who use them.
| Issue |
One Category for Support
|
One Category for Each Product
|
| Do most/all customers use most/all products? |
Yes |
No |
| Do most/all customers relate to individual products |
No |
Yes |
| Which has better support in core Discourse |
Tags are more limited |
Categories have better support |
| Which has better support in plug-ins |
Tags are more limited |
Categories have better support |
| Easier category management |
Yes |
No |
| Easier view and report management |
No |
Yes |
| Easier for new Discourse user |
No |
Yes |
On balance, I think that you should go with individual categories for each product as it will work and the main disadvantages are the long category view and a boring period spent setting up category and sub-category details and group access.
Example with individual Product categories (as shown above)
At this point your minimum categories would be:
- Customer
- Lounge
-
Product 1
- …
-
Product 100
- Site Feedback
- Uncategorized
4. What other categories might be useful
I’m sure that you are aware of other categories you might want that you haven’t specified here, e.g.:
- Company documents e.g. generic terms and conditions across all customers and products
- Product documents e.g. product-related documents
- Downloads e.g. product-related software such as old versions of a software product itself
- How To tutorials
- FAQs
C. What features should be tags?
As to what tags you should use, I’d need more info e.g. on how departments manage support.
At the start, I would leave Department out your forum because you can develop reporting based on Product with summaries by Department that wouldn’t need any visible tagging.
I’m referring you to existing topics here to give you the flavor of what can be done with tags in a support forum. These topics are newest to oldest:
Also some useful plug-ins:
And useful theme components:
