Cleaning up Meta categories in light of Tags

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Continuing the discussion from Early preview of the new tagging plugin:

@eviltrout

(…)
I’ve just deployed the preview release of discourse-tagging here on meta for us to play with and collect feedback. The code is also there for review and PRs, try it out and let us know what you think! (I will add some tags now)

Maybe you guys weren’t intending on tags to be a long-term feature here on Meta, but wouldn’t it be great if Meta could serve as a stellar example of Good Practice with tags? I do believe it will require some oft-requested features (that seem to be on the roadmap) to work well, but already now we could use tags to do a decent cleanup on Meta.

I suggest converting the following Categories to Tags:

discourse-hub

The entire thing consists of 10 topics. Come on ^^

faq

Only need to mark actually frequently-asked-questions with this tag. I think it was always a bit of an odd thing to let people post directly into as if they should know what’s been frequently asked already.

login

Very low traffic, and it has many “cousins” spread around Support, Feature and Dev. This only makes category selection more confusing for users, and the sub-category doesn’t serve its purpose as a one-stop-shop for “all things ´login´”.

sso

not specific to one category. same as above.

wordpress

not specific to one category. same as above.

Others

installation

I think “installation” is ubiquitous enough to warrant tag-ification, but since it’s got decent traffic I suppose it’d be best to wait a bit and see how the other category-to-tag conversions fare.

spec & rfc

It’s tempting to tag-ify spec & rfc due to their low volume of posts, but since they don’t belong anywhere else than Feature it’ll be confusing if they pop up as options anywhere else. Fine as they are for now.

releases

I would like to see Releases become a sub-category under Dev. It’s not the sort of category you need to see in the parent selection.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@erlend_sh

releases

I would like to see Releases become a sub-category under Dev. It’s not the sort of category you need to see in the parent selection.

I disagree with this one. This category was born out of a heated discussion about roadmap planning and transparency. And the changes batched in a particular release are more relevant to enthusiastic users (the whole population here on meta) vs the dev category which is pretty much only relevant to contributors.

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

I was on the fence about it, so consider me swayed

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I don’t think it is necessary to overthink this at the moment.

The main advantage of tags is they can cross cut across multiple categories. So if the proposed tags are not useful in multiple categories then they are a bad idea.

[riking (Kane York)]

@erlend_sh

sso

not specific to one category. same as above.

I disagree with this - the SSO category is pretty much for implementations only of SSO, not discussion about SSO itself.

FAQ was always a bit weird, I agree.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@erlend_sh

Maybe you guys weren’t intending on tags to be a long-term feature here on Meta, but wouldn’t it be great if Meta could serve as a stellar example of Good Practice with tags?

Regardless of the decisions about individual tags and categories, yes, I do think it would be good to use them here in an intentional way if possible.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Revisiting this, I definitely support extremely low volume categories becoming tags. I think “there are (tiny number of) topics in this category” is a strong data backed argument in favor of a category being converted to a tag.

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

For starters then I’ll migrate:

• Discourse Hub to a tag, and move to Meta
• Login to a tag, and move to support/dev as appropriate.