It is basically a space for users to provide suggestions and submit bug reports at the moment. Login is already integrated into our website, so the friction for players to enter it is minimal. Most people prefer Discord for chatting, so the general channel is rarely used. We are also starting to improve the delivery of game news, and the forum will also bring the latest updates.
However, I still think the organization could be better. I don’t know, I am still studying Discourse and trying to improve my instance.
In your opinion, how is the forum? What points could be improved when you first encounter it? Is the onboarding good enough? Or should I use a different homepage with categories instead of just “latest”?
I had a quick look around. It isn’t bad, but I’m not sure how to feel with reports and bugs having tags like this.. seems like a good spot for some subcategories to me
Pulling in user avatars from the game is very cool.
Font size is a bit small for me, I’d be increasing it a notch in the browser.
You do have a lot of tags, but that’s probably better than a lot of categories.
The tag name format “group:tag” is unusual, and arguably not 100% necessary – but if it’s working for you and your users, that’s the important thing.
The Closed Issues category is an interesting approach – I think I like it.
If most users are coming to post something, landing on Categories rather than Latest could be more straightforward – though your header links do provide good starting points.
Also, noting your Blokreations category of image posts, there are a bunch of add-ons you could look at to highlight images in that category, select some for the homepage, even collect them in user profiles:
You mean the “in:“ prefixed tags would be better as subcategories? I was thinking on that, but if we move it to closed issues this at-a-glance “metadata“ about where the issue happens would get lost
One thing I realised was that if they were to be placed as sub-categories, which parent would they be in? Both Support and Bug Tracking seem likely to have these (and having identically-named subcategories for different categories would just be plain confusing).
One thing I noticed was that the navigation links to ‘Report a Bug’ or ‘Give your Suggestion’ redirect to the category page. Would it be better to instead open up the composer directly with the category filled in? You could use Creating a link to start a new topic with pre-filled information.