Forum structure advice

Support
1

I’m in the early days of setting up our forum and wanted to seek some guidance.

At the moment, I have 3 categories.

General - An open space to ask for support or general questions/discussions.
Game1 - A space dedicated to our first game, support/questions/discussions.
Game2 - A space dedicated to our second game, support/questions/discussions.

We also have a very basic support wiki page that I would quite like to build into our forum. This is currently a read only space. Each game has a section and under the title of that game they have “Rules” and “FAQ’s”. There are several pages under both rules and FAQs.

What’s the best way to add this into Discourse? Create a new category called Support Wiki and have Game1 and Game2 as sub categories and put all the content in there as locked posts with tags for rules and FAQ?

  • General
  • Game1
  • Game2
  • Support Wiki
    • Game1 - Rules and FAQ Tags
    • Game2 - Rules and FAQ Tags

Or would it be better to have Rules and FAQ inside each game category?

  • General
  • Game1
    • Rules
    • FAQ
  • Game2
    • Rules
    • FAQ

Perhaps there is a better way to do this - Very much open to advice :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

The second option (with Rules and FAQ under each game) seems more logical to me.

Rather than locking topics,[1] I’d use category permissions to limit who can post and reply to threads. If members of your community become trusted enough to contribute, you can add them to a group that has access.

  1. I think that’s what you mean rather than “posts”. :wink: ↩︎

1 Like
3

Thanks Jon, very insightful.

I guess my only concern about going down this approach is if someone jumps right into the Game1 category those Rules and FAQ topics will just be lost in with other discussions. I wouldn’t really want to pin them all to the top as there is quite a few.

Perhaps that’s just my inexperience with Discourse though… Thanks again!

4

There is a category setting under, uh, “Settings” called “Show subcategory list above topics in this category.” that kinda pins the entire subcategory list under the main category. That’s been a pretty good solution for sites I run that have a lot of nested categories.

Another option would be an index topic pinned to the top. (See this mostly unrelated topic I just responded to: Order posts by Title .)

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5

Ahh! that setting is fantastic, I think that should do the trick for visibility.

I will keep playing around, but it looks like I am on the right path now. Thank you for your guidance.

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6

I do have a follow up question.

I feel the topics posted inside Rules and FAQ would look better coming from a company account, rather than under my name on the forum. What would be the best way to do this? change ownership of the topics to the system account once I have created them?

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7

Exactly. It’s not uncommon to use the @system user with the site logo for this.

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8

There are a variety of ways to accomplish things in Discourse.

For example Tags can be used in a category to organize topics. As mentioned Subcategories can also be quite handy.

Ie

In the Above model

Game1
Main area use Tags for game play/content(not sure nature of gaming)
Subcategory

  • Rules & Faq Wiki. (Game staff group)
  • Game1 Help - Special Category for questions

If Self hosted plugins like Solved can be used in the Help Category. Have topics here always start on first post. Op can mark a reply as the solution which uses a special quote in first post…so use category setting to always default to first post when a topic is viewed.

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9

I am still getting used to Discourse. Where can I find this option. I’ve looked and search every where under Settings – but I cannot seem to find it.

Really appreciate ur help.

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10

It’s actually under each category’s settings (/c/[category-stub]/edit/settings). Select the wrench icon at the top of the category’s topic listing and select the “Settings” tab. The checkbox is about halfway down under “Appearance”.

2 Likes
11

Jom, this is a great feature. Thank you so much for sharing. Appreciate it.

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12

Thanks everyone for the help. Been really helpful to understand the different ways I can go about setting this up.

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