Hi all, I’m very confused. Currently trying to set up Discourse to migrate my large community from Facebook. I’ve been thinking about how I’ll structure it through categories, and it was mentioned to me that tags can help for that too. As I understand, tags in Discourse are quite “category-like” (at least for me, coming from the blogging-flickr-delicious world of “just quickly type out your tags in a text box here). But OK, so it makes sense to create my “tags” upfront. But how? As mentioned here, there’s no way to “just add a tag” on the tags page. Maybe I don’t want all my tags in groups – is that possible?
(FWIW I’m also a bit stumped in my category creation, there doesn’t seem to be a user-friendly way to organise/create/manage categories as a whole, or I haven’t found it. At the stage I’m at some kind of “community structure builder” interface would be really handy, in which I can move categories around, up and down, into each other or out… like reordering menu navigation items in WordPress, to take just one example).
Apologies if I’m not 100% on topic, my brain is drifting quite a bit these days, despite my efforts.
I moved your question to a new topic, because the answer will be useful to others and then we can keep the related UX topic scoped to the implementation details.
Tags are definitely an area that could be with some polish, so I encourage you to add your vote to the relevant feature request. The more votes, the more chance it will be prioritised.
In the meantime, adding tags up front is something that can be done, but it’s quite hidden and unintuitive.
You can go to the tag page, here that would be https://meta.discourse.org/tags
I have no doubt about that and I will, but as I have limited energy (recovering from bad accident) I’m trying to see how I can make things as simple as possible for myself
Yes, seen, but it’s quite cumbersome when I have 8-12 categories to create, color, organise, describe, hierarchise, and each one influences the others so I keep going back and forth between panels which each contain just a small part of my big picture…
Ok, having to create a csv feels like quite a bit of overhead! I don’t have a final list of my tags, just like categories.
So it looks I need to « design » the structure of my community outside of discourse, and once I am set on my categories and tags and colours and descriptions, go and add them in, because what I see of the interface so far is not really helping me do that part of the job (the thinking, trying something, seeing what it looks like, changing it to try something else, tweaking this and tweaking that, moving things around some more, and so on…)
Even being a Discourse expert, I’ve always gone through this step. Planning is done outside Discourse, this makes things easier.
Discourse is amazing software, but the learning curve can be steep. Fortunately, the dev team and the community are keen to help
You can also hire someone to help on Marketplace if you have a budget.
This is great feedback! I have struggled with this as well, especially with the tags. I recall when I was product manager for the staff experience team we planned eventually to create an admin section to more intuitively manage categories and tags. Not sure if and when that will happen.
Also going back years we’ve always wanted to have “parity” between tags and categories. Tags are so powerful but the UI for navigating and managing them needs to catch up!
Power tip: once you have created some categories you can use the pulldown on the category settings to quickly switch to another category, so you can compare and set up e.g. security settings. Example:
When you are concerned about security and who can access what, you can also look at the permissions tab for groups. Example:
This is super precious insight. Thankfully I’m still « early » in my process to not have banged my head against too many walls! I’ll do that too, then.
It’s not intuitive to me to have to do this outside the tool, because I’m very much a « try something, look at it, iterate » kind of person and I think « context » is super important.
For example, what looks good on a wall with post-its, on in a spreadsheet, or a text document might not work quite as well as forethought once implemented in the system, with the design.
I would definitely consider it a plus for Discourse as a community platform if it could also facilitate that part of the process of setting up a community structure and strategy.
Is this something that could be done with a plugin? Provide a drag and drop or alternate interface to create and manage tags and categories?
Note also that a Group’s ‘Permissions’ tab only lists categories that Group members have special access to. Any categories that are already available to all users won’t be listed here. (Perfectly sensible, but might cause concern at first glance.)
I’m not sure it’ll be useful but I asked Gemini to create a category planning tool, you can see it here:
It’s mostly a draft, I was curious what Gemini would do from a very simple prompt. If you think this might be useful, I can refine it a bit and add an export/import button (to and from txt/csv file).
oh wow, this looks super promising!! I already love it, really.
Can’t delete categories and I’m not sure where to find “cat ID” (I know you said it’s draft), but I think this could be really precious – specially if there is a “export this in a format that Discourse can swallow up” feature!!
(I played around with it and tried adding a bunch of categories and reordering them… honestly now that I’ve seen this I feel that I won’t be able to live without something like it!)
I’m not suggesting that this is a complete, polished recommendation, but maybe it’ll spark a thought or two.
Couple of notes:
Discourse comes with a Site Feedback category that’s publicly visible. This visibility cannot be changed. If you want a Site Feedback category limited to registered users, it’s recommended to just delete the default one and create a new one.
You usually don’t want a category and a tag for the same thing. Like, maybe Food should be a category that all food-related stuff goes in, so there’d be no #food tag. However… if you want the ability to see all Vet category topics related to food, then you might add a #food tag to a tag group that’s limited to the Vet category.
