I like the idea of a separate area for gardening items, and a group inbox – or even a Gardening category – does sound easier to manage than a megatopic.
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It might be worth trying a megatopic first and seeing how it goes.
If it feels unwieldy, we can move to a category (or a tag we norm on using withing Site Feedback).
But for what we are discussing here, I think we might find a megatopic sufficient.
(Chat could play a role here too)
Happy to experiment in this space with you all.
Regardless of the implementation, I do like the idea of having a place where this kind of collaboration can happen among the people who care to pay attention to this level of detail.
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I wonder how often a topic is closed without action, as a “won’t fix” or “not really an issue” kind of item. Tags would be the way to filter closed topics on that basis.
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Hmm… if it’s a megatopic, would having automatic reply deletion after, say, a week, make sense? Because if the tag is added/change is made, it won’t need to stay there forever?
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I think it’s ok not to garden the gardening topic itself.
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Thank you everyone - I think that this discussion has now successfully aired the underlying issues quite nicely, as well as a few quite workable ways to tackle this ‘gardening’ (and I feel heard).
However, I’m not sure a megatopic is the best way forwards for this; if we are maximally flexing Discourse features, then a Chat Channel with threading is a much better fit in my mind.
This sort of stuff is definitely ephemeral; once a ‘small thing’ is fixed, there is zero value in keeping a record of the fact on a Topic. Likewise, there would be no value in these trivial / gardening things turning up in search at all.
It would also make it a reasonably easy thing to find, and relatively unobtrusive. It would also allow a convenient emoji to mark when something was sorted. Maybe TL2 and above to keep it from cluttering things up for newbies?
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This reminds me of this Feature topic Please distinguish flags for "bad" things from organizational and "please help" flags - #20 by mattdm.
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How do you want to keep track of what has been resolved in the mega gardening topic?
Missing images at Meta.discourse.org was kind of a gardening topic tied to one problem. To keep track of what had been resolved, checkboxes for each report were added and then checked later. I understand that it was the easiest way to keep track of things there, but all those edits were quite noisy. So, I don’t think this is a good solution for a larger gardening topic.
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I think theres a difference between a closed feature request, and one that has a clear completed tag. The first one could be closed for any number of reasons: no longer valid, won’t do, not possible,…
My only concern with having non-staff do it, is that they have to be very certain it’s actually completed. Hence my preference for trying to make it a habit that the person who fixes or completes something, just updates that on meta.
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After some brief discussion with @ToddZ, we decided to start with a topic. We’ll see how it goes and adjust as we learn by doing: Experiment: Collaborative content gardening hub for meta
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Wouldn’t it be fixed in Contribute > Bug ? And the more fitting one in Contribute > UX ?
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Yes, I suppose you’re right.
I’m not sure that distinction is worth it, personally, but until we decide to change that, yes.
I’ve adjusted restrictions on fixed and completed so TL3 users can also add them now as well.
I think that’s the better tradeoff for these tags given the discussion here.
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I’m going to close this topic.
It’s served us well, but it’s a bit of a grab bag, and we have an even bigger grab bag now: Experiment: Collaborative content gardening hub for meta
There was some good discussion above, but I think at this point, we’d be better off focusing on each use case independently – e.g. how can we improve the experience in our Support categories? I’ve kicked off a new topic about that here: Improving the experience in our support categories