For context, we push all our product announcements through our community. As you’ll see, we have over a dozen products, and many of them have multiple supported versions. Currently, users “subscribe” to an entire product news category, which means they may receive alerts about products they don’t even own/use.
I’m curious how others are balancing something like this. The answer almost certainly has to be tags, right? Subscribe to a tag instead of the full category? And if it’s a SaaS product that updates the version number (monthly, quarterly, etc.), update the tag and/or add synonyms for it?
If that’s the case, how do you inform them that a new version was released? Or there is something newsworthy applicable to all customers of that product (like a feedback session), but they aren’t subscribed to that entire category. Or, similarly, if a new version is released, do you add the tag for all older active versions even though this has nothing to do with those versions?
The root of this problem is that a product has shifted from a version that received updates every few months to one that will get updates biweekly.
I’m trying to get ahead of the wave of notifications that some people may not appreciate. Any suggestions are welcome
I would say yes to tags. I would use categories for the high level content types, not for every product/version combination.
So there might be categories for:
Product Announcements
Release Notes
News
And tags for:
product: 1secure, auditor
version: 1secure-dpsm, release-minor, etc.
Discourse supports fairly structured tagging with tag groups, parent-child tag relationships, limiting one tag from a group, and category tag restrictions, so you can keep this from turning chaotic.
Then users can watch or watch-first-post tags, and you can set default tag notification levels.
If you have one release topic tagged with both product and new version
category: Release Notes
tags: 1secure, v10.8
Anyone watching 1secure gets it.
Anyone watching v10.8 also gets it.
I think establishing tag groups and mandating/restricting their use will help a lot. That level of control slipped my mind.
My reluctance to separate the product from the version is that they’ll be notified whenever someone uses the 1secure tag, even in a support-style topic. Still holding out hope for subscribing to tags per category
Though I guess the potential answer there is to restrict 1secure from being used in those support categories, since it’s already denoted as 1secure support.
