# Quick question about categories organization on my forum

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/quick-question-about-categories-organization-on-my-forum/88554>\
**Category:** Community Building\
**Created:** [5월 27, 2018, 11:57오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/quick-question-about-categories-organization-on-my-forum/88554 "2018-05-27T23:57:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![Canapin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/canapin/32/119591_2.png) [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)\
**Post date:** [6월 1, 2018, 10:46오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/quick-question-about-categories-organization-on-my-forum/88554/4 "2018-06-01T10:46:16Z")

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> [@HAWK](#):
>
> Do you have a compelling reason to group them?

That’s a tough question. I _feel_ that I have one, but I have hard times to properly put words on it (even in my native language). Maybe I’m just used to have this kind of parent category, like phpBB, eh…

Let say I have a gaming forum.  
I have these categories:

**news**  
**video games**  
– **pc**  
– **console**  
**hardware**  
**jobs**  
– **searching**  
– **providing**

Don’t you feel that **searching** and **providing** are in their right place, under the **jobs** category?  
My main categories are unrelated between each others, they have their own purpose:  
**news** , **video games** , **hardware** , **jobs**.

But wouldn’t it be weird if **searching** and **providing** were both on the same level than **news** , **video games** , and **hardware**?

**news**  
**video games**  
– **pc**  
– **console**  
**hardware**  
**searching for job**  
**providing job**

> [@Nichalas\_Petranek](#):
>
> i would set the `classified ads` category security to `everyone can see` and set the `buy` and `sell` category security to `everyone can create/reply/see` .
> 
> regarding visibility of topics on `classified ads` , users would still be able to see topics in both sub-categories displayed and would also have a clear picture of how the sub-categories are related.

Yes, but in the all categories menu, the displayed number of posts doesn’t take account of the subcategories (which is a weird choice in my opinion, are there plans to change this in the future?), so the users would see: **classified ads x 0** … Which is not right.  
 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/3/8/38d747c7553294132340dc86a0c8499a1f47a939.png)

And they’d have to click on the (apparently empty) category in order to see that there are indeed topics:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/f/8/f88a8bd2719eed87b33f2ba89a21b8af1cb46ec8.png)

* * *

Another issue is that when a user goes to the **classified ads** category which lists by default all the topics from the subcategories ( **buy** and **sell** ), the “create a topic” button will be disabled, which is also not right.  
 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/7/f/7f26a32e8312563e5ae8bc4b2f64682d945457d4.png)  
How does the user know that he has to actually go inside a subcategory in order to create his topic?

So actually I’ve put my **buy** and **sell** categories on the top level, I think I have no alternative.

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