He there. I’m trying to make a decision now should I switch to Discourse from phpBB. I will have to convert DB of curent forun. My forum is not very complex, but there’s up to 4 levels of sub-categories somewhere. Like:
Music > Electronics > Dubstep
or
Games > MMORPG > World of Warcraft > Recruiting
I’ve found info that Discourse supports only 2 levels of categories now. But maybe there’s a plugin for this?
Thanks, found it. And it doesn’t look very user-friendly and intuitively clear. More look like a crutch to me. Situation - new recruits comes to our forum to apply in World of Warcraft guild. Should I explain each of them that they should put “Recruiting” tag on their posts? That’s kindda turn off.
Gamers don’t read and understand anything. They post before reading. And it’s not even the point - user should be able to post right away without having to read or understand anything. Each forum software aims for max comfort enviroment, and they should. If some decision creates inconvenience, confusion, complication - it should be reconsidered.
Let me explain one thing about gaming forum - all games dieing at some point. So as their forums. So I don’t want to put forums on dead projects with active forums in one bucket. For example, now I have:
ArcheAge
Recruiting
General Descussion
Our guild
Classes
But when ArcheAge will die, I will have to put this forum in to “Archive” category. With Discourse I can’t do this now. I can only delete all ArcheAge sub-categories and put all post in ArcheAge category, which will create a big mess. So I think there’s gotta be a plugin for more sub-categories, or Discourse devs should reconsider their decision on this.
I would assume such archivization is not to make content read-only, but move those forums out of busy spot to make place for new ones, while leaving users with option to still discuss elsewhere.
With Discourse, inactive topics (and categories) will quickly become invisible anyways. And afaik, categories you cannot post in do not show up in the category dropdown in the composer.
However, the hamburger menu would become somewhat cluttered.
That’s what’s great about tagging. Once a Category needs to be deprecated, you can simply migrate all of the posts in it onto a tag and remove the category.
Not what I meant. They’ll be visible, but less-active content gravitates towards the bottom and users will sooner or later simply not bother to scroll that far. This is true for categories on the categories page (unless you override category ordering) as well as topics in just about all topic lists.
However, even ancient topics may pop up through the search, as long as they’re visible (and not archived, iirc).