The discussion revolves around the limitations of Discourse’s category hierarchy, specifically its restriction to two levels of subcategories, which users find insufficient for complex forum structures. Maestra_Powers initiates the thread, comparing Discourse to phpBB and expressing frustration over the inability to maintain deep subcategory trees (e.g., Games > World of Warcraft > MMORPG > Recruiting) without losing organizational clarity. Several users, including codinghorror and strager, suggest using tags as a workaround, but Tom_Newsom and others counter that tags are not a suitable replacement — they span categories, causing confusion and clutter, especially in structured environments like makerspaces or gaming forums. cpradio suggests Discourse may not be ideal for communities requiring deep nesting, while elberet notes inactive categories naturally fade from view. tobiaseigen references a tagging plugin, and sam proposes tag restrictions as a potential fix. The core tension lies between Discourse’s design philosophy — simplicity, flat structures, and tag-based filtering — and users’ needs for hierarchical organization, especially for archiving or managing domain-specific forums. Some users, like Maestra_Powers, emphasize the importance of preserving context for dying games or projects, which Discourse’s flat structure doesn’t easily support. Ultimately, while tags offer flexibility, they don’t fully replicate the intuitive navigation and separation that nested categories provide, leaving some users disappointed and seeking alternatives or custom solutions.
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?
Probably just have a music category and use tags for everything “deeper” than that. Same with games.
I’m not getting ya mate. How this gonna look like?
It would look like categories with tags.
Games > World of Warcraft
Tagged: MMORPG, Recruiting
Music > Electronic
Tagged: Dubstep
Tags coming soon? We are really looking forward to it! 
There is also a tag plugin.
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.
The same problem exists with knowing what category to post in - except they at least have a description (if they read and understand it).
So a brief “tooltip” description for each tag would be a good idea.
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.
Then I’d argue Discourse isn’t right for your community at this time. If sub-sub-categories are a necessity, you’ll have to go with something else.
Yea… 
I guess I’ll have to eyeballing it till plugin for infinite categories nesting will pop up.
So you are saying you don’t mind moving posts into the proper category?
Seems a similar amount of work would be entailed as tagging them.
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.
Why can’t you just change the permissions on ArcheAge to Everyone can See, but Admins are the only ones who can Create/Reply/See?
That way it becomes a “view” only category… (I believe this would give the category the “lock” icon too – making it feel like an archive)
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.
Rly? That’s kindda lame. I want old forums and threads to be visible, so guests could see our activity.
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).