Traditional multi level hierarchy vs flat discourse hierarchy

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

This won’t work because it violates one of the restrictions I mentioned.

@angus

Multi-tag intersections are only possible site-wide; not at the category level, i.e. there aren’t routes in standard Discourse to show a topic list with topics in a specific category and with more than one specific tag. If you wanted this, you’d have to add the route.

You can’t filter by two tags within a category.

I’m not sure, but I think you’re assuming that if you’re in the local nodes category and filtering by ‘continents’, you’ll also be able to filter by nations and cities at the same time. This also won’t work.

@PackElend

In the beginning, we properly use only local nodes as category and a subcategory per city*.* As soon as there are too many nodes we would switch to local nodes and nations ,

I think that this is your best move

use only local nodes as category and a subcategory per city

I think you’re trying to incorporate too much future planning into your current needs.

As soon as there are too many nodes we would switch to local nodes and nations

I understand the desire to want to set up the right ‘structure’ now, but however good your service is, it’s going to take a while before this becomes a problem for you, i.e. years. At that stage, the assumptions on which you’re running your community will have changed.

Moreover, the problem you’ll face will be largely one of organisation, rather than one of hierarchy. For example, you could just group the city sub-categories in a modified navigation bar according to nation if you wanted to. If you wanted to have discussion on a ‘national’ level (query whether that would make sense anyway), you could just have a seperate sub-category for that.

You don’t necessarily need a hierarchical structure in your discussion forum that strictly matches the administrative hierarchy of the places around which discussion is happening. You need a hierarchy that makes it possible for your users to find the content that’s relevant to them. I understand you’re connecting those two concepts, but I’m not sure whether that’s warranted. Focusing too much on that connection is over-complicating your thinking around the forum structure.

Basically, I think you’re investing too much in making this structurally similar to how you see the ideal state of your service from a 10,000 foot view, i.e. operating on such a large scale that it’s necessary to divide cities up by nations and continents. When and if you get to that point, the whole nature of this decision will be different.