As many people have suggested or hinted at various steps along the way, I think in many cases, what I’m looking for is more like “category groups” instead of “parent categories”.
Problems I’m feeling with the current experiment:
- To allow posting or not in parent categories?
I don’t really want people posting in some of these top level categories – for example, Customizations. I could prevent it, but if we allow it for some and not others, it’s a bit awkward - Awkward to filter to only a parent category
I put Community Building at the top level, but the child categories are noise if you just want to look at that one. - Lack of direct access to subcategories
People want to get directly to bug, feature, or UX, for example, but having them nested makes that awkward, especially in the topic list drop downs
I am debating between these two options as next steps:
- Further contort things into a consistent hierarchy
Disallow posting in top level categories everywhere – push all topics into subcategories. - Revert, then rethink
Go back to how things were. Use parent/child categoies sparingly, but intentionally, with posting allowed in the parent category where used. Re-assess next steps