Where should open ended discussion about the product happen?

Contribute Site feedback
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Our Contribute > Feature category currently has the following description:

Discussion about existing Discourse features, how they can be improved or enhanced, and how proposed new features should work.

On the other hand, we’ve enabled “topic voting” on the category, close topics when they are done, and mark them completed.

The category is serving two purposes.

  1. Open ended discussion about the product and its existing features
  2. Individual proposals for new features or improvements

It’s kind of always been that way, and maybe it’s fine.

But I do feel like the more we try to use the ideation/voting features of Discourse, the more it adds a bit of pressure there is to separate them, and have distinct spaces for each of them.

Here’s an example topic I’m tempted to close as “done”, but which gave me pause as I was about to do so, because I could see leaving it as a conversation that could stay open: Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet?

Curious to hear others’ thoughts on this…

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Maybe move it to Contribute > UX, it’s largely an experience discussion… though the category definition there is potentially too narrow as well (it’s scoped more like a lesser bug category), so perhaps General for general discussion?

It’s a bit of a mess because topic voting didn’t exist for the majority of Contribute > Feature’s existence so a lot of old topics don’t really fit the current format. That’s partially why sorting by vote might help a little, because it prevents older less-fitting topics from getting bumped to the top of what’s now a bit of a different category.

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I like the idea of expanding the scope of that category. Will sleep on it for a few days, but right now that feels compelling to me.

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That topic iss also quite good at showing how the Team’s view if ideas has changed and evolved over time.

While maybe a bit if topic for this discussion. I will say Nested Replies implementation is fantastic. As there is an option to have a toggle to view flat or threaded. Which if not mistaken is currently unique to Discourse Meta. No nested platform I have seen myself has this feature.

I am wondering if it might be an idea to start a new topic linked to the Contribute > Feature Topic with an AI summary with the recent posts moved to the new topic?

As Awesomebot has mentioned maybe General with a Tag perhaps or might be an idea to create a new Subcategory?

Or maybe even a general #discuss tag in the Contribute > UX category to expand scope of if that category via new tag(s)