Thank You Bob Beatty
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@IRJ from watching tons of new users at other communities, I feel like no system is ideal, but sub categories are too hard. It's a barrier to simple things. Even I struggle posting at popular communities because sub categories become such a quagmire. It makes it hard to identify new content, know where to look for it and find what you are looking for.
Other than the name, what does it offer? If tags were presented "as if" they were subcategories, would that fix things? Would you even really be able to tell?
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This is an area where I only see people struggling and never see them succeeding because the only interaction that I have anywhere with categories is when a category is wrong and people either miss a thread or it misleads them (MySQL topic gets put into a SQL Server thread and people answer about MS SQL Server instead of MySQL because that's how it is categorized.) Since I don't use categories when viewing topics, I never see how successful interaction works with them.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I think it would at least be good to have categories for certain technologies, Say Windows Client OS, Windows Server, AD/Group Policy, Linux, etc.
Those are really tough. It's actually pretty rare that any topic goes cleanly into any one of those. Something that is Windows is likely both workstation AND server and sometimes neither. AD and Group Policy normally overlaps with any number of things, including both Windows Server and Windows Desktop. It's much more complicated than it seems and I've never seen a community where it works. The community that you are thinking of has people constantly missing things because they are in the wrong category or not able to be in enough of them.
I think that tag subscriptions would be idea. That way you can subscribe to "Everything about Active Directory" rather than just "things so obviously about AD that they didn't get put anywhere else."
Then many mandatory pre-denfied tags in addition to user-defined tags would be the way to go.
Agreed.
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Maybe a script that suggests tags before the post goes live and maybe gives you the option to add some and even gives you some suggestions based on keywords in your post.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Other than the name, what does it offer? If tags were presented "as if" they were subcategories, would that fix things? Would you even really be able to tell?
I was thinking about this the other day. Because I searched for something and the result sucked.
If everything was tagged, then tags would work here like labels in Gmail. Similar to how folders in Outlook compare to categories on a forum.
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@JaredBusch said:
If everything was tagged, then tags would work here like labels in Gmail. Similar to how folders in Outlook compare to categories on a forum.
Yes, perfect example. Tagging should offer everything that sub categories do and more. Taxonomy is an area that I have studied in IT heavily for about sixteen years now and am very passionate about. In a case of a thread, the information about it is a many to many. Each thread can be and almost certainly is many different things. Tags are the taxonomical tool for that case and are how modern meta data systems like Sharepoint are advancing file storage to handle a more taxonomical world. Categories (and sub categories) are like folders and are for one to many relationships where a thread would below to only a single thing. But that's not how threads are.
We learned this lesson when designing systems for hospitals long ago. We got burned badly by enforcing strict hierarchies of buildings "a room goes on a floor goes in a building." It seems obvious, categories that contain each other make sense and each room belongs in a single place.
But this wasn't true. Rooms moved (room 212 moved to different places, the ER took up multiple floors, etc.) Floors crossed building boundaries (the "second floor" would refer to the same floor everywhere.) All kinds of things turned out to have been wrong assumptions. Tagging was what we should have done. We needed a flexibility that categories would break.
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Others may feel different, but I like the layout of stackoverflow for some reason. It just seems to flow for me, but after using ML for awhile I've gotten used to it and have a ritual when I visit. I first check my notifications, them move on to the recent and unreads, then I start checking out the categories.
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Also the badges on Stackoverflow amuse me and the bounties are kinda fun...
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@lance said:
Others may feel different, but I like the layout of stackoverflow for some reason. It just seems to flow for me, but after using ML for awhile I've gotten used to it and have a ritual when I visit. I first check my notifications, them move on to the recent and unreads, then I start checking out the categories.
.You like Stackoverflow I can't stand the layout of any of their websites. Nor how strict they are on posts.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@lance said:
Others may feel different, but I like the layout of stackoverflow for some reason. It just seems to flow for me, but after using ML for awhile I've gotten used to it and have a ritual when I visit. I first check my notifications, them move on to the recent and unreads, then I start checking out the categories.
.You like Stackoverflow I can't stand the layout of any of their websites. Nor how strict they are on posts.
I know right? I don't like how strict they are on their posts either and you do have to spend some time before you post, but I've met alot of helpful and friendly people there. I'm not sure why I like the layout, I guess it just sort of grew on me.
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Now, should there be a better tagging interface? Heck yeah! I think that that is where we should at least investigate first. See if it doesn't provide what I believe people are asking for. It needs to be way more robust than what we have now and it needs some more thought put into it. But I think that that is a reasonable, possibly doable thing here.
And, just like categories need mods to shuffle things around, tags need constant moderation too, but less of it. It's less confusing and easier to manipulate and it doesn't cause posts to break links or disappear from one group and appear in another. Much less painful to mod.
A "primary tag" or "currated tag" page might be a good replacement for categories. What do you think? "Windows", "Linux", "Exchange", "Office 365", etc. type things that "look" like groups, but actually go to tags OR, if we can get the developers to do it, to groups of tags!! Groups of tags would be awesome. That way "Windows" could include manually selected lists of things like "Windows Server", "Windows 8", "2012 R2", etc.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Now, should there be a better tagging interface? Heck yeah! I think that that is where we should at least investigate first. See if it doesn't provide what I believe people are asking for. It needs to be way more robust than what we have now and it needs some more thought put into it. But I think that that is a reasonable, possibly doable thing here.
And, just like categories need mods to shuffle things around, tags need constant moderation too, but less of it. It's less confusing and easier to manipulate and it doesn't cause posts to break links or disappear from one group and appear in another. Much less painful to mod.
A "primary tag" or "currated tag" page might be a good replacement for categories. What do you think? "Windows", "Linux", "Exchange", "Office 365", etc. type things that "look" like groups, but actually go to tags OR, if we can get the developers to do it, to groups of tags!! Groups of tags would be awesome. That way "Windows" could include manually selected lists of things like "Windows Server", "Windows 8", "2012 R2", etc.
That'd be awesome!
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So can we get a button at the breadcrumb to take you to the newest post. I really want that!
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@thecreativeone91 said:
So can we get a button at the breadcrumb to take you to the newest post. I really want that!
What are you talking about? you already have the button right above the breadcrumb to go to the end of the thread.
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@JaredBusch said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
So can we get a button at the breadcrumb to take you to the newest post. I really want that!
What are you talking about? you already have the button right above the breadcrumb to go to the end of the thread.
In page layout for me it's just going to the end of the page.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
In page layout for me it's just going to the end of the page.
Ah, I use endless scroll so it always goes to the end of the thread.
What about the new post view? from there I click on the last post link and get taken right to the end also.
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@JaredBusch said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
In page layout for me it's just going to the end of the page.
Ah, I use endless scroll so it always goes to the end of the thread.
What about the new post view? from there I click on the last post link and get taken right to the end also.
It just goes to the first post in the thread. My phone doesn't show the Arrows either which is odd since it's more needed there.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
It just goes to the first post in the thread. My phone doesn't show the Arrows either which is odd since it's more needed there.
I click on "replied xx hours ago" and get to the end of the thread. What you are seein is one of the main reasons I do not use pagination.
I agree there should be some thread nab functions in the compact phone view.
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I don't care for the mobile interface personally. I find it klunky.
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I'm stealing this post from another community because it so perfectly fits this conversation. I won't link the thread because it is a thread of people complaining about another specific community, but that's not relevant or needed for this particular post to be poignant. Here is the quote:
I must admit this is the one bit of [community name redacted] that absolutely infuriates me because it's so backward that I can't work out how it ever got into such a mess.
Right now I want to post a new question about replacing my mobile phone - does it go in Android because I have an Android phone now and have some Android specific questions? Does it go in iPhone because I have some iPhone specific questions? Or does it go in Mobile Devices because I have some general questions?
The categories are just too complicated IMO and need way more than a lick of paint.
The complaint here has nothing to do with the community in question. It's really a complaint that applies to every community that uses categories and specifically technical ones. We use categories here but we use them for things that are pretty high level and clear - Community Announcements, Self Promotion, Industry News, Job Postings, The WC and then the big "one category to rule them all" for all of the actual, technical discussions for which the community exists. It if is a technical question or discussion, it goes in the one giant group and everything is sorted out by tags from there. If you want to post cats, you can, just not there. The WC is for that. If you want to discuss IT careers, that's not a technical discussion but an orthogonal one, there is a category for that. Careers are clearly defined as a different thing from getting Windows deployment advice or figuring out storage performance numbers.
