I am a fan of keeping things simple and only having a few categories. The good topics will bubble to the top of the list and the old ones will drop down. This also allows for less confusion on where to post something.
Suggested categories
Projects - This is where builds go, Questions you have about where to find stuff for your project. Photos about projects, etc…
Space and infrastructure - Questions about the space, What we should be doing, What needs to be done, what needs to stop happening, What we should get next, etc… This will be very similar to the VHS-Members list that use to exist.
General lounge / Categories - This thing is cool, and you should know about it.
Kind of topics and where they belong.
“I want to make a tube amp” - Projects
“Where can I get lockpicks” - Projects
“Do we have a bandsaw?” - Space and infrastructure
I like the idea of relatively few categories, and I like the categories funvill suggested at the start of this thread/topic, plus Events & Announcements.
This ties into Bruce’s suggestion in another thread about public vs private sections of the forum. I guess the current “Space and infrastructure” category would function as Bruce’s “Private chat for Serious Business,” i.e. as a member-only replacement for vhs-members? (Which leads to the question of how we distinguish VHS members from talk.vanhack.ca members within the Discourse software, but that’s a separate discussion.)
It isn’t obvious to the new user that categories are the basis of the access control system in Discourse. We should probably explain that in some general FAQ, if it isn’t covered somewhere already.
The level of access for each category is only visible to site admins. I guess we should describe each category’s access settings in the short description of the category, e.g. “Space and infrastructure: VHS members only. Anything that used to go on the vhs-members mailing list.”
It would be fairly easy for an admin to mess up these access controls, and it’s not obvious if this happens. As a backup, I think we should mask out all non-public categories in robots.txt.
Hrm, robots.txt isn’t going to help. I thought I noticed a category-based URL structure happening here, but that doesn’t exist.
In other news, I’m sure “Space and infrastructure” was a members-only category before but it’s not now. Which kind of underscores that we need to make sure we nail down a solid distinction between public and private categories.
It was never members only as far as I know.
Keeping the “Space and infrastructure” public I think would be a good idea. It shows other spaces and other people the problems that we having, maybe they can help. The more public info the better.
The only private section is “OMG Secret” (we can rename this section).
What should the private section (VHS-Members only) be called?
I just added a Non-VHS event to the general category
Do we think this needs to be in a specific category or can it stand like this?
Do you think we need a specific category for VHS related events? I think this would be a good idea.