Who can and / or should create categories?

So far I think only @brian created categories yet and they are what used to be the different newsgroup in the old world.
Should it stays as is? I have a few questions regarding categories:

  • Can a subject have more than one category?
  • Should we have several categories where there is a lot of traffic like in “Rhino Windows”? Could be Bugs, Modelling problems, Plug-in problem, Rendering with X plug-in, User interface…
  • Is there other means of “categorization” like tags?
  • Or we try to keep this as flat as possible and rely on the search (and it works, yeah!)

I think multiple categories per topic would be good.
Or indeed tags might be a better system, leaving the categories as a fixed infrastructure.
Maybe possible tags should be left to the moderators. Otherwise we might end up with
many similar tags (problem error bug fault) or (model file scene objects) a list I come up with in half a minute:

  • bugs
  • wishes
  • modeling
  • scripting
  • rendering
  • import/export
  • user-interface

I see this can come in handy for users to cherry pick topics.
When tagged rendering I personally probably have not much to add, yet a scripting tagged question will raise my attention and I will read it.

-Willem

1 Like

A discussion on the subject: http://meta.discourse.org/t/proposal-for-a-hash-tagging-feature/6304
And the conclusion seems to be the same as you; experienced users only can create tags.

I encourage you guys to “like” the topic on meta.discourse.org. I wonder if the general public will understand tagging, but I agree it is a great way to organize data.

As for adding categories, we certainly can. I’m not sure how many we should add, and I’m a bit worried about having “rendering for Rhino for Windows” an “Scripting for Rhino for Mac” - I can see the utility and futility both.

1 Like

I can see one post being classified under more than one category as a good thing.

Creating categories on the other hand must be sysop’s business and held tight.

Btw, works just fine on the iPhone

In the dinosaur newsgroup the subject line was sufficient. I for one will never either look at tags or add them…
----H

You had different NGs that were not visible together. Now you can see subjects from Grasshopper and Rhino etc. all at once if you’d like.

In the dinosaur newsgroup the subject line was sufficient. I for one
will never either look at tags or add them…

The NG could not be searched in a efficient way either …
I think a tags like “blocks” or “import/export” can help not just for fresh topics to be sifted,
but as a search tool tags can be of added value.

2 Likes

I think tags can be a very good idea, but need to be looked after by admins.
Just my 2 Eurocents.

Norbert

Searching the newsgroup is/was a complete nightmare.
So many useful information that is buried in a obsolete structure.
Norbert

Sorry this was meant to be a reply to @Helvetosaur

Yes, but why? How is that really useful? How does the image below help my brain organize and categorize the information it contains?

----H

It would probably be helpful to be able to hide categories you’re not interested in. Anyway, we need a little bigger volume of topics that don’t all fall under the “Meta” category to see how well this works…

Of course - I will probably just look at one forum at a time. I was simply trying to point out that trying to see a bunch of different forums (or subforums or whatever) at the same time - in comparison with the NNTP “one newsgroup at a time” is not necessarily easy to deal with.

The NNTP group got 60 posts a day - and that for a “limited subset of users” who could access nntp or were willing to go through the web interface. I get the impression that GH gets at least that many if not more, the NING Rhino forum gets at least a dozen a day I think, plug-ins (Developer) gets maybe a half-dozen on average… All that together will make a LOT of info…

----H

Because you can choose the most helpful view instead!

And if you want to see only one group at the time:

And yet that requires quite a large window (1000px X 1400px) to see everything that is going on. The dinosaur could do that task in 150px X 150px. I really hope they offer a much more streamlined style for those that want it.

Why is screen real-estate actually important to you? I realize more information could be packed into less space, but would displaying this forum as compact as an old-school dictionary page improve it in some way?

First and foremost is speed. With the newsgroup I could see in less than a second with a glance at a small area which groups had new postings and how many of each, without even making the newsreader active. If I am using the example Marc posted, I have to switch focus and mouse to scroll down to see everything.

Second reason is purely real-estate. With the old newsgroup, I had Thunderbird docked on the side of my second monitor at about 600px to 700px wide. This gave me room an entire screen for just Rhino, and properties, layers, named views / cplanes, material editor, lights on the other and still have room for the newsgroup (and my mail) passively sitting there.

Perhaps I’m just curmudgeonie, but I liked that the newsgroup was clean, with a lot of information clearly displayed in a small space. It let me have it displayed at all times without having to interact with it to get a general sense of what was going on. With this site, I have to pull up my browser, almost always make it bigger, then navigate to see what is new, instead of just looking at a glance. The “whatever, people have all the screen space in the world, we don’t need to streamline this puppy” train of thought is irksome to me.

It would also be nice if it were functional in a docked Rhino web browser tab, which it is very much not so.

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I don’t know if somebody said that.
I already mentioned that the readability is the place where I think there’s room for improvement.
Like I feel it works ok on the iPhone but it could be greatly improved, notably posting is a bit buggy.

Yeah, mobile styling is being developed as we speak. Should you be interested in the nitty gritty…
http://meta.discourse.org/t/brainstorming-a-mobile-discourse-design/4116