Renaming "How-Tos" category

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1

Many people mistakenly ask for user support on the “How-Tos” category (about 2-4 per week).

I guess this happens because they want to know “How-to” solve a problem, thus not realizing it’s for people to write “How-Tos” instead.

Maybe we should rename it to “Guides” to avoid the confusion.

2

Bumping this thread as this is still relevant. The average is still the same (2-4 per week)

3

Yeah, I think changing it to “Guides” or “Tutorials” might help.

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4

As someone who has just made exactly that mistake, I suggest two things:

  1. “How-to Guides” would work for me.
  • The “how-to” phrase suggests something step-by-step and approachable.
  • “Guide” indicates something authoritative, dry, from-first-principles and sort of read-only.
  • Combined however, it clearly indicates you aren’t going there to post a query, but seek the solution. (Or supply one). IMHO, anyway.
  1. Visually, landing on https://forum.qubes-os.org/c/user-support/5 is pretty confusing. Especially after you’ve tried and failed to solve your problem on screen after screen…
  • The link boxes are the biggest, brightest elements on the screen.
  • The small, grey “new topic” button sitting waaaay off to the right is easily missed.
  • On a laptop screen, the actually posts are all but hidden, all the more so with the survey box that’s currently up the top.

It just doesn’t look like you’re at the forum page yet. It looks like you must chose one of the boxes to make your post, and “How to” is the one that closest fits. You interpret it as “How do I…?”

I’ve probably overthought this! FWIW.

5

A post was split to a new topic: “User Support” Category is Visually Confusing

Moved the point 2 onto its own separate topic

6

I’d prefer to keep it short like the suggestions of @adw of calling it “Guides” or “Tutorials”.

I don’t get the same impression from that word. I think it’s more on what people make of it.

7

I have renamed it to Guides. I hope that’s ok. We can always change it, but anything would be better than “How-Tos” (I’m tired of fixing the category of “How-To” posts which are really support request posts.

8

Apparently this is still happening but with much, much less frequency.

9

But why is “Guides” a subcategory of “User support”?