Threads Asking For Help Get Buried If They Don’t Gain Traction / Get Bumped

@deeplow

Also, while I’m at it, this has been on my mind for a while:

For those using the Discourse website, the topics are presented in order of latest activity, and with the wide array of topics, it’s easy for threads asking for help to get buried and stay buried forever if they don’t gain traction or get bumped. This thread, for example, is basically pinned because of its constant activity, taking up one slot and keeping someone off the front page. This is a thread that should be of interest to everyone here, but there are also threads that are less universally appreciated/interesting (e.g. the meme thread) that get stuck on the front page via a positive feedback loop of visibility and interaction. On top of that, most of the topics that have been posted on this forum are filed under the category ‘user support’ of one flavor or another (e.g. ‘4.1’, ‘Hardware issues’), which makes filtering and navigating a pain.

I was wondering it there should be tags and categories for individual aspects of Qubes (e.g. one for networking, GPU/passthrough, hardware/HCL, etc.) once R4.1 becomes mainstream. This is to avoid excessive fragmentation, so there won’t be these categories for R4.0 which will eventually fade out.

This way, if my interest and expertise is in hardware, I can stay on that forum or have it open in another tab and the chances that someone’s question gets buried gets drastically reduced. I don’t think this would have much of a significant impact on moderation workloads.

Not sure there is much we can do on this front. Users can mute certain categories, if that helps. That’s the way Discourse works.

Tags are a possibility and that’s been on my mind for quite a while. But user-created tags will be a mess. So we need a pre-determined list of tags. But doing that is something I’ve been postponing for a very long time.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: User Support Categories are Too Broad