Categories structure

[steve]

The way the categories are currently structured is a bit overwhelming by offering many categories which to a majority of users may not be relevant. Looking at the number of topics, e.g. Board Discussions has 1.9k and projects has 1.8k both listed close to the end of the categories list while category #3, #4, #5 and #6 (Bengali, Hindi, India, Nepali) have a total of 1 topic.

A few suggestions:

1. Would the entire structure of this discourse be more approachable if language specific communities where sub-categories to a meta category called Language Specific Communities? That should not be a problem as per How to create a Sub-Category - support - Discourse Meta and provide a much cleaner overview.

2. It would be great to maybe even sort the remaining categories by traffic as to listing the categories with most traffic at the top and moving the ones with less traffic down to the bottom of the categories list.

3. All categories use caps except for projects and libreladies. Maybe those can adapt to the same style of the rest of the categories?

[sophi]

Hi Steve, it’s not possible to group languages in one category because each may need subcategories and third level categories are not possible. For the second point, it’s true for the moment that some categories are empty because those communities are new and will develop And for 3, you’re right, will correct them. Thanks for your feedback!

[steve]

Thanks for taking the time to respond and tacking the naming of the two categories.

As for the three level subcategories: core discourse developers strongly advice against that and I tend to agree with them: Nesting categories in three levels - support - Discourse Meta

The workaround or rather better way to address this is to just use tags instead. See also: Admin guide to tags in Discourse - admins - Discourse Meta

As of march 2020 Nesting categories in three levels - #20 by HAWK - support - Discourse Meta the feature has been implemented and is available to enterprise customers.

In order to improve this LibreOffice discourse I recommend to either apply the three level sub-categories (if on enterprise plan) but since I agree with the core devs that using tags is the better route maybe that would be a way forward if enterprise is not available. Even with enterprise available tags is what is being recommended. Had that option been discussed?