The categories here have grown organically over time. There seems to me to be a lot of overlap in their purposes. This adds friction when adding new posts and makes it harder for interested parties to focus on areas that are relevant to them.
My thoughts come out of our discussion about the role of slack. If we want this place to be our long term memory, I think the information architecture is one critical aspect to supporting that goal. I’m trying to strike a balance between:
Clear, big buckets so it’s obvious where your post can go
Buckets that can be tuned with subcategories when they get noisy at the top level
Trying not to over structure in a way that would lead to ghost towns for certain categories
Here is my first pass proposal for restructuring them (ordered by my best guess at where they will fall in post frequency).
Help
Testing
Ember-cli
Ember-data
Routing
Announcements
Think #announcements in slack
Official Blog posts and their comments would live here as well
Addons
concurrency
mirage
(any other big addon), the rest can be add in the root
Resources
Presentations
(This area can grow to how to’s, links to blog posts, etc)
Core Teams
Learning Team
(This area can grow to meeting notes, other team discussions)
Show & Tell
Jobs
Meta
With this, I’m also proposing the removal of Search, Design, Performance (which can easily fall into the Help section) and Proposals (Which our RFC repo takes care of and announcements will serve as notification for).
I’m sure this hierarchy isn’t completely sufficient, but I wanted to take a stab at it. Is there anything that’s missing? Thoughts and objections welcome!
looks good to me. The only thing I have concerns about is wether we should try to make fine grained help categories, which probably will mean that we will have a lot of them. Or if we should just keep a more general one and add more when we see a need for adding a more specific one.
Currently I would be having troubles where to put anything ember related except cli, routing, testing and ember-data stuff. Where do questions about controllers, components etc. go?
edit: just noticed during writing that post Adding ember weekly to the emberjs site? that we probably should also have a category to discuss the emberjs website including docs etc. If meta stays a place to discuss the forum, this does not really fit anywhere. However, having that said, I could have just opened a issue over at github as well, which probably would have been just as good
asking for maintainers or people that help maintain add ons.
It has happened to me more than once that I added an addon which looked really great, only to find out that this was the very last update to addon I will probably ever see. Good addons sometimes just silently get stale unless you noticed a warning during your build. Probably just because the maintainer no longer works on ember projects.
I believe there are quite some people who want to help and some people who need help. However this is quite difficult if it just happens over at github within a repository the maintainer hasn’t looked at in 6 months. Ultimately I think github should improve in this area, but until they do. How about a “need maintainer or help” subsection within the “Addons” section?
I went back and forth on this one. I’m thinking about the new ember dev in need of some help and, for whatever reason, Help feels more obvious than Questions. I’m open to Questions though
What type of discussion are you thinking of? Feels like lots of back and forth for that can still happen in Slack. Then any actual issues could go well in the Help/Questions category.
One of the things I tried to balance with the proposal is making it obvious and quick to decide where stuff should go without creating unused labels. I think having a couple subcategories for the more obvious topics makes sense in the beginning and it can grow over time. One thing I think is really important for the forum is for it to feel busy without being overwhelming. If the forum feels like a ghost town, Ember itself will feel like a ghost town to those outside of the community.
The main Questions/Help category would be fine for that, right?
This was my thought for the Addon’s section listed in the proposal.
