Current forum categories, in the order that they appear to me on the homepage:
Zcash Foundation
meta
General
Market
Community Collaborations
protocol
Uncategorized
weekly updates (used by ECC)
Mining
support
Support
zcashd client
Chinese
3rd party applications
Site Feedback
education
Russian
Italian
Spanish
Portuguese
Frankly, we don’t have the comment volume to need this many categories. And it’s a confusing experience! So I suggest that we streamline things, with this setup of categories and subcategories:
General (absorbs Uncategorized, Market, education, and the non-English language categories — we should install a translation plugin as @paige suggested a while ago!)
pinned welcome thread w/ FAQ-style resources
Ecosystem (combines Community Collaborations and 3rd party applications)
Zcash Foundation (replaces standalone ZF category)
Electric Coin Company (replaces weekly updates and gives it a better name)
Zcash Protocol (replaces the protocol subcategory of Community Collaborations)
Tech Support
Mining
zcashd
Zebra
Meta (absorbs Site Feedback)
Thoughts? What am I missing? What should be changed, removed, or added? Ping @moderators but also everyone.
“3rd party applications” should be an explicit category in Ecosystem.
A category for “New ideas/proposals/suggestions” (like this one) so that they are organized in on place and easy to review.
The “Welcome to the Zcash forums!” contains useful information/links - however it’s unpleasant to read due to the stripes of the background - I think a popup isn’t the best way to present this information.
I think by today there is no more need of a mining category itself and it could be implented into the general category as well.
Reasoning: All the latest topics in the mining topic are non-Zcash mining related. Without having miners at all on the forum by today the mining support category as a subforum is even more useless in my opinion.
“Uncategorized” is the default category given to anything that is not filed under a category. There is a setting in discourse: “allow uncategorized topics - Allow topics to be created without a category. WARNING: If there are any uncategorized topics, you must recategorize them before turning this off.”
So someone would have to go through all the uncategorized topics before disabling this.
For reference to the translation plugin, this is the one I was looking at: GitHub - discourse/discourse-translator
I think it’s worth a shot. I don’t have time for further investigation right now, though. If we want this added relatively soon, someone else should take this investigation on.
I would suggest that Community Collaboration remain on its own since it can support a range of subjects
And perhaps the Weekly Updates category could remain independent, re-named to Development Updates (to be for ZF and ECC) as an easy place for lurkers/users to find the latest news about whats going on.
Everything else looks good to me, as Paige mentioned nixing the Uncatagorized may be a bit of trouble, we can make an effort to go through new posts and drop them into categories more often if they forget to pick one.
Can we have a category for Major Grants too, please?
With a similar expectation of MG recipients to provide updates like the ECC and ZFND. - Whilst the zip doesn’t mention this, I would like it to be part of a social obligation for the MG teams.
I think ecosystem is better for ZFND grants and 3rd party stuff. (not small stuff, just not MG’s)
Regarding governance, This would be nice to have its own category, but I can see it being a nightmare to maintain with lots of post moving by mods. maybe Protocol and ZFND should both have governance sub categories or to keep things tidy just have one and put it under protocol. (code is law :p)
I feel like we should have Major Grants instead of an “ecosystem” category. Community collaborations seems like it would fit more under the general category.
I’m not sure it makes sense to separate ECC and Zcash Foundation into two separate categories. For example, if ECC wants to make a post about protocols it would be confusing to know where to categorize it. Instead I vote that we have a “Weekly Updates” category where both ECC and Zfnd can post updates. I like that name “weekly updates” better because it lets me know what to expect.
What is the thought process behind the categories for zcashd and zebra? what information would go there that wouldn’t go in Zcash protocol category?
I would make Tech support and meta the same category and put it under “Support and Feedback”
We now have a Governance category (thanks @Shawn!) which seems to be serving us well.
Protocol definitely feels wrong for governance discussion, despite the use of the originally-technical ZIP process for the latter.
There’s an idea, being explored, to integrate this forum with the ZF grants system, replacing the latter’s native commenting system and user accounts. The idea is that any forum user wondering into the grant system will find, at the bottom of the grant proposal, the discussion system that they’re already familiar with and logged into. Moreover, the grant discussions will be visible within the forum, and thus get more eyeballs.
So yeah, I think a dedicated “Grants” category is desirable. We may want to later split it into “minor” vs. “Major” grants, but I’d first see how things play out.
Y’know, it’s debatable. I think when they’re mentioned within general updates, that should stay in Ecosystem Updates. But, for example, ZF’s recent technical blog posts would fit better in Research and Development, no?
I also want to limit ambiguity… does Ecosystem Updates feel clear as a category name?
‘Technology’ makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t want questions about how the protocol currently works and how it could evolve to be artificially separated, since it’s quite likely that some discussions will be about both.
Hey all, I will be doing the forum re-org today with some slight modifications to Sonyas original list taking into account feedback above and importance of third party apps like zbay and zewallet.
New layout will be as follows:
Uncategorized
General
absorbs Market, education
Grants
this will be a place for the MGRC to provide updates and feedback to the community
also for MGRC recipients/applicatnt/updates, etc…
Third party applications
ZecWallet and Zbay will get their own sub cats. (others subs like Nighthawk or Zboard can be added upon request)
Governance
absorbes the protocol and ZDA subcategory of Community Collaborations
Technology
zcashd and Zebra subcategories?
absorbs R&D
Ecosystem Updates
absorbs / replaces standalone ZF category and the ECC weekly updates category
could also be used for Zeal calls and Gardening club
Technical Support
Languages
absorbs all non-english speaking categories
Mining
Meta (absorbs Site Feedback)
We can of course make modifications to this layout, I just want to get the initial push of the re-org complete then we can tweak as needed.
EDIT: Decided to leave “Community Collaborations” as its own category, many things in there don’t fit elsewhere
EDIT2: Not sure how “Technology” parent would absorb R&D better? Just re-named R&D to Technology. Let me know if Zebrad should still get their own sub-category (not much to put in there atm)
