Reorganize Forum Categories

Open Ag Technology Community Building
1

How would people feel about reorganizing the forum categories a bit? I personally find it hard to find certain things, espeically the Open Ag Technology > Community Building category, which is an important one but always gets buried. I think that’s because Discourse shunts all the subcategories into their top-tier categories and only displays the first 5 top-tier categories from the menu in the left side panel. Plus we’ve piled everything into the Open Ag Technology category, which has never really made sense to me as a category — isn’t everything on this forum about “Open Ag Technology”? I tried suggesting a reorg in the past, but I foolishly put it in the Site Feedback category, pretty much ensuring no one would ever see it (case in point).

Reorganized Categories

So here’s how I propose we reorganize. This gives us a lot fewer top-tier categories and spreads the subcategories out more evenly. The :locked: represents locked categories (so some ppl might not even see them) and the :sparkles: are new categories we would need to create.

Convert to tags

Below are some subcategories of the current top-tier partner org categories, namely Our Sci and Bionutrient Institute, which I’m proposing we make into subcategories of “Partner Orgs & Projects.” Discourse only allows nesting them to a depth of two, so we can’t keep them as subcategories if their parent categories become subcategories. So I suggest we create a corresponding tag for each of them, then do a bulk operation to assign that tag to all topics in the original subcategory. After that we can delete the subcategories and nest their parent categories under “Partner Orgs & Projects” without losing too much specificity.

There was one more such subcategory, OpenTEAM > Question Set - Methods (coffee shop!), but that had far more of its own topics than any of the others, so I suggest we make just make it a direct subcategory of “Partner & Orgs & Projects.”

Original Categories

For reference, here’s an outline of how the categories are currently organized, as of posting this, with :bookmark: indicating the ones that will be replaced with tags and deleted: