I talked with Jeff Atwood at Discourse, and they recently changed the name of their “Meta” category to “Forum Feedback.”
I think we should do this, too. But I think we should change it to “Community Feedback” since it’s technically useful for feedback about the entire community. Is this name clear enough?
For reference, here are the other categories on our forum:
Wiki (short guides for challenges, projects, and various programming tools)
Project Feedback
Getting a Developer Job
Reviews (5-star ratings for books, courses, podcasts, videos, etc.)
General - everything else (if you don’t give your post a category, it ends up in General. We for expect most posts to be uncategorized, and that’s fine.)
I’m particularly interested in whether we should change “Wiki” to “Guides” since that’s what most of the entries are - guides to challenges, projects, and various coding tools. (I’m particularly interested in @Rafase282’s opinion on this.)
I’m also curious whether the purpose of “Reviews” is sufficiently clear, or whether we should name it something else. Any ideas on this?
I agree. Every time I see “meta”, I think of meta tags for HTML.
In regards to “Reviews”, I thought it was reviews of projects or code. Perhaps it would be more clear if we use term like, "Customer’s non-FCC reviews "
As for Wiki, I especially like the idea of switching it over to “Guides”. This gets my vote.
“Guides” is much clearer than wiki, to this day i’ve never browsed the “Wiki” tag, i just didn’t know what it was and never gave it much thought.
The rest is fine as is(to me). I think the “meta” tag should remain as “meta”, since most topics discussed are about the freecodecamp movement, naming it as “Forum feedback” gives (me) the idea that it’s an area for feedback about the structure of forum.freecodecamp.com, and not the whole freecodecamp platform.
“Feedback” would be better than “Forum feedback”. “Meta” seems more to the point than all of these though.
Meta can be a bit confusing for some people. Especially those that do not speak english as a first language.
Guides sounds good
’Reviews’ is clear seeing as there is a project feedback category imo
From meta to Community Feedback is a good name.
I’m also in favor for wiki to be changed to Guides for now. I do think that over 90% of the articles will be guides.
As for reviews, I would say Community Reviews to make it clear that the reviews are from the community and not particularly from freeCodeCamp. An alternative would be Media Reviews.
I would suggest changing the description of the “general” category. It currently states:
Topics that don’t need a category, or don’t fit into any other existing category.
So it isn’t entirely clear that this category is meant for (all sorts of) questions as well.
I noticed a few people who asked a question (about their project) in the “Project Feedback” category, presumably because there is no clear category for questions.
I’m wondering if we would be better off with an unlisted Introductions category rather than just a thread. For one thing, it’s more work to post the canned reply, shut down the thread, and de-list it than it is to simply move the post to another category. We also have to deal with recreating the Intro thread every time it hits its maximum, and I don’t think anyone benefits from having that giant monolith hanging about. Plus, I get the feeling that some people may feel shut out by having their first post locked up and thrown away. An intro category could foster more long term membership by giving new people a space to be heard and converse with each other.
That’s an interesting idea. Consider the following though:
We would need to figure out a concise way to explain this category to new campers.
we would have 100+ independent introduction threads each day, many of which would not be properly categorized, and would require a moderator to step in and recategorize them - thus generating substantially more work than the current situation
while these threads were awaiting re-categorization, they would make the newsfeed much noisier for everyone
Also, with regard to creating a new thread whenever a welcome thread hits 10,000 replies, this only happens once every few months and we have plenty of warning of it happening (I think we’ve only had to do it once so far).
Isn’t it the same when they’re awaiting unlisting?
An advantage I see with recategorizing is that regulars can also recategorize topics, so they can move introductions to the introductions category if they wanted.
