Category Creation!

Both good. Think I prefer the second one.

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A Speakeasy?

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That is it!!! Love it!

@Daveb With the green, that shade of green is kind of a classic internet color as well. Itā€™s the shade of the green screen monitors and those colors also came into vogue when web design was becoming more professional.

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@LockeCJ - so how about some initial categories?

Says Danegeld, getting the First Mention badge

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Party

needs more spaces to post

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Seeing @ChickieDā€™s gender/sexuality post made me want an ā€œanthropologyā€ (name up for discusiion of course) category, for this, race, and other human identity/ human behavior / group dynamics / family and community structure discussions could fall under this. Could be too narrow, but a thought.

I also think the name dizzy for a category in particular was too clever by half, and just confused a lot of people. Iā€™m in favor of fairly straightforward names, just 2cā€¦

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Suggestions:

Personal: TL3, indicative of weighty/personal discussions ahead
Governance: How and why we run the place the way we wind up choosing to do, discussions about improving the same
Operations: The nuts and bolts of the discourse instance and all the technical bits associated with it

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I donā€™t have the power to create the categories, but I went to my Discourse and am copying and pasting in graphics showing how to do it for @LockeCJ

Logged in as admin, go to the main page. Then select Categories from the menu.

When you click on Categories, the Categories menu option becomes highlighted, as shown below

You should have a hamburger menu at the right that allows you to create a new category.

This page opens. I circled where you change the color assigned to the category

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Now I just need a list :wink:

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Hereā€™s my suggested list based on this thread. Seems a little long.

Board Help - place for users to get help
Board Governance - area for making decisions on the rules
Board IT - for people doing work on creating and maintaining the board to discuss tech details

Games - for playing games
Entertainment - for media discussions
Just Look - fun discussions

Bounce/Ahoy/Avast - BoingBoing discussions

Lounge - for general schmoozing

Maker - talking about making stuff
Food - eating/making food/recipes
Party - fun topics

Virtual Hugs - Personal topics and shouts outs
Politics - politics

User Written Articles - like a blog for us
Collaboration Space - for working together on projects

Interesting on the Net (or something to share articles) - share interesting articles
Nerd Culture - nerd/geek/computer related

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the traditional 14 categories:

  • belonging to the emperor
  • embalmed
  • tame
  • sucking pigs
  • sirens
  • fabulous
  • stray dogs
  • included in the present classification
  • frenzied
  • innumerable
  • drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
  • et cetera
  • having just broken the water pitcher
  • that from a long way off look like flies
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Thank you so much for putting that together.

Here are my thoughts on the list. Iā€™d like feedback from @everyone on this if possible.

Maybe just Help?

Again, maybe just Governance or something similar?

It looks like I can create a hierarchy, so maybe these two should fall under a Meta category?

Iā€™d probably move Site Feedback under Meta as well, unless we think that would obscure it too much.

Thereā€™s already a Staff category that is limited to admins and moderators. Would it make sense for these discussions to happen under there (possibly in a sub category), or should they be public?

Maybe have a top-level Entertainment category with sub-categories for Games and Movies?

Would this be different from the TL3 Lounge? Itā€™s there waiting for us, and Iā€™m not planning on removing it. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Maybe a Creative category, or Arts & Crafts? There could be sub-categories.

This could fit under there too.

These could probably be merged into a single category like News or Signal Boost. Iā€™m wary of a category specifically about BB in the spirit of being about something rather than against it.

I could see this as either a top-level or a sub of the news category.

These should probably be a single category, maybe under entertainment. Iā€™m not sold on either of the names, but Iā€™m open to feedback.

This is presumably where the victory and cake threads would go?

Maybe just Blog then. Sam at Discourse has a scheme to host a blog from inside the BBS that I want to investigate.

On second thought, Entertainment should probably just be Culture and this could be a sub.

Iā€™ll try to make a nicely formatted list tomorrow. I am tired and it is late. :sleepy:

Was that controversial enough for everyone?

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No, think you got it nailed.

Once we figure out the basic ideas we can get creative with the names.

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I think a wrath/rage category would be useful to separate out the infuriating stuff that happens everyday. Maybe as a subcategory of news

I know I have days and even weeks where I donā€™t look at the news because I canā€™t cope with it

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I donā€™t think we should go to crazy with the categories. Nesting categories seems particularly unnecessary.

I think the most important category that we need to land on is the one that takes the place of ā€œboingā€ - on the BB-BBS, that separated the user-created conversations from the ones that were linked to ā€œfront pageā€ articles. We donā€™t have a front page yet, so we donā€™t need to worry about it just yet, but I think we should have a front page and that it should have its own designation. Thatā€™s where the ā€œblogā€ section comes up, which I think warrants its own discussion because it includes issues of tech, content, and access.

Note that Iā€™m not talking about something that comes from BB - I donā€™t think we should have that as a reference or necessarily think of that as the origin of our threads. It would tie us too much to the past, I think.

Other than that, categories are really about setting the tone for the conversations. I prefer slightly wackier names over dry, straightforward names. I had suggested ā€œHelp Meā€ and ā€œJust Lookā€ but probably should have explained; Help Me would be for anything someone needed advice on, from dating to building a website, or I suppose help with this board. Just Look would be for anything unusual - a ā€œcuriositiesā€ section. That would be distinct from something like ā€œnewsā€ which would be more mainstream stuff, politics and world events. The reason I wanted an explicit ā€œreviewsā€ section was because I felt that I really liked reading peopleā€™s personal experience with products, and also for future front-page content.

As for the whole governance thing, I really think we can just keep all of that in the Site Feedback area, though I do think thatā€™s a bad name for that topic - could we change that to Site Management or something?

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Not exactly a category, but it would be interesting to invite Flossaluzitarin over here to see if BoingBoingā€™s beta-stage AI can travel between servers. Of course, we might inadvertently initalise Skynet in the process, but at least weā€™d have the ā€œUnderstanding Flossyā€™s Emergenceā€ category here to discuss it.

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+1 everything you suggested. As for the above question, IMO public is better for two reasons - transparency is good, and it allows for more input. If that turns out to be a bad thing for whatever reason, you can always change it, right?

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I like the idea, a lot. I often find Iā€™m in a certain sort of mood, and it can be tedious and demoralising to scroll and scroll through a bunch of stuff you donā€™t want to look at.

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As @weatherman pointed out, I think categories should describe the tone / shape / style / behavior of the threads in them, not the content. They are most helpful when they describe how one participates. In a games thread you play. In a news thread you read and respond to news, in a personal thread you post personal stories and support eachother, in a making thread you show and tell.

This helps avoid non-mutually exclusive categories which, given that each thread can only have one (correct?) It forces hard decisions if the categories overlap. This, of course, negates my earlier suggestion, though perhaps something like ā€œacademic roundtableā€ would be a category that the anthro topoc would fit in. Is there something akin to tagging, where multiple subject areas can be assigned to a thread? Or is that what subcategories doā€¦?

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                                    POPOISMS
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