I’m a little new to this particular Discourse setup (the other one I am seems to be configured differently). Can we all make new categories or just the admins? Do we want categories or just everything in general? For example, I was wondering about making a BMI category.
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I think only admins can make them, so suggestions here could be good.
A BMI category would be good, but sub-categories should also be possible (e.g. per language?
- BMI
- C
- C++
- Fortran
- Python
- Java
- Javascript
- Julia
- Model coupling
- CSDMS showcase (like Pangeo’s showcase (sub)category).
- Jobs
- …
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Admins can create categories and subcategories.
A topic can belong to only one category, but it can have multiple tags. Admins and users with a trust level >= 3 can create tags, and everyone, I think, can apply tags to topics.
It seems like the official advice (e.g. It’s Time We Talked About Tags) is to have fewer broad categories and more specific tags, and to add categories when it seems clear that they are useful.
The different programming languages would be particularly useful as tags, I think, because they easily cross category boundaries.
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Note that we have an existing BMI Forum (csdms/bmi · Discussions · GitHub) that we absolutely should move over here to defragment our Forum space.
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@wkearn Just so I’m clear on this, we could create a BMI category, then use tags for languages; e.g., python, c++, fortran, etc.
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That was my thinking. The tags as I understand them can be applied across categories, so we would have one python tag. Topics on BMI or Landlab + Python can all get the same python tag even if they land in different categories.
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Okay cool - I made a BMI category: BMI - The CSDMS Forum then we can tag from in there. Sounds like the right way forward?
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And “education” tag or category could also be nice
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@BSchilperoort Which would you prefer? I would lean toward category since it’s a pillar of CSDMS.
OK, now I’m waffling. I know this goes back to the old catagories-versus-tags argument, but maybe we should just have one category and many tags? For example, @BSchilperoort’s post, Teachbooks: jupyter-book based interactive notebooks, lives in the General category and it could be tagged both education and bmi. It shouldn’t be siloed in an Education or a BMI category.
How about a landlab category or tag? As with BMI, we already have a landlab discussion forum but it’s not widely used.
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I created and added “education”, “python”, “bmi” and “tools” tags to @BSchilperoort’s Teachbooks post. Everyone should be able to tag topics with one or more of those four tags now.
Users with trust level >= 3 can create tags, but no one other than admins is at that level yet. We might consider either lowering that threshold or manually bumping our first batch of users up so that people can create tags for their own topics.
I might be wrong, but it looks like you can only create tags on topics that exist. So if we want a landlab tag, for instance, someone should start a conversation about Landlab!
One of the pieces of advice in the Discourse article about tags I posted above is to start by making tags because they are more flexible, and then to promote tags that seem to make sense to categories once you have some experience with it. We can flesh out the hierarchy once we have more posts to categorize.
Ha! I knew I should’ve rtfa first! I think this is a great plan.
Sounds good! Should I remove the BMI category then for now?
Up to you. I don’t think it hurts to have it for now.
I just created this post and thought it might be worth having a students tag or similar for posts relating to studentship/educational opportunities. Or should that go under the education tag?
I just looked over some other academia-oriented forums, and it seems like a common practice is to have a “Jobs” category, possibly with tags describing the job level like phd, postdoc, etc. If it is all right with you, I can create a jobs tag and a phd tag and add them to your post. We can consider promoting the jobs tag to a category at some point.
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Perfect, that sounds like a good approach!