Category Strategy

So we need to come up with a strategy for organizing the categories for the forum. The rules we have to follow:

  1. Only one category per posted topic.
  2. Only 2 levels of categories… category -> subcategory

So we cannot abuse categories as tags and as per the Discourse team there will never be tagging as it doesn’t work in their opinion based on the results on Stack Overflow.

So currently I have 3 top level categories in Mobile, Console, and Desktop. Then subcategories for things like iOS, Android, Linux, etc. We also have a few other top level categories like Showcase and General. You can see all the categories here:

http://forum.monogame.tv/categories

The first problem i ran into with this is the Windows Store category… is it desktop or is it mobile? Could be both in the future as Win8 and WinPhone merge.

Second was in figuring out what to do with OUYA. Yea it is a console, but it also runs Android. So where should it go?

My other thought is to go with categories that are more about the area of interest:

  • Graphics
  • Shaders
  • Content
  • Sound
  • Input
  • Mobile
  • Desktop

Thoughts? What is our goal really with these categories? How will people use them?

Ok… i’m flattening all the categories.

I’m also adding Graphics, Audio, Input, Content to round out the categories for non-platform specific issues.