One word of caution: Those who remember the ArsDigita BBoards probably
remember when some bright bulb at aD went nuts adding more and more
top level forums. There were easily
more than 50.
The vast majority went utterly unused, and many otherwise very useful
forms (e.g., "CVS for Web Development") were more or less lost in the
clutter. And the website stayed that way until for a long time, until
aD finally shut down.
So, Carloline's call to get categorization working before or instead
of spawning more forums strikes a real chord with me.
That said, Joel's and Malte's suggestions for top level and within
forum categories do seem basically sound to me.
Malte, I bet your "Deployment" and "Howto" distinction will be ignored
(or not understod) by many posters. If we're going to have
distinctions like that we'd better have a cadre of folks with the
ability to easily move a thread from one forum to another.
Ideally, we should also be able to rename, split, and merge top level
forums and categories at will, as some forums will undoubtedly go
unused, etc. - the forums and categories we want will certainly change
over time.
Categorization should be very useful, but only if
the categorization info is accurate and reasonably complete. Often
the original poster gets it wrong, or new info in the thread merits an
additional category. So we'd better have a good UI to let that same
volunteer cadre (presumably the long time experienced users like all
of us, basically) edit the categorizatation metadata for each post as
they read it.
