Secondary Tags in General discussions - part 1

roxy_r

Hello folks,

As you know, on Flarum we have the ability to create Secondary tags for any of our Primary tags. To make sure everyone knows what I am talking about, I will give you an example of how we use it today:

If you look at the Feedback board - Primary tag, you will see that it contains a few different mini boards - Secondary tags. like: Visuals, Missing basics, Bugs, Unexpected behaviour, Nice to have' Ideas pot, Lovely jubbly and Resolved. This allows us to organise the forum a bit more and make sure we get as much as possible out of the discussions for both members and staff.

This brings me to another example that you probably know a lot about: Forum Games being a secondary tag of General discussions.

We have seen the feedback about that so we know how you feel about which is why we are planning on migrating Forum games into it's own primary tag very soon. If we all agree this is the right thing, then we are looking at possibly 1h time-frame where members would not be able to created new threads in the two tags but still able to reply to existing threads.

At the same time, there has been a suggestion to create a secondary tag in General discussions that would host all the Member led initiatives (like the creative writing competition) called 'Run by you'. The suggestion was made by @jesi23 and it is all about giving those regular member run activities and competitions a home. We think it is a great idea but we want to hear from all of you as well.

I know there is an opportunity for us to categorise GD and other parts of the forum but I thought we could start small, nail this first and see how it works before we move forward.

So, as next steps:

Is everyone OK with moving Forum Games out of GD?
Are we all good with a new secondary GD tag called Run by you for all member-led initiatives?
How will this tag operate and what should be included in it? (Would this be something that only the Eds can assign? What would and would not be suited for this new secondary tag? Can we come up with a description?)

Really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
Roxy

harrrrrry

roxy_r

Those changes seem to be a good and proper response to the various discussions members have started on these subjects, so I'd agree we should go ahead with these as a start.

Concerning the RBY subtag, I see the probability that if left open for everybody to start threads there it will be over-run by all manner of subjects that probably should have been posted elsewhere. So I'm thinking that:

it should start off with only well-established competitions and features, such as creative writing
thereafter new subjects that are previously agreed with the community can be added

This does mean that threads in RBY should only be started by educators or by the organiser(s) of an agreed RBY subject. I'd imagine, for example, that if the competition is monthly, it probably needs a new thread every month to keep the month's entries together.

shabazmoqsud

roxy_r the changes you have suggested are perfect looking forward to the especially forum games having its own primary tag.

woodyuk

roxy_r this all makes perfect sense to me and I think it will make the forum cleaner,tidier and easier to navigate,especially for new members.

endorphin

roxy_r

I would prefer it to remain secondary to General Discussion as I prefer hierarchical to flat structures. Perhaps if it were to remain there it could be hidden by default as per this suggestion?
Yes an RBY secondary tag is fit for purpose.
I don't know what permissions can be applied to the management of secondary tags but I can see that there will be various attempts to post stuff there that won't belong there, either accidentally or deliberately. Perhaps we should only allow Eds to tag discussions as RBY initially to see how it goes?

RBY's mandate should be something like "A place for threads which require deeper member involvement than just discussion". So stuff like competitions (er I can't think of anything else just now).

frenchielove

roxy_r thank you, yes, great idea

extreme_one

roxy_r Is everyone OK with moving Forum Games out of GD?

Yes. Definitely.

Are we all good with a new secondary GD tag called Run by you for all member-led initiatives?

What's the reasoning behind moving to a sub tag?
Are there lots of people clamouring to have these threads hidden, as the ability to hide a tag seems to be the only member-facing benefit I can think of?

Unless there's another benefit to a sub tag I'm missing ...?

giffgaff20147

roxy_r seems ok to me but not tech minded so fine to go with the flow whatever you want

danwillen

extreme_one What's the reasoning behind moving to a sub tag?
Are there lots of people clamouring to have these threads hidden, as the ability to hide a tag seems to be the only member-facing benefit I can think of?

One of the over member facing benefits is it allows for the easily finding of threads like the creative writing competition that on the old forum would of been stickied to keep visibal but on the new fourm there trying to find over ways of making threads that used to be stickied still been easy to find with out filling up the first few pages of all deductions with stickied threads

roxy_r Is everyone OK with moving Forum Games out of GD?

Most definitely agree with fourm games having there own tag.

timwilliams25

roxy_r

Sounds good to me. Would be nice to have the Run by You tag to see the things you can get involved in.

sha_shah1

roxy_r
Sound like a good idea and easy to use for new members.

ianmorland

roxy_r

Morning everyone, just a little note to say that I have just finished implementing these changes.

There were no unexpected issues, and all went smoothly. 🙂

Over and out...

Ian

dtuxcomp

roxy_r As someone who has muted the Forum Games threads I think it would be far better for them to be in their own section, that way people can chose to follow or not. Likewise the secondary tag for RBY seems like a good idea. Maybe start that off with only Eds being able to assign for a while to build content then trial people being able to add the tag themselves to see if that also works, or maybe the other way around, let it be a free for all and see if that goes wrong 🙂

endorphin

roxy_r I like "Creative Corner" too or maybe "Members' Creative Corner" to emphasise who's running it.

BTW now that Forum Games is a separate tag I think it should have some sort of description in the All Tags view, currently its description is blank along with a few other tags:

stephenpperry

roxy_r 1. Yes 2. Yes and 3.... I’m not sure I have the answer

essie112mm

Hi Roxy,
Thank you for listening and responding to member concerns and views on this.

General discussion can struggle to attract good discussion threads and the sight of Forum Games drowning everything else out was guaranteed to lower the credibility of GD still further.

On the grounds that the “Run by You” tag is now actually starting to mean something I am happy to see the new secondary tag given the name.

While it is in its infancy I am also of the opinion that only Eds should be able to assign threads to the new tag. Once the tag is established perhaps a team of reliable members could take over responsibility (something like KB editors) for assigning threads, competitions etc. with Eds merely keeping an eye on what is in the tag.

harrrrrry it should start off with only well-established competitions and features, such as creative writing

I can’t agree with this. As a result of this thread a member might come forward with a great idea, only to have it turned down on the grounds that it isn't well-established. Inclusion should be based on merit.

As regards a description for the tag here’s my suggestion: “Here’s where you can participate in regular activities and challenges, as well as share your creative skills in member-run threads and competitions”

suppers_ready

I think moving Games into it's own tab would be a good move. Even today I've seen a comment by someone who is having their GD tab flooded. I also saw a comment in the same thread that a member can't now hide the Games in their GD listing (don't know if this is the case as I hid them when the forum first changed over)

I also agree that the suggested RBY tag is a good idea. I think it needs a bit of variety in there, threads like kath72's Home Made/Creative threads and cass905's upcycling thread etc. (with their permissions of course) in addition to the CWC .

When the CWC was held on the Lithium platform it was stickied every month, which the educators had to do. In an ideal world I think monthly competitions such as the CWC would still benefit from being stickied, even on a sub tag, that's assuming that it would not then be stickied on the All Discussions tag.

I believe I'm right in thinking that on the Lithium platform the CWC would be posted in General Discussion and the OP would ask an Educator to sticky the thread. This could be the same pattern for the content contained in the new sub tag. Once the post has been made in GD the OP should ask for it to be moved to the RBY sub tag.

roxy_r

Brilliant! Thanks for the input so far folks.

So for Forum games, we need some help from the platform team to do this and as mentioned it will take about an hour to complete time in which we will not be able to create new threads in either GD or Forum games so are we happy for this to happen in the morning or more towards the evening?
My view is that morning time would be best as we can first of all monitor it properly and second I believe we have more activity in the evening in those areas.

On the RbY tag, happy to go with the suggestions and yes suppers_ready, just spoke to @arlettak about the Eds being nudged when something needs to be in that tag.

So, to recap: At least at the beginning, only the Eds will be able to assign this tag to threads and for regular threads like the CWC the members should just report it to an ed and ask for it to be moved into that tag.

One other thing would be to create a description that we all agree on for what should go in there or what the process is for us to decide if a new thread belongs in there in the future. This will help avoid any confusion in the future.

dez_d

roxy_r On the RbY tag, happy to go with the suggestions and yes suppers_ready, just spoke to @arlettak about the Eds being nudged when something needs to be in that tag.

Is it still a thing that the OP can't report their own thread? It will be ok if the thread has some replies but might prove a bit more difficult if no one else is on the thread which might mean the OP PDing an off-line Ed.

roxy_r

Hi endorphin, at the moment I am not sure we can hide it by default but at the same time, if we do manage that then it would be pretty hard for new people to get involved in it as they would not know it is there. Which is why we thought in order to be fair to everyone, best thing is to move it out of GD, then give everyone the opportunity to either view it or hide it.

Regarding the RBY tag, yep, that was my thought as well. We have a few nominations for threads to be included in there already but I would love for us to define a process now that we will all use to see if a new thread needs to be in there or not.

yvonnearmstrong

roxy_r

Great reply from @woodyuk and I think the same it would be much cleaner and tidy 🤩

Yvonne

roxy_r

Great thoughts folks! Cheers for sharing.

So are we ok with having about 1 hour perhaps Wednesday morning where members won't be able to create new threads in General discussions or Forum games as we move them over? You will still be able to reply to existing threads.

Looking deeper at the name of the secondary tag I had a quick chat with the folks here and the engagement team and it might be better to get a bit more specific with what part of Run by You we are referring to.
What I mean by that is that a lot of what we do is about Run by you and I am actually working on a bigger long term vision that will enhance on this which I hope to share with you all soon. So in light of more examples of Run by you on the horizon, it might be better to prepare ourselves and be a bit more specific. The other reason why it would benefit us is new members coming in and seeing the sub- tag, they will understand that this is a specific part of Run by you and not the entire thing.

So what do we think would best describe this part of Run by you? Member led activities ?

extreme_one , danwillen is spot on - at the moment all stiky-ed threads are shown on the All discussions page and it would be great to still give these initiatives a home and make sure members can easily find them. It would also give us the first step towards trying to organise General discussions a bit more.

essie112mm and harrrrrry yep, we need to decide on a way for us to figure out how new threads would go into this tag. Could it be as simple as us having another thread where members can nominate and discuss?

ianmorland

dez_d Is it still a thing that the OP can't report their own thread?

No, OPs can now report their own threads/posts 🙂

anth006

Jargon and abbreviations without explanation are quite exclusive. Please don't assume that the meaning is generally known. What on earth is CWC?

suppers_ready

anth006 Sorry, Creative Writing Competition

jesi23

anth006 What on earth is CWC

Actually, since there is no longer a ‘competition it now stands for Creative Writing Challenge where members write ENTRIES each month on a specified topic, and receive reactions from other members. A parallel thread is used for any COMMENTS and further elucidation on the topics, or ‘non-entries’ where any member wants to write more than one entry on a topic. The actual entries are limited to one per member. 🤡 Jes

guffygoff

Big thumbs up from me on moving the games forum out of general discussion.

The other suggestions all sound sensible, though I can't comment further, as they involve things that I'm not very familiar with.

And a big thank you to those behind the scenes who make things happen.

harrrrrry

essie112mm As a result of this thread a member might come forward with a great idea

Maybe what I said wasn't as clear as I intended. I intended the established features to get the idea off the ground. In parallel, or at least very soon after, we should consider how we decide what other features are added. New features can be added once we've agreed how to choose what gets added. But it shouldn't be a complete free for all with a hundred members launching random competitions and challenges as that would dilute the interest in each one. There should perhaps be ideas suggested, refined for a week or two and then a monthly vote to decide on a couple of features to add.

essie112mm

harrrrrry it shouldn't be a complete free for all with a hundred members launching random competitions and challenges as that would dilute the interest

That is not what I want either. None of us does. But if Eds are in charge of assigning threads then they will automatically filter out any which don't have merit or are unlikely to take off, and also restrict the number of threads allowed into the tag.

I feel quite strongly though that if possible at least one new thread should be allowed into the tag straightaway. If the community is to flourish we must make it more open to newbies and members who are infrequent visitors. At the moment someone posts an idea in Labs and gets cut down to size, they make a suggestion on Contribute and for their pains get told off or sarcasm or cold water poured on their thread (btw I'm not suggesting you do this), and here we are again saying only established threads can be at the starting line of the new tag. In my opinion members should be given the chance to pitch any ideas they might have before the tag is launched.

roxy_r So are we ok with having about 1 hour perhaps Wednesday morning where members won't be able to create new threads in General discussions or Forum games as we move them over?

Yes, but would it be helpful to post a thread on GD this morning giving notification as many members won't know about this thread and might assume there is an issue with the forum?

roxy_r So what do we think would best describe this part of Run by you? Member led activities ?

Fine with me

roxy_r we need to decide on a way for us to figure out how new threads would go into this tag. Could it be as simple as us having another thread where members can nominate and discuss?

Can't see why not. It might be useful to have the thread on both Contribute and GD. And how about resurrecting old extablished threads that worked well before? I seem to remember there was a "grow your own" thread which had quite a following.