Conversations here are organized by categories. Each category hosts a number of topics forming a collection of posts.
Categories > Topics > Posts
When you contribute to an existing discussion, you post replies to a topic. Similar topics belong to the same category.
A category’s purpose and specificity is introduced in a pinned topic (usually tagged about) to help organize common knowledge as we build it.
The first post of a topic can be used to summarize the discussion in order to facilitate the onboarding of new participants. Developing the first post also has the advantage that you can turn it into a published page (pages).
Topics can be re-categorized or merged, and posts can be moved as well, individually or in a batch, for example when a conversation drfits away from the proposed topic: a new related topic can be created and will be linked to the original conversation. This helps constructing knowledge and keeping discussions focused.
New topics that do not belong to any category are created here in Community . Topics can be moved later on to a more appropriate category, or be merged into an existing conversation.
Tags and Groups
There are two other ways to organize discussions in the forum. Namely tags and groups.
Tags
Tags can be used to collect similar topics across categories. For example, we’re using the about tag to collect category descriptions and facilitate discovery of new categories.
The welcome tag collects onboarding topics that are informative to newcomers Getting Started.
The documentation tag family covers explanation, tutorial, howto guides, and reference material. The faq tag brings lists of short answers to more in-depth topics.
Groups
Groups gather members around membership or interests and can grant extra functionality: some groups enable notifications, or give access to restricted categories.
There are three types of groups:
- Public groups may be joined by anyone. Before joining a public group, you should check its description to understand why it can be interesting for you, or not.
- Closed groups may require an invitation from an existing group member, or some of them may require a candidate to request membership. (e.g., @ngi-taler, @well-being.team)
- Automatic groups grant specific features to regular users, as well as facilitation privileges (changing tags or titles, moving posts and topics around). (e.g., @trust_level_2)
Notifications
Notifications appear on your avatar, flash on your screen or enter your email Inbox when something worth noticing happens: new topic in a category you watch, someone mentioning you in a conversation… Notifications can be tuned to achieve balance in your participation: too many and you will loose interest, not enough and you will miss important discussion. It’s all a matter of focus and attention.
Quotes
Last but not least, Discourse (the forum software) allows deep linking and citations of existing conversation. When composing a reply or a new topic, you can navigate to any post and select part of it (a sentence, a paragraph) to put it in the context of your message. This will automatically link the topics, across categories, and reinforce the knowledge base as it grows.
Here you can learn more about the quote feature on Discourse Meta.