Discussion categories

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21

I think a Geo subcategory would be good. Basically anything that could have its own mailing list seems like a candidate for a domain subcategory.

22

I wish there was a way to delegate administration of subcategories, but there doesn’t seem to be. As more people use this system, they’ll automatically gain trust and moderation capabilities though, so I think this will start to resolve itself.

23

I’m not sure if you are looking for suggestions in this thread, but maybe a separate “Announcement” forum where people can follow package tagging and news.

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24

Ok, so once a Geo subcategory is created we would transition there, since there were no complaints on the julia-geo mailing list.

25

Geo domain created: Geo - JuliaLang. Please edit the About Geo page as appropriate – I’ve made it a wiki, which should let people edit it as I understand things, but if that doesn’t work, let me know.

26

What’s wrong with low traffic categories, as long as they do have some?

Suppose that in the future a not-yet-existing subcategory acquires traffic withing an existing big category. How do we expect to ever make the split reasonable, if discouragement is our criterion? Cause the old big category will still have more traffic than any new one (as is the case with Usage anyway), so that discouragement will always stay in place. Or who will bother discovering and moving the past relevant threads from the chaotic big category to the new subcategory? Therefore we’ll get stuck to the few categories decided early. Is that desirable? Do you have a different positive scenario in mind? Or does current consensus fail the whole concept of categories?

If the subject of a category is worthy to subscribe to, then low traffic is a plus, not a minus!

The only encouragement to use a category is for it to exist. If users end up not categorizing their posts and moderators end up moving many threads all the time, why not give moderators more categories to work with, along with giving users more specialized subscription options?

27

Forums create new subcategories all the time without this problem? Subcategoeries get made with mod help for a bit moving relevant topics, and people quickly switch. Hasn’t that always worked pretty well?

What hasn’t worked is creating too many categories. Julia-jobs? Julia-math? I could keep listing. When it splits too far it makes the community look inactive and makes everyone use one thread in order to get someone to actually read everything: Julia-users. So we know that method doesn’t work correctly.

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28

Following up on the Audio category: was that really necessary?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/julia-users/audio|sort:relevance

There have been 33 posts in Julia-users with the word “audio” in its whole run. The majority of that is picking up posts which just have the word audio in it. JuliaAudio is an org, but it’s a small org without much usage yet (at least judging by the admittedly bad indicator of stars).

Telling people to post their 4 posts a year in such a small category is a good way to have no one read it, which defeats the purpose of the category. If every 4-5 posts per year topic is a separate category, there will be tons of categories most people won’t read, so most people won’t respond in, and so everyone will just post in the main forum. They need to be at least populated enough to be useful.

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29

I think the solution that is going to work best for now is that we don’t over design what categories we have, but rather use tags to classify topics. If a certain domain/topic arises often enough we then create a category for those posts.

Also if a community wants to move to discourse e.g. julia-stats, or JuliaGPU, we can create a specific subcategory.

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30

What you describe is valid only for small communities, which may easily switch and may indeed look inactive at times. It’s the exact opposite with big ones. A big community is very hard to switch and a bunch of low traffic forums cannot trick anyone into believing that the overall community is inactive. Unless someone hopes for Julia to stay small, it would be wise to look at the rate overall Julia traffic increases, even while currently being fragmented. Discourse cannot worsen things, only improve them. But as traffic increases (and Discourse will increase traffic even by itself), so does noise. Low noise is different from silence and can be a blessing.

And having people read what they don’t want to read (i.e. noise) defeats the purpose of the categories as well. We don’t tell people anything particular, cause chances are that people won’t listen anyway. Categories are mostly for subscriptions and proper movement of threads will be performed by moderators. There won’t be a single category without at least one moderator subscribed to it, so every single post will get read. Of course reading doesn’t guarantee a good answer, but that’s true for the main forum too.

Moreover, what most people miss is that Discourse is also a wiki. Can you imagine a wiki without specialized categories? Or should we defeat the purpose of wikis too? I’m afraid that most people jumped into the new platform thinking of it as just a little better than google-groups, without reading the features of the new platform nor the full reasoning for and vision behind the migration.

31

Actually, a stated part of the vision behind the migration to Discourse or Statement of intent is that we want to invite, motivate and integrate the whole Julia community to the new platform.

UPDATE: Although in theory integration has many benefits and is the ideal, in practice independence is too precious to sacrifice. Therefore, I no more support integration.

32

I am pretty sure that a pinned post and mod intervention can easily make a big community switch to a new active forum in 14 days. Just a gut feeling.

I have had people tell me that, by looking at the inactive Julia-jobs, there must be no opportunities in Julia right now (which is completely false, just develop in Julia for a bit and the emails will start rolling in). So… it can?

I missed that because I don’t care about wikis most of the time. I just want LaTeX/KaTeX. Literally, whatever forum has LaTeX is the best one. At least we now have pretty-looking code.

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33

Thanks for clearing up that your objection is based either on “gut feeling” or rumors or lack of much care for anything beyond personal convenience. My own experience and research on the matter is way different (internet is a big place, so maybe we experienced very different parts of it). Please don’t take that as a personal accusation, cause you are not alone, most users just want to do their jobs, not having time to read such things. We hope in Discourse to better inspire the concept of the online community beyond that of an old-fashioned forum. There is no guarantee that this effort will succeed, but I believe that it’s worthy (else I wouldn’t bother myself with threads like this one, I value my time like everyone else).

34

Thank you all for your comments and feedback, I found them very valuable.
Right now I am trying to make Discourse a good fit for the Julia community, so different opinions are doubly valuable.

Please remember to be civil and respectful to each other, as well as interacting on the basis of good faith.

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36

Hey all,

I’d also like to suggest a “Tooling” or “Tools” category. That category would be for discussion about the repos in JuliaEditorSupport and similar (Eclipse plugins and whatever else may be out there); we could even move discuss.junolab.org over here, if there’s interest.

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37

Hi Ismael, I share your opinion regarding this topic. Having a specific language categories will extend the Julia user community.

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38

I agree whole heartedly with those. Now that there’s a Julia Discourse, it would be easier to follow the Juno discourse if it was here. Also, Julia is international and so we should accomodate other languages however possible.

39

Moving the Juno discourse over here would be good but it doesn’t quite feel right under Domains. Maybe a Projects top-level category with Projects/Juno as the first subcategory and discussion of Juno can occur there?

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40

Now that’s the proper spirit for this thread and this community, thanks to everyone! Keep those categories coming and let the fragmented venues migrate and integrate into the new platform.

UPDATE: Although in theory integration has many benefits and is the ideal, in practice independence is too precious to sacrifice. Therefore, I no more support integration.

1 Like
41

Well, the Domains description does say

Discussion of Julia in various specialized subject domains: statistics, optimization, machine learning, linear algebra, networking, GPUs, IDEs, etc.

but I agree that Domains doesn’t seem like the right category for this. Projects/Juno sounds fine, but I’m not quite sure yet what else could go in there as opposed to one of the Domains. Not that that’s a reason to not do it though :wink:

1 Like