I would like to open the discussion with the “early adopters” by seeking opinions on the most effective approach to design the forum categories.
First, I think the topic-specific categories are great, they are direct and concise. However, the number of categories could start growing and growing. For example, if people can’t find the exact category they want, they might want some more specific ones, such as wave breaking, source terms, wave energy harvesting, wave climate, to say a few. In that case, another approach would be structuring the categories based on the user purposes. This involves identifying the primary reasons users will visit the forum, for example:
Seeking information or advice
Sharing knowledge or experiences
Promoting new research articles
Discussing specific topics (tags or subcategories are needed)
Seeking help with coding or technical things
Socialising and networking
Posting job offers
Advertising events
By tailoring the categories to the users’ intended purposes, the forum can be more user-centric and intuitive. The various sub-topics within the great waves topic can be achieved using tags or subcategories. An example of the structure could be as follows:
As you suggested, we can only guess what the user community as a whole would want to post and read about, and thus we’d be guessing some categories that make sense.
We can also individually express what categories we’d each like to see.
Either way, I suggest starting coarse-grained and fine-graining from there incrementally on an as needed basis (i.e. following the feedback from users). Having too many categories from the onset could introduce decision fatigue to posters.
Some categories/tags that I’d personally anticipate and want to see:
announcements (anything significant that the community should know about)
events (general, applies to in-person meetings, zoominars etc.)
help (anything you need help with, science, coding, algorithms, finding a specific paper, etc.)
homework (like help but indicates to not give the solution)
papers (your or someone else’s papers that would be interesting to the waves community)
I think this is a great suggestion, as opening topic-based categories could turn out to be too messy. I am looking into structuring possible sub-categories, following your initial template and @milancurcic preferences.
Let’s see how we can then improve the structure further.
Hi @Fabrice. I think tags would do the trick. We can create as many as we want within each category or subcategory. Though I will check if some sort of hashtags could be implemented.
Hello,
Following Daniel and others: I agree that we could use tags to find topics more easily than having a structure. We just need to build up this tag list.
On the structure side, besides the jobs, student internships … , we probably need to have a category on datasets
