Category Suggestions

A couple of days ago posted a topic that didn’t have a suitable existing category.

So I’ve had a think about a few categories and thought of two that I think might be useful, but rather than just suggesting them, I thought it would be good to also use this thread to have a little discussion about categories to see what peoples thoughts are about them.

i.e.

  • Are the current set of categories alright?
  • Do any existing categories need clarifying?
  • Are there any categories we don’t already have that might be useful?

My two new category proposals are:

A “Help Wanted”/“Classified ads” section.

The main purpose of this would be for people looking to team up to develop a game or ‘advertise’ for help with developing a particular part of their game.

For example, if you’re is good at art but not very good at programming, you could post a request for an artist to join up with.

Or if (like me) you’re a good programmer but are horribly tone deaf, you could ask if any musicians around would be willing to develop the sound track for the game.

A “Troubleshooting” category.

At the moment a lot of people are using the “Bugs & feature requests” category to ask questions about issues when setting up their Pokitto.

That’s not what the category is supposed to be for, but people have been choosing it because there’s no obvious place to troubleshoot issues with setting up their Pokittos. (I speak from experience.)

That’s what the “Troubleshooting” category will solve - it will be a distinct place for people who are having hardware issues when setting up their Pokittos.

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Sounds good to me

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I also propose a Beginners category.

I think we proceed according to @Pharap’s idea

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What sort of things would the beginners category be for?

Just for beginners asking how to do programming and hardware tinkering?

Or would it also overlap the ‘troubleshooting’ slightly and include people who are having trouble getting their Pokittos running?

It’s a good idea either way, but it’s nice to know if there’s a distinction.


By the way @Jonne, I found out moderators can’t make categories, only admins can, so when we’ve decided which categories are best to have you’re the only one qualified to make them.

(Unless @system would like to do the honours? :P)

A few other thoughts:

If we’re adding the “Help Wanted” section and the “Beginner” section, maybe it would make sense to change “Tuturials & requests” to just “Tutorials”, or at least refine what the “requests” part means?


It might also be worth revising a few category descriptions to make them clearer.

For example the “Bugs & feature requests” category is described as “Report bugs and issues here.”.

It makes no mention of the Pokitto Lib and the use of the word ‘issues’ probably contributes to why people try to post their setup ‘issues’ there.
Something like “Post bugs, issues and feature requests for the Pokitto Lib here.” or simply “Pokitto Lib issues only.”

And “Tutorials & requests” is described as “If you are a beginner, don’t worry”, which is more of a statement than a description, and would need to be changed to avoid confusion with the new “Beginner” category. Something like “Tutorials written by our users.” or “Find and request tutorials here.”.

All the other descriptions are suitable as far as I can see, it’s just those two that could possibly cause confusion.


The main reason I’m bringing these things up now is because with any luck we’ll have an influx of new people when the shop opens, so it makes sense to sort the categories before then, while it’s easier to do a bit of upheaval.

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What about C++ questions? Where should they fit better?

I assume they’re covered by “Pokitto Programming” (#programmers-talk) - “Show your projects, ask questions”.

Though maybe that’s not entirely obvious?

I’m not sure.

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I can already tell I’m going to be one of the most frequent visitors there (as an answerer).


The new category arrangement looks much more organised and inviting.

I’ll try to keep a look out for stray discussions that now need recategorising (like the ones in troubleshooting that actually were bugs/issues), and hopefully other moderators and trusted users will do the same.


Edit:

Two small points:

Firstly I’m still not quite sure what the " & requests" part means in “Tutorials & requests”

Secondly do ‘feature requests’ now belong in “Bug reports”, “Troubleshooting”, “Tutorials & requests”, some other category, or a category we don’t yet have?
I had a quick flick through some of the stuff in ‘Troubleshooting’ to weed out the obvious ‘Bug reports’ topics, but I’ve run into a few feature requests and I wasn’t sure where to direct them to.

(One of my moves accidentally registered as new activity, sorry about that, I’m not sure what caused it.)

Edit 2:

It seems changing a topic’s category when it hasn’t got any replies somehow counts as new activity, so I’m going to try to avoid that in future.