A suggestion was made to exclude the Off-topic category from the front page. I want your opinions.
Exclude Off-topic from front page
Create subcategories (e.g. philosophy) of Off-topic and exclude just those
Don’t exclude anything
I have another idea! (explain below)
Safe network is inevitably linked with freedom and therefore politics. I would just ensure such threads are labelled as off topic and split on topic threads when suitable.
Firstly an observation of some of the existing categories:
Uncategorized
Topics that don’t need a category, or don’t fit into any other existing category
Is this one really required?
Strategy
Community strategy, economics, politics, media etc.
Change to: SAFE Community Strategy?
Off-topic
For anything not directly related to MaidSafe or the forum. Use this category for politics, philosophy and anything else.
Politics is duplicated
My idea seeks to tightly define the categories. Debate will still go into the philosophical, but at least the boundaries are more tightly defined as there are no Undefined or Off-Topic categories visible unless desired.
My choices for these redefined categories are up for debate, addition and deletion, but with something as important as SAFE it would seem appropriate to keep the Categories relevant to SAFE as much as possible:
Delete Uncategorized
Delete or move Off-Topic
Add a category: Cryptographic - Other technology that may be relevant to SAFEnetwork
Add a category Privacy - How it’s being eroded, how to get it back
Change description of Strategy to ‘SAFE Community Strategy’
If Off-Topic is still needed then either move it somehow off the front page or:
Use Lounge (Level3) and change the description to reflect.
Level 3 could be attained by adding ‘value’ to the SAFE based categories first, with ‘value’ being assessed by Admin.
When assigning Level3 make it clear that these topics will become visible and offer an opt-out, thereby rendering the topics invisible.
Uncategorized is not a category, it is the absense of a category. 
This is certainly up for debate. The reason I liked it is becuase it is a way to identify new categories that we need. If people really can’t find a fitting category they will (should) not assign a category, which is better than putting it in the wrong category.
Now, since we have an off-topic category I realize that this actually means “anything about SAFE for which I can’t find a specific category”… so maybe it would be better to simply have a “general discussion” category which is quite common in other forums.
Makes sense. It’s a bit long though, would take up a lot of space on the front page. “Community strategy” might be fine…
Thanks, yeah that shouldn’t be in the strategy category, I think it was put there before we had off-topic. I will remove it.
I’m pretty sure that it will be needed, even if those other categories are added.
Possibly, but I would really prefer not to add manual work to decide who can post there or not. Also, I’m afraid that we would still get off-topic posts by new users, but posted in the wrong category.
I wonder if the nature of this software is throwing us off a little.
As the name implies, it’s a discourse…maybe more akin to a twitter conversation where fresh discussion bubbles to the top (for good or worse) i.e. not compartmentalised like Forum software.
It feels like categories in Discourse are more akin to Tags and a move in the direction of the semantic web. I don’t think we should be scared of having lots of tags to more tightly define the conversation…this would seem to be the way to both (a) focus conversations and (b) offer a highly searchable resource into the future
Do we use Tags to organize our email? i.e a bunch of conversations…I know I do…the narrower the semantic the better for later on.
I’m thinking about this body of ideas from the perspective of someone seeking insight in say 5 years time. As it stands now, it feels too easy to hijack, by creating multiple accounts and carrying on an ‘Off-Topic’ conversation between accounts…but with the added bonus of having that fake conversation ‘front and centre’ and with no re-course to bringing it back ‘On-Topic’
If this is done in the spirit of how I’m interpreting it to have been created, then there should be no requirement for the undefined, like Off-Topic.
Would Meta, be well utilized for suggesting new Tags?
I don’t think it’s a feature, but the ability to mute a post from one’s feed would be a nice way of tailoring the personal experience. As an extension to this, I could just imagine the ability for someone arriving here in 5 years time and having the ability to ‘Clone view’ i.e I’ve decided that a particular member is awesome and I want to ‘follow’ exactly what he/she sees (all the applied mutes) 
I think you’ve done a great Job here David, so please don’t take anything I’m saying here as criticism…
I agree that since the front page shows everything it feels more like tags. But, there is the possibility of having the categories page as the front page instead, and in that case it looks more like a traditional forum. Also, the fact that a topic can only have one category make it seem less like tags.
I know that there are a number of discussions on meta.discourse.org about tags/categories, I don’t have time to look through them now though. But, the way I see it they are categories now.
Yeah, I don’t think that there is a way to hide topics from the front page. You can mute topics and categories but I think that they only disappear from New and Unread (not sure here, someone who has tried can confirm perhaps?).
Thanks! Don’t be afraid to criticise though - that’s fine too.
I know that there are a number of discussions on meta.discourse.org about tags/categories
I guess I’m dreaming of being able to mute anything as a way of gaining real focus…I’ll have to dive into the Discourse discussion, get schooled a little and come back knowing what I’m talking about. Maybe run the software myself to see what your seeing