Continuing the discussion from State of this forum, better moderation:
I think that "privacy’ category is indeed too broad and we need to split it up a bit.
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I just now saw the split by tag in the category, but it is optional
Yeah, we need a security category
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I would like to propose a change to the current categories.
Privacy has the description “General privacy & security discussions” but it is confusing to see the privacy category on a topic that is clearly security related, such as the recent 2FA-fingerprint unlock on GrapheneOS.
A #Security category could be introduced to make finding security related posts easier, especially as the forum continues to grow and since frankly, there are a lot of posts that are mostly security related. I get that this is Privacy Guides, but I firmly believe they still have a place here, and I think most of us can agree that Privacy and Security are inextricably linked.
The main flaw in my idea is what to do with the Questions category. I think ideally it would be renamed to just questions with the same description (currently it is [#]privacy:questions). This is because it could be confusing for new users searching for answers to commonly asked questions to have to keep track of whether they are asking a security or privacy question and not being 100% sure.
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Agreed we should have more labels : Privacy/Security and sub categories : Cyber-attacks, Privacy techniques, Privacy regulation, Surveillance, Big Tech, etc.
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Fwiw, perhaps a news category would be more adequate than a data breach category? AFAIK there aren’t many frequent posts about data breaches. I’m open to hearing otherwise 
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+1 for Privacy techniques. I have 300 
I think we should first clarify and define what a category should be, and then what a tag should be.
A category should inform us about the underlying structure of the post (or how it’s presented) to see where it should be categorized. We can differentiate this from tags, which should inform us about the content of the forum post, meaning what the post is about (as opposed to what kind of post it is (i.e., what category it is in).
If we focus solely on what forum posts is about and use this as the definition of “category”, then we run into the issue of forum posts being in multiple categories, which should not be the case for categories (firstly because Discourse does not allow for a topic to be in multiple categories, but secondly because it is just a good rule for knowledge organization).
This is why tags should be used for the content of the forum post. A post can be about privacy and security, but its category may only be of one kind: discussion. This does not mean that there can be no subcategories that can inherit categories.
Possible category rework:
- Bulletin Board → (the actual term does not matter and is up for change, but the abstraction still remains; this is where the Privacy Guides team posts their written/video content, forum announcements, and other official thingamabobs that come from them)
- Articles → (articles published on Privacy Guides here)
- Videos → (the new videos being created by Privacy Guides, as seen here
- Announcements → (any forum posts categorized only at the top-level category (seen here), meaning they are neither an article nor a video yet still exist within the Announcements category)
- Changelog → (stuff seen here)
- Site Suggestions → (remains somewhat unchanged other than the fact that the Changelog is now a subcategory of Bulletin Board and that the term “site development” is changed to “site suggestions” to reflect what the posts are actually doing (which is suggesting changes to the website)
- Tool Suggestions
- Guide Suggestions
- Discussions → (this is where actual discussions happen, which currently exists mostly here; we should differentiate this from Questions by stipulating that “discussions” are about constructing knowledge (like through debate or whatever) ***for the sake of the community or ***)
- Questions → (this would be somewhat akin to “tech support” but instead, it is “privacy support” so to speak; it is vital to police this category more than most because discussion posts often start off and are disguised as questions; to differentiate them from Discussions, questions should be thought of not as constructing knowledge, like through rational argumentation, but first and foremost as providing already-existing knowledge to the OP like tech support forums)
- Reposts/Multiposts → (the name is up for debate… but things that go here are the various news articles, blogs, videos, etc., that people share; the title should ideally be the original title of whatever is being shared (this makes others repost less of the same thing); ideally, nothing should be provided except the link to the actual news article/blog/video/etc. and maybe a couple of alternative ways of viewing the work (like through frontends for YouTube, or an archived version of the article); if the OP wants to provide their own opinion or reaction about it, they should reply to themselves instead of writing it in the original post, otherwise it might look like anyone else who responds to the original post would be responding to whatever the OP wrote, which may not always be the case since others may be responding to the actual linked work instead (which is usually the case); bad example here, okay example here; good example here; it’s also just good practice to separate what one is linking from their reactions/criticisms of it (when I reply to the bad example post, am I replying to the OP’s reaction or the post itself?); is the post’s priority sharing the article/blog/video/etc., and is their reaction to it supplemental/secondary? or do their reactions or thoughts take priority?; if the former is the case, then it remains in this category, but if the latter is the case, then clearly it goes in Discussions; this is how we can differentiate between sharing things and discussing things, although maybe it can actually be a subcategory of Discussions, IDK)
- I find no issue with Meta and Off Topic as categories, so they should remain as they are IMO
(I’m thinking of grouping up Discussions, Questions, and Re/Multiposts into something like “Community” or whatever, but IDK… what do u guys think?)
Possible tag rework:
- I don’t think I need to provide a rework for tags. All that needs to happen is for someone (or multiple people, rather) to take a look at whatever subjects forum posts seem to be about and create a tag representing that. For example: privacy, security, anonymity, etc. An issue with this, though, is that tags themselves can also be categorical, like OPSEC being under security or whatever, which means that tags themselves might run into the same issue we had before if left unchecked.
- This article here is a decent source for understanding how to usefully create tags. These articles here and here, written by that same guy, explain why “categories” (or hierarchies) aren’t good (although I still advocate for a specific kinds of categories). I haven’t actually read those articles in a while, so whatever information I’m positing here, he explicates far better. And so, whoever does rework the categories and tags should read up on this IMO.