I think this might be helped with more categories? Our categories are as follows:
- Announcement [12]
- Privacy [778]
- Site Development [184]
- Meta [61]
- Off Topic [181]
The category of Privacy is kind of… broad. Its a privacy forum, so yeah anything “on-topic” is about privacy. But there are definitely breakdowns of this, which could be explored. Not saying the below are better breakdowns, but considerations:
- Recent Events and News
- Threat Models
- Privacy Applications and Services
- Operating Systems and Hardware
If we create the categories, we can have sensible rules and focus per category, and some general rules to gear towards higher quality initial posts and discussion. From what I am seeing, we don’t have this, and only a general conduct. However we can create all the rules we like, its up to staff if they believe this is a better way to delineate and enforce discussion.
Most forums I’ve been on, maintained, and browsed separate their niche focus into distinct categories to help maintain discussion. For example, see Ultimate Guitar Forum - a very focused topic of instruments and music, but with major groupings for each category, which there are plenty.
Just an idea.
An aside is that I don’t like the Discourse UI actually. If you visit the linked forum, that is my preference in style (maybe I’m old fashioned). I can hone in on topics I care about, and I don’t care about the feed like view. Each category has a pinned rules thread that you should read before posting. But pros and cons, feed view works really well for smaller communities like this.