Should we have a separate "Pickleball Blogs" category?

Currently the Pickleballist community can be used to ask short and sweet questions such as this one from @PickleballPhil :
What is the best Pickleball to play with, and why? :wink:

Users can also write more detailed and extensive blog-like articles, like this great post from @nicole:
Making one of these rookie strategy mistakes?

Right now we can tag longer posts as ā€œblogā€ to easily distinguish them.

I donā€™t want to create too many categories right now and make the forums feel bloatedā€¦ thatā€™s the whole point of TAGS.

The big thing Iā€™m deliberating over right now is the general differentiation of different TYPES of contentā€¦

Should we have a separate ā€œCategoryā€ for ā€œBlogsā€ where we put all long-form and thought leadership contentā€¦ Anyone is welcome to blog on this platform. Having a dedicated place/category would be like a syndicated blog where weā€™re getting great content from lots of different experts, pros or even people who just have some broad topic they want to discuss in depth. Then we could continue to use the ā€œPickleball Discussionsā€ Category for general discussions and questions.

Whatever decision makes the most sense today might not be right tomorrowā€¦ and we can always change, as we scale.

Love to hear some thoughts on this.

1 Like

I donā€™t think it would be a bad thing to have more categories if things arenā€™t being tagged to inform me quickly what is posted. Categories do give more of a rigid structure to what we talk about but from what I can tell you probably want things a little more free flowing that that.

I am member of one other forum (not pickleball related) and they have 60+ categories. The forum, which is kind of old school, is fan board for the college that I follow and the categories that are available help me quickly know what is posted be it directly related (i.e. basketball, football, baseball, or news pertaining directly to the university talk) or less directly related (i.e. misc. sports, misc. news, outdoors, business, chit chat).

The blog that you are referring acted as a kind of springboard for some other good discussion on technique. Was it was tagged that way? Possible tags from my perspective Vlog. Blog. PrimetimePickleball. Video. Strategy. VideoTraining. VideoLesson. Tags are flexible yes but can that post fall under one category and would it help users of this forum if it did?

3 Likes

Fantastic perspective here @bryan

I was really hoping that some folks who have experience on other forums or have managed big projects of organization of content, would chime in here.

Weā€™ll keep the conversation going and hope to have some additional ideas trickle in. Maybe weā€™ll both even come up with some NEW ideas!

The biggest conundrum I face as Iā€™m developing these forums and laying out the framework, is the UX and for users being able to quickly and intuitively be able to find the things that may interest them.

One amazing thing with tags, in this forum is that if you visit the tags page, and click on one of themā€¦ you can hit the little BELL :bell: icon to choose a level of subscription/notifications for that specific tag! So someone could just follow the ā€œblogā€ tag if they were interested. But again this goes back to that idea about being intuitive. 98% of users wonā€™t know to do thatā€¦ right out of the gate.

On another note, it would be cool if you checked out the thread Tagging Taxonomy for Pickleball Community Forums and offered any feedback you have there. You gave some good ideas for us to put on the drawing board as weā€™re laying out a tagging taxonomy for the community.

As I outlined in the What is Pickleballist? threadā€¦ THIS IS YOUR COMMUNITY!

Thanks for taking ownership here, Bryan, and helping contribute to the main thing that distinguishes these forums from yet another Facebook groupā€¦ ORGANIZATION!

1 Like

I really like that perspective. As many tags as possible to help me know and be informed if someone posted in that tag would be awesome.

1 Like