Right now we can tag longer posts as “blog” to easily distinguish them.
I don’t want to create too many categories right now and make the forums feel bloated… that’s the whole point of TAGS.
The big thing I’m deliberating over right now is the general differentiation of different TYPES of content…
Should we have a separate “Category” for “Blogs” where we put all long-form and thought leadership content… Anyone is welcome to blog on this platform. Having a dedicated place/category would be like a syndicated blog where we’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 “Pickleball Discussions” Category for general discussions and questions.
Whatever decision makes the most sense today might not be right tomorrow… and we can always change, as we scale.
I don’t think it would be a bad thing to have more categories if things aren’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?
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.
We’ll keep the conversation going and hope to have some additional ideas trickle in. Maybe we’ll both even come up with some NEW ideas!
The biggest conundrum I face as I’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 them… you can hit the little BELL icon to choose a level of subscription/notifications for that specific tag! So someone could just follow the “blog” tag if they were interested. But again this goes back to that idea about being intuitive. 98% of users won’t know to do that… 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 we’re laying out a tagging taxonomy for the community.
Thanks for taking ownership here, Bryan, and helping contribute to the main thing that distinguishes these forums from yet another Facebook group… ORGANIZATION!
icon to choose a level of subscription/notifications for that specific tag! So someone could just follow the “blog” tag if they were interested. But again this goes back to that idea about being intuitive. 98% of users won’t know to do that… right out of the gate.