Lefora moving to Single Category Posting
Frequently on this support forum, we've heard of confusion and complaints about how members misuse the multiple category option. We recently ran internal stats, and found out that 97.5% of all topics on lefora are in just in 1 category. That means a very small percentage exist in more than one category.
So the first question you might ask is, 'What does it mean to post in multiple categories?' Since we see that not many people have used it, you may not have been aware that when posting a topic, you can select one or more categories to post into. The idea was to allow a conversation to be found from multiple places. But the reality has been a lot of confusion and abuse of the system. We have other ideas going forward that will address our initial intentions.
When we dug down a bit further into that minor 2.5%, we found one of two things:
- The majority of topics that existed in more than 1 category, existed in just 2 categories, and that wasn't too frequent.
- The 2nd most occurring use case, was that a topic would exist in every available category on the board - this was typically done by members who were confused or overzealously trying to promote their thread.
The pros of moving Lefora into 'one category per topic' system (which is the universal norm across all other forum software):
1) Less confusion for your members, especially the new ones
2) Avoids a long listing of categories below the post box which makes it hard to see the 'Submit Post' button - we'll be changing it to a dropdown box.
3) Removes duplicate posts in your forum's RSS feed
4) Allows us to eventually provide for you 'Admin Only' private categories. This has been a much requested feature on lefora, and one reason we couldn't handle it, is how would you handle the case of a topic that exists in a private and a public category. This will avoid any confusion there.
5) Speeds up your forum - having topics linked from multiple categories actually creates scalability issues and has slowed down a number of forums with a lot of categories and a lot of topics.
6) Prevents bugs in your category editor - a number of admins have complained about problems on their admin panel when trying to move categories between groups (with a large number of categories).
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Above, I mentioned our initial intentions were positive - we wanted to help members find the right topic when browsing. Our decision going forward will be to use keyword 'tags' in this same manner. This will be sometime off in the future though, so how the interface will work on all this is still to be decided and when the time is right, we'll ask for input from the community.
What does this mean going forward? We're going to phase in this change in stages:
- Phase 1 [next 1-3 weeks] - any new topics created on your forum, will have a drop down to select only one category, instead of multiple.
- Phase 2 [3+ weeks from now] - We'll go through and manually set old topics that are in multiple categories to only one category. If any admins request, we can send them a mapping of their old topic/category pairings, to their new trimmed down topic/category parings.
- Phase 3 [a month or two out] - We'll introduce 'keyword' tagging so that admins who want something like multiple categories will still be able to provide this for their members.
I like multiple categories and I want to continue having it in my forum!
As our design philosophy is to build a platform that works for the masses, sometimes we have to sacrifice certain features in order to keep things simple and running smoothly. For one, we want an admin panel that's sleek with minimal options. And two, every option and feature that exists on Lefora creates more complexity on the backend and slows us down from adding new features. By keeping Lefora simple in terms of options, it allows us to make upgrades and changes without having to maintain multiple systems. We always take into account the needs of members on the forum, hence why we ran the stat to see 97.5% of posts where not using this feature. We also take into account our own desires to make an easy to use product that we can continue to build upon and expand.
And all is not lost, we'll be introducing a tagging system in the future, that will be similar to categories and allow an admin or member to 'tag' a topic with multiple keywords. This is how many blogging platforms and photo sharing sites work, and we'll apply the same methods here at Lefora.
Should be a great improvement for most.
