What I miss the most is a separation between general discussions about Node-RED and help requests. Most discourse/discord boards I use have a Help category. Of course, it's always some extra work to move mis-placed threads there. But on the flip side, I usually don't read the general category at all 'cause it's 90%+ help requests that I can't handle (nor am good at handling).
It's not only for people who want to or can help, I as an entry level user am also looking for issues that I might have or may face in future and trying to know the solutions.
So you would also be helped by a better structure.
As example, how many questions is related to MQTT and just thrown into "General", cluttering the whole board?? That is one example that should have it's own section and you may detect others as well that would benefit from dedicated categories
Indeed. But have no major issues about the current setup either, its more of a user discipline (or lack of understanding ?) issue rather than the structure. As a beginner, (more than a year now into NR) I also had difficulty in understanding, because not only to NR, but to put a question in any forum itself was a new thing to me. I have been aptly guided by the very helpful members. I also had a tendency to put everything in GENERAL since I did not know. my topics have been moved to right category by helpful moderators whenever needed. need to be little patient with new members, which the community is.
I was going to suggest that the General
category have sub-categories like MQTT
but the problem is that new users don't have a handle on the terminology (for example, define 'flow') or the knowledge that is gained after time and they just don't know where their question should go so 'General' is the spot they pick.
I've had the same issue on other forums, trying to figure out where my idea of the issue fits into someone else's idea of how things should be setup.
Got to say...
Is this really a problem??
Only for the "Creating Nodes" category! That's where I started. The conversation has drifted slightly.
Steve suggested a change which would be great to see happen.
I don't think it is a big deal. At the same time, the forum also uses suggestions (i like it) which some people don't seem to read and just post anyway with a single sentence. Some things cannot be captured by the forum, there is a moment where the user to actually needs to read. We as custodians can only provide our feedback (to new users), this is where the templating can help.
I have made a couple quick tweaks.
I've changed the default view for the forum to be the category view. I think that will help introduce users to the categories, rather than it being a single stream of posts.
If you want to keep the 'latest' view as your default view, you can change that in user preferences:
I think it is a good default, raises the bar a bit.
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