We’re now a year in to TAO 2.0, and the transition seems to have gone pretty smoothly.
However, we’ve retained the old site organization, at least the hierarchy of topics and sub-topics from the old site. Do people think we should do a re-organization of the topics into something more modern? A huge percentage of the traffic goes to a couple of top level groups and others are almost dormant.
So… what do you think. Who’s got a proposal for re-organizing the topic hierarchy to make it more useful? What would make things more discoverable for you?
Not sure - from looking over the threads there seams to be 4 rough areas - Recuitment, General, Q&A and Show & Tell. Dont know if the site fits more free-flowing form though. I think being able to drill into problems that people have easily would be handy.
I find fewer categories easier to follow and discover. The Slack currently has too many channels for my taste. I find it splits the discussion, when most topics are fairly universal to our interests. I’m sure I’m missing some discussions because I find it necessary to ignore most of the channels to avoid having a giant list in the sidebar.
Though the new “All Unread” helps on Slack.
On this site, the latest discussions pop to the front page, just like “All Unread”. So that’s cool. So… I dunno. I always prefer a flatter hierarchy.
Yeah, I basically just use the latest post feature on the front page.
Plus the search function seems to work better than the old forum software, so that helps as well.
If you click on the hamburger menu you’ll get the numbers for recent posts by category . Last time I checked “Technical discussion” got several times more than all the others put together (apart from its two main subtopics)… And if you go to the categories page it summarizes all the current post counts.
I’ve done a little more digging as part of the forum upgrades and I think we can reorganize the category tree without losing our permalinks and search engine history . There’s also a bulk option for moving items to different categories.
Although the search is good, I do think a better hierarchy will help.
Here’s a draft proposal :
community - for general chat, meetup groups, gdc & students
professional - for industry specific talk, plus employment
coding - programming topics
pipelines - organization & workflow topics
art - modeling, animation, vfx etc
applications - software specific (DCC and engines)
site - for admin stuff
I’m not wedded to any of that but 6-7 seems like a good top-level number – we currently have 9. Better splits under those will make it more like a balanced tree.
I’d also suggest that we create DCC app and /or language specific subtopics, something we’ve avoided in the past. While there are certainly things a Maya Python coder can learn from a MaxScript discussion, there’s also a lot of API noise that people just filter out. And if we have separate channels we can crosspost them to and from the same channels on the slack…
Just throwing out that this is what is covered in areas of library and information science - taxonomies to support information seeking behavior. The draft looks pretty solid as a top level and coupled with search might be sufficient for the needs of the group.
I know someone mentioned DCC specific channels. Would it be possible to tag posts with the appropriate application to filter for those who need it and keep everything in the dcc forum? (this is my lack of discord knowledge showing.)
Personally, I like that education gets rolled in to community. Our slack channel has fits and starts and is unintentionally walled off from the informal education that happens when people are discussing common interests.
Do you know if there is anyway to filter answered vs unanswered? Potentially as a search flag?
Would be nice to be able to filter out answered ones to see where people are potentially struggling.
I should add that I can bulk reassign things pretty easily but it would be super helpful if people helped out by catching cases where whatever algorithm move things around turns out to be mistaken…
