since sime time I happen to notice that the latest update of the forum is causing quite some inconveniencies. These manifest in:
Former categories were converted to tags
As a result the quite vast category of Community Extensions is poorly structured
hilst multiple tags can be applied, filtering in the aforementioned category only allows to apply one tag
Tags are not alphabetically sorted (categories aren’t either respectively have no obvious sorting), do not provide any insights into how many posts are assigned
While exchanging with a community extension developer we also by coincidence exchanged about that and came to the conclusion that community management / engagement has gotten worse since.
I also once issued a topic pointing out potential broken links because of missing redirects. Organic traffic, I assume, contributes a significant portion of traffic to the forum. Whilst not significantly problematic a quick & dirty check immediately revealed broken links
What was the motivation behind restructuring a well organized stucture inthe first place? At first glance there seems to be no apparent benefit which outweights the possible issues implied by that change.
Let me try to address at least some of these concerns.
We converted existing community extension categories to tags for a couple of reasons - first, we had too many small subcategories that were very rarely used. This was both cluttering up the category list, and disorienting to new users.
Second, we had far too many tags available (there were literally hundreds), the vast majority of which were barely used at all. When tags were being used, they were assigned haphazardly by users in ways that often didn’t make sense. The thought was that converting subcategories to tags, along with restriction on tag creation, would give tags a more defined purpose and help make tags more useful again.
This leads to the third reason for the change, which was to over time improve the usability of the forum search feature (which gives special focus to tags on the backend).
I agree that tags not being alphabetically sorted is annoying. I’ll try to see if there is a solution for that. As for Google search results, those should (hopefully) improve over time as googlebot continues to crawl the site.
Thanks for your explanations which I can relate to. Considering the shared details about the “tag mess”, wouldN#t it have been a better / more intermediate approach to first elaboreate options which do not have such a huge impact?
It seems to me the needs of the Knime Team, which compared to the many community extensions, differ quite significantly. Maybe sharing the responsibility by granting individual community extension developers a certain degree of freedom to manage their respective sub-categories (if that wasn’t done already) would have been nice.
For me it is also not quite clear if you Knime members are managing the forum as your primary or “subsidiary” responsibility.
