Proposal to move Development sub-category back into its own top-level category

Technical Support Development
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Several years ago, we moved this “Development” forum channel to be a sub-channel of “Technical Support”. The goal was to reduce confusion regarding where to post questions of a technical nature.

However, as the CHT community continues to optimize our public organization/communication practices (particularly with regard to development efforts around the platform code/tooling (cht-core, cht-conf, etc) I think we should revisit our structuring of these forum categories. Much of the core development conversation should happen in GitHub tickets, but there are a lot of other types of discussions (e.g. like this recent one) that don’t really make sense to start as a GitHub issue. A forum thread is a great place for these discussions, but currently it is a bit unclear where to put this kind of thread on the forum since it does not really fit into the “Technical Support” category (though it does maybe make sense in “Development”). Additionally, more granular sub-categories, will allow forum users to tune their notification settings to remain better aware of ongoing conversations they are interested in.

Here is my proposal for restructuring the “Technical Support” categories/sub-categories. Edits/counter-proposals welcome!

  • Technical Support - Found a bug? Encountering an error? Report it here. Want to assist others or contribute to the discussion on issues or known bugs? You’re in the right place. For Core Development talk or Feature Requests, please use those categories.
    • App Config
    • Docker Compose
    • Kubernetes
    • Deployment
    • Monitoring
  • Core Development - Want to contribute? Need help adding code/translations/docs to the CHT repositories? This is the channel for all development-related discussions! For general Technical Support or questions about building App Configs, please use those categories.
    • Android
    • Monitoring
    • Interoperability
    • Documentation (Already a sub-category under Product)

My initial inclination was to avoid adding subcategories until it was clear which ones would be useful. However, upon further reflection I think the sub-categories may help to clarify the differences between the top level channels. (That being said, I am very open to changing my current list of sub-categories here…)

CC @antony @Sugat_Bajracharya

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I think it will be hard to gain full consensus on a move like this. Maybe query some of the top folks who reply a lot?

As one of the - I think this sounds good - go for it!

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  • Monitoring

feels weird under core development. I think it should be Tech Support.

As a user, if I have problems knowing whats going on with Core, and I would go to Tech Support forum and ask how are people monitoring this?

I feel that’s the same trajectory as deployment (As a user, if I problems deploying Core, I would go to the Tech Support forum and ask how are people deploying this?)

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I think adding the sub-categories will also make it easy for users to search for specific topics. We can review the existing posts to help define the sub-categories.

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:+1: Moved monitoring up to be under Tech Support.

@hareet In my head the Docker Compose and Kubernetes sub-categories were intended to be where the deployment questions could go. Now that you mention it, though, I think I like just having one Deployment sub-category better. Let me know if you had other thoughts here!

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