Overhauling The Club categories and chat channels

[simon_tomes]

Summary

• We’re simplifying the number of categories on The Club. This will make it easier to ask questions, continue with long discussions, find helpful resources and introduce yourself to the community
• We’ll encourage the use of tags. You’ll soon need to add two tags minimum to start a new topic discussion
• We’ll tweak and enhance the chat channels. This should make it easier to share with the community, ask quick questions and celebrate with each other. We’ll spin up and close down chat channels based on demand and community initiatives
• We’ll sync tags to ministryoftesting.com. It’ll become easier to find what you’re looking for and to discover new and evergreen conversations and ideas
• Changes to The Club categories and chat channels will take place in the coming weeks
• Let us know what you think.

The Home of Testing

At the start of this year, we set out to enhance the community experience of The Club. We switched on a new chat feature and overhauled all the categories. We did so based on the conversations that were going on in the community.

We aimed to reduce the gap between life on The Club and life on the main Ministry of Testing site (ministryoftesting.com). We posted and started the conversation here with various updates in the Site Updates & Feedback category. Yet there’s still a disconnect between the two sites. Ideally, they are one, yet for now we’re leveraging the brilliant community tooling of Discourse – which The Club is powered by.

@friendlytester and I have observed feedback from the community and connected it to where we aim to take ministryoftesting.com. Our goal is to make ministryoftesting.com the home of testing. The place you go to connect with the community, learn from incredible content, ask questions, have discussions and share what you’re up to. All of this is geared towards you growing your career via the Ministry of Testing community and via other testing communities – we’ll eventually pull in much more content from other communities.

Read on to learn what this means for ministryoftesting.com and The Club.

Ministryoftesting.com Updates

We plan to update ministryoftesting.com, so it relies on “tags” to categorise all the incredible community content. The Club will also become “tag led”, so everyone will soon need to add two tags (from an existing list of tags) and up to five tags when creating a new topic thread.

So when someone visits minstryoftesting.com you’ll be able to view anything tagged with, say, “exploratory testing”, and not only will it return all Club topics, it’ll return everything else that exists on the ministryoftesting.com platform that’s been tagged with “exploratory testing”. TIP: Don’t see the tag you’re looking for? New tag requests can be shared via a new Site Support chat channel.

Discussion Category Updates

We’ll reduce the number of categories available to make it clearer where to start a new discussion topic thread. These long-form discussion threads are important as they spark value for many community members for years. They are all searchable even when they are automatically closed after 2 years.

The updated categories will look like this.

Category Name	Description
Questions	This category is the place to ask your questions and for community members to answer them. Best for long-form discussions. They are searchable for others to benefit from in the future.
Introductions	Check-in every quarter. Say hi and introduce yourself or reintroduce yourself. What brings you to The Club and Ministry of Testing community? What interests you now and what do you want to learn? Auto-close each topic after 3 months
Wikis	This category is for maintaining helpful lists related to topics of interest. We’ll bring this functionality onto the MoT platform yet for now we can leverage Discourse.
Meetup Organisers (private)	This category allows you to share ideas and ask questions amongst the Meetup Organiser Community.
Site Updates & Feedback	Have something helpful to share about this forum called The Club? This is the place to discuss it. And feel free to start a discussion about the main Ministry of Testing site. What site improvements would help you and others?
Content Discussions	This category is for MoT staff to link to content on the site so community members can reply with their thoughts and comments.

I’ll reassign recent topic discussions to the appropriate new category and tag them accordingly once the new categories go live. I might even ask some of the community to help go on a tagging mission – to retag many topic threads. All new category topic posts close after 2 years except for Introductions which close after 3 months. Closed topics remain viewable.

Chat Channel Updates

We’ll update the chat channels to make better use of the faster style of chat and the ability to share with the community. We’ll also use chat channels to better support conversations by spinning up and shutting down chat channels accordingly based on demand.

And if anyone spots a chat that would make for a longer form discussion then they can easily add it to an appropriate category topic thread via the ‘Quote to topic’ feature.

We’re also excited to share that chat channels will eventually support threads.

The updated public chat channels will look like this. Chat history is set to 90 days. Everyone is automatically added to all chat channels if they have been active in the last three months and reach a certain trust level (to avoid spammers joining and immediately spamming). All community members have the option to leave or mute a channel.

Chat Channel Name	Description
Daily Check-In	What are you up to today? A place to check in online with the community. Talk about things you’ve learned today, discovered, celebrated and are struggling with. Keep it professional.
Sharing	This channel is a place to share things. Kinda like Twitter but not Twitter. Share a thought, share your blog post, share where you’re speaking, share your learnings, promote an event etc.
Quick Question	What would you like to know? What do you need help with? And discover how you might help someone by answering their quick question. You can also select one or more Chat Messages and ‘Quote to topic’ to take a quick conversation and make it into a new Question topic post for in-depth discussion.
Woohoos and Oops	This is the place to celebrate and commiserate together.
Site Support	Need help with using anything to do with Ministry of Testing? Just ask. Spotted a tag that is missing, feel free to suggest it in this channel. This might be helpful for some even though we may end up just directing people to the actual support chat on the main site.
Just For a Laugh	A place to share the memes to make you smile. Testing jokes are welcome. Remember the Ministry of Testing Code of Conduct.
Random	All the random chat happens here. Remember the Ministry of Testing Code of Conduct.
On-demand tag-specific chat channels for popular tags, items of discussion and active community initiatives	i.e. automation, tools, TestBash, 30 Days of Career Growth etc

Coming soon

We aim to do all this in the coming weeks. In the meantime, let us know, what do you think? Feel free to reply to this thread or send me a personal chat.

Thanks again for being part of this excellent community.

[simon_tomes]

Hey folks,

You might’ve already spotted some changes.

Various categories and chat channels have now been created, updated or deleted. (nearly a full house CRUD! )

I’m in the middle of migrating existing topic posts to the new and most appropriate categories and will continue to do so for a while.

Any questions feel free to reply here or send me a personal chat.

[sebastian_solidwork (Sebastian Stautz)]

I feel a bit sad about the new categories. Especial as it looks like big parts of the navigation where moved from the distinct categories into the more foggy-by-count tags.

If I scroll Latest it looks to me like around 80% are in the Questions category.
Categories have easily distinguishable colors and icons while tags are just text.
And there are 255 tags which give me choice overload. I do not know how to navigate them quickly. It is a to detailed separation.

I wish for the previous system with more categories then now, but less then current tags.
I would be fine with having tags in addition.

In the past is sometimes looked at specific categories for interesting topics no matter the age.
I have not done this with the tags.

[kristof (Kristof Van Kriekingen)]

@sebastian_solidwork

I feel a bit sad about the new categories.

I actually have to agree with this. Basically stumbling upon several things yesterday and today.
I wanted to make a post about Content Discussion (which wouldn’t have worked cuz it’s Staff only) which isn’t an option anymore apparently.

Technically I’ll have to do it in the Sharing channel … BUT what I would share is basically not searchable anymore. So people who are interested in the topic in the future and if they would search for it, won’t be able to find it and this means now that I’m not able to find content shared from you guys either since it’s all in Sharing .

Personally I’m less active in the chats-channels and I just noticed there is a lot of sharing content going on, which I missed. I personally prefer to search for content on the Club itself and not in a chat.

So my personal opinion would be to bring back categories so people can share topics and start discussions. Because right now I’m only able to create a question or give feedback to the site.

[simon_tomes]

Thanks for sharing your feedback, @sebastian_solidwork and @kristof. Much appreciated.

I’m in touch with the product manager for “chat” at Discourse. Next time we catch up I’ll ask if there are plans to include chat channels when using search. I’m aware the default retention date is 90 days yet we could certainly review that and change it if we like.

[simon_tomes]

@sebastian_solidwork @kristof.

Have you considered setting up a custom section in your sidebar? This could help you satisfy a need to view discussions based on your tags of interest.

1. Select the “Add custom section” button at the footer of the sidebar

2. Grab links to the tags you’re most interested in e.g. Topics tagged security. Add as many as you like and perhaps use a unique icon for each.

3. Select “Save” and you’ll see the custom section in the sidebar

[kristof (Kristof Van Kriekingen)]

@simon_tomes

Have you considered setting up a custom section in your sidebar?

I have them setup indeed

[kristof (Kristof Van Kriekingen)]

Maybe a thing to remember. People who are new and not yet registered can search the forum and look through everything that is on there. What they can’t do is look into the sharing chat.

For us we are logged in it’s all pretty clear, because we have all the chats & sidebars. But for somebody who is maybe getting onto this forum for the first time, he doesn’t know there is so much more like the sharing channels etc.

I believe if I don’t find good information on the website/forum, I won’t register to it.

---

@simon_tomes

We’ll tweak and enhance the chat channels.

I still think chats are not long-lasting, because if I want to come back to a topic a week after I posted it. It’s kind of hard to do in a chat, and how will others follow-up on it? Some might have missed a lot of context.

And especially… because I don’t use chats so often (almost never) - I like to browse forum posts and help people with my knowledge or absorb their knowledge, maybe I’m alone on this but maybe we should do a poll or something to bring the categories back

From my personal view, I think the forum has been ‘less active’ but that’s only because I don’t use chats, as I said, chats is not long-lasting and hard to followup on something that someone shared, especially if weeks go by and information gets lost for new people. + there is no information available for ‘non-registered’ users.

@sebastian_solidwork

If I scroll Latest it looks to me like around 80% are in the Questions category.

I totally agree with this, maybe I’m just to used to the old days but I actually quite liked it.
If I now look at the overview, everything is a question or an introduction, it looks so weird because it could be so much more.

I really like the “forum”-attitude where you can discuss stuff in a post and not in a chat. That’s why I originally came here also to share and absorb knowledge. I just feel it’s so much harder to do these days, just because I don’t use “chats”.

Forum posts are 200% easier to follow-up.

@sebastian_solidwork

I wish for the previous system with more categories then now, but less then current tags.
I would be fine with having tags in addition.

This please

[fullsnacktester (Ben Dowen)]

I’ve found since the change, so far I’ve continued to use chat but have stopped using the the forum all together.

The cognitive load having to figure out two tags that make sense to post is a lot bigger then I would have expected, especially when you can’t just add new tags as you post.

I find questions as a general catch all category challenging, because while I’m often posing questions, I’m rarely asking for direct answers. More like I’m trying to trigger discussion on topics. And this is at odds with others who are asking for help.

[fullsnacktester (Ben Dowen)]

Having said this, now I’ve noticed I’m being blocked I should be able to get over it and start posting again. Let’s see what I can get started…

[sebastian_solidwork (Sebastian Stautz)]

@simon_tomes Any news here?
I see many unanswered responses.

@simon_tomes

Have you considered setting up a custom section in your sidebar? This could help you satisfy a need to view discussions based on your tags of interest.

I was not aware of it and by looking into it I doubt it to be much helpful.
I do not see single tags to be similar to the old categories. Just by the shear number I see myself, and I expect other too, being overwhelmed to pick appropriate ones consistently.
For the level of details that current tags provide I would prefer to use a search.

[simon_tomes]

@sebastian_solidwork

@simon_tomes Any news here?

Hi @sebastian_solidwork ,

Thanks for your message.

No further updates are available at this point in time. Is there something in particular that you’d like a reply to?

At this stage, we’re just taking on all feedback and continuing to discover how things progress with the overhaul of categories and chat channels. We have no plans in the foreseeable future to make any major changes.

[sebastian_solidwork (Sebastian Stautz)]

@simon_tomes

Is there something in particular that you’d like a reply to?

No. It was more in general.
I see here much feedback and I wondered what your thoughts very about it.
How much you can empathize with and plan actions.
I take from you that this feedback so far did not triggered actions.