I’m sure this is planned, but right now with everything going into “Questions & Answers” it’s kind of spammy. So I advocate for more categories rather sooner than later.
At least have a “Beginner Q&A” category. These starter questions create a notable amount of noise. Is there some kind of moderation planned? There are far more low quality (unanswerable) posts in here compared to the forum.
Hiya thanks for your feedback.
There is a beginners tag that should be used to filter out that content
Will that help at all
Not at this time. I can find only 8 topics tagged with Beginner-Question.
I don’t know who is adding tags, possibly moderators, because in my own posts I have thus far consequently ignored the tags list - it’s just too damn useless having a looooooooooooooong dropdown of tags sorted only by use count, not by name.
I think the user should HAVE to make a decision what tag to use. For a category, that decision HAS to be made by default. With tags it’s currently optional.
And personally I’m scanning categories, not tags, because there’s just too damn many of them and I don’t want to have to manage following/tracking/watching individual tags. I try to set that up but this only helps when it comes to receiving emails. When I’m on the site, I just browse categories. I mean, just that one.
Oh it’s not that long 
about 120 at most……(I typed them all in ) and you can type and sort or find.
I will also see if we can make tags mandatory.
I’m not sure that beginners that won’t add a tag would bother to also choose a category, and as most beginner questions historically don’t get an answer, they might actually avoid a whole category dedicated to it.
The good thing about a Beta is we get to try and work out how to best solve this.
You can actually leave out the category too? 
Where do these posts go to then?
They go to a special hell…… seriously they go to uncategorised and then they will need sorted.
But my point was more if we have lots of categories users would need to choose, most won’t.
And our intent is to increase the findabilty ( not my word) of content for all users tags will let us do that.
But we are actively watching how things go and we will make changes if they will make things better for all our users….
I’m not a Discourse power user, but I’ve used Blender Artists forum quite a lot, and I think it uses Discource too and their “All Categories” view is pretty nice - basically a forum front page.
If I choose to create a new question in Coding > Python Support, new question will go to categories Coding and Python Support. They don’t even have tag for python, and the person who asks a question doesn’t even have to define any tags, which is nice.
Not sure how this would translate to Unity Discussions at this point or ever… just thought to mention this.
“Nice” is quite the understatement. That’s how I expect this to work. I love that the Unity forum and practically all others have these categories that you can intuitively navigate to. Categories rule, tags are a nice addition but they’re often too specific and don’t help to sort out crowded spaces with lots of activity.
For example we have tags for every Unity major-minor version where major should suffice for the most part.
So tags that you add to a topic are bad and don’t work.
Look at the Unity forums - pretty much every single new thread made by a beginner has arbitrary, silly tags. The scripting forum is full of new threads with the UnityScript tag, a programming language that was deleted from exitance like 5 years ago.
People want answers, and are savvy enough to understand that the more tags they add to their post, the more people will see them, so they will spam tags. A few people won’t, and will instead carefully chose a small set of correct tags, and those people will be rewarded by having their posts seen less.
The great thing about forum categories instead of tags is that you can only chose 1! So your question cannot be equally about Scripting and Shaders and Prefabs and Unity 2022. It helps with correct categorization and getting the right people the right answers more than any tag system ever will.
I think I would like to have more conversations on tags and categories.
What you are all describing is using categories to filter content. What I am not seeing is why tags couldn’t do that. Is it because users can create tags, because in Discussions they can’t,
Is it because the tag list is too long but if we add loads of categories it will be to long as well.
I think is is one we will need to get a lot more user feedback and conversations on before coming up with the final solution.
Your example looks like it’s run on Discourse and we haven’t moved forums yet so we can still move stuff around, that’s why we are in open Beta. I would however like to have more user feedback on this both from old and new, so we can make the best decisions based on
Tags have the issue that they’re too specific. Let’s say with categories you would have (taken from the forum):
Just by entering the category “Graphics” you narrow down your focus to all things visual and rendering. You do not have that with tags.
With tags, the discussions site has these tags that I would consider part of “Graphics” and I list them in the semi-random order they currently appear in the tags list of making a new post:
graphics
urp
shader-graph
shaders
animation
graphics-for-ecs
materials
particle-system
post-processing
textures
vfx-graph
built-in-render-pipeline
directx
hdrp
lightmaps
opengl
ray-tracing
rendering
scriptable-render-pipeline
shadows
vulkan
Since the tags are sorted by popularity, the most generic tag “graphics” appears at the top. It’s clear that this will be the #1 tag to be used by users asking anything remotely related to graphics, and few will check for further related tags and practically no one will get it right. Which means mods will have to clean up each and every post with proper tags.
On the other hand, if a user with a graphics related question has to first enter a category “Graphics” and then gets to choose a more narrow scope like render pipelines or visual effects or shaders and makes a post in one of these subsections (and automatically assign tags “graphics” & “xxx”) you have already directed the majority of users to make a reasonable choice and the tags allow for filtering related topics in subcategories you wouldn’t expect.
For instance, a “2D” question could rightfully also be include tags “performance” and “3d” even though it’s posted under “2D => Tilemaps” category because that person is using the 2D tilemap system to make a 3d tilemap and has performance issues.
So tags are for refining the scope of a topic, categories are for navigation and specifically work well in directing users who only visit the discussions site once in a while.
I guess you have planned this, but as a user I’m thinking this - Answers was a nice Q & A site for quick answers to specific questions. It always came up in the first hits in google search, whenever I needed to find out how something was done. Now what happens if there will be categories like in Blender Artists forum (for example)? Are those categories going to be different than those what are currently used in Unity Forum (or perhaps the same)? I think there was also a goal to merge Unity Forum here at some point, so do people have to learn new categories (subsections of current Unity forum)? If you merge these two, what will the users expect? Will there then be only an expectation about longer discussion on broader topics and all kinds of interesting ramblings and so on? Or is there going to still be a place for quick short specific questions and equally short answers? The division to these two different purposes has been very clear between Forum and Answers.
So some of what your looking for in terms of grouping can be achieved by tag groups. But it’s clear we need to think about tags and categories.
The points about clear distinction between Q&A and forums content was one of the reasons we were looking at tags as providing the granularity that you need, while letting categories provide the distinction between the larger content types such as forums v questions
The tags can be sorted In many ways at the moment is set to most popular but there are others
So I have already moved posts in the wrong category, and we have only two at the moment …… I’m not sure that the solution to the problem you are describing is categories. I think that’s something we will need to work on. There are ways for us to set a tag for a users first post or even first few posts which might help
This is why I am wondering if some form of workshop/session on tags and categories might be of use. I need to think about how we could ensure a god representation of experienced and new users so we can make sure we get a good resolution
I think it may be worthwhile taking a step back and asking yourself:
Why might a user be creating a Topic in the wrong Category?
This will always be a problem to a degree as some users simply do not pay any attention to structure. It happens in the current Xenforo forums, to be sure, and moderators are generally great about addressing the issue.
But it is not pervasive. En masse, forum users get it right a vast majority of the time. I would suggest that this is because it is far, FAR more clear about what’s going on with the forums than with Discourse. Specifically:
I have asked myself the question I suggested at the top of this post because I myself frequently created topics in the wrong Category during the closed beta period. If I didn’t initially notice, then I would upon review when checking to see if someone had responded or not. I have not made this type of mistake (as far as I can recall) in the main Unity forums.
As I see it, the problem isn’t “Categories are just another Tag and therefore we’d have the same problem!”, the problem is that Categories are not communicated well in Discourse - at least insofar as they are implemented in the Unity Discussions installation. They are way, way more floaty than Forums in Xenforo and they are not communicated with the same emphasis and structure in Discourse - they’re far more… floaty.
