Categories and Searching

1. Categories and Searching

   #1

   I've introduced an acquaintance to the Citadel, and he loves the content. However, he has brought to my attention that the current organization is a bit difficult to use. In his words, "Searching by categories is fine if you know approximately what you want, but if you're just wanting to see the top voted of all time to get inspiration, you can't really do that."
   
   It WOULD be rather nice to have a slightly different "find submissions" interface, perhaps with a multi-select on categories and some other filters that can be applied to narrow down what you're looking for. Does anyone else concur with this?

2. Re: Categories and Searching

   #2

   I'd be happy if we demoted categories into just another freetext, and simply required at least 1 freetext on any submission.  For a freetext to appear on the dropdown, it would need to reference at least 1 submission.
   
   That way the whole concept goes away and the interface could have less custom-built pages.  Look at StackExchange for an example of how this could work.
   
   So, we change organization around the freetexts - tags really - and we have normal 'freetext' which can be made by any user of the required level.  Regions become 'owned' freetexts with landing pages and the current categories become regions.
   
   Main page looses the tabs for the categories and perhaps stuff currently in the Systems and Library menus gets promoted to the main menu.  Forum would get one too.
   
   Someday, we could let users built their welcome screen widget style, so they could choose what views they saw.  That customizability would be tied to their level as well.
   
   
   Just some disorganized thoughts that have been lurking in my head and provoked by Chaosmark's comments.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

3. Re: Categories and Searching

   #3

   Happy to have the discussion again. Times change and I think I was too scared and had too many other things I wanted to do at that point. Now the Citadel is in a fairly comfortable stasis. Sure, there are plenty of additions we could do and such, but it works. Not sure I am ready for it yet as it is an extreme shift but hell....
   
   http://strolen.com/guild/index.php/topic,5112.msg66764.html#msg66764
   
   

4. Re: Categories and Searching

   #4

   I had forgotten that thread. Apparently I am consistent in my option on it :)

5. Re: Categories and Searching

   #5

   In general, I do better with hierarchies than tags, so I'm a bit hesitant about this. However, I tend to have a really hard time fitting my ideas into the categories, so maybe I'd be better off learning to use the freetext better. I do like the idea of being able to apply multiple filters.

6. Re: Categories and Searching

   #6

   I'm also of two minds on this. On one hand, I'm doing mostly fine with existing categories and browsing thru freetexts, I sometimes see redundant ones for subs of a particular topic that few Strolenatis have written on cos long-term/stable Strolenatis simply type whatever comes to their minds when they input freetexts so you get subs split b/w two freetexts that are almost identical rather than grouped nicely into one which sorts of bothers me. On the other hand, there are sometimes instances when a sub sort of straddles the line b/w 2 categories due to focus etc and the freetext/tagging approach would obviously work better for those instances.

Rise of the Strolenati-Ideas/Suggestions · All categories · Guildhall