We are in the process of merging our user-support forum Ask Fedora into Fedora Discussion — our site geared towards contributor and project team conversations. Historically, we’ve used tags differently on those two sites. This means we need to figure out an approach for combining them. Please take a look at the Adding -team to (almost) all of the tags in Project Discussion? thread and add your thoughts.

History of tags

These sites were initially separate because of the different target audiences. We learned that is often confusing to people, and it’s hard to re-categorize posts that land in the wrong place. Plus, making a strong distinction between users and contributors has never been the Fedora way. Almost all contributors are Fedora Linux users too, and we always welcome all of our users to get more involved. So: together!

In the current Fedora Discussion site organization, tags are roughly the equivalent of team mailing lists. If you’re interested in documentation, you subscribe to the #docs tag. If you’re interested in marketing, subscribe to the #marketing tag. Then you get notifications (including email, if that’s your preference) when someone posts about those things.

On Ask, we’ve used tags more loosely, and in a more traditional way: tags describe the content. For example, if a question is about Fedora Workstation, it might include the #workstation tag.

Merging

This is all fine, but we have a concern for the merged site. After the merger, will topics from Ask Fedora will overwhelm those from Project Discussion? If you’re following the #docs tag, you’ll get notifications for both support questions and team discussion. If you’re getting email notifications, you can filter on X-Discourse-Category and X-Discourse-Tags headers to distinguish, but that doesn’t work for the site’s notification menu.

I proposed that existing tags get a suffix, becoming #docs-team, #workstation-wg, #kde-sig, etc., to distinguish them. But, folks from several teams have now told me they prefer having the same tag. And I can see the simplicity and elegance of that, too.

So why is this on the Community Blog rather than just Fedora Discussion? Because I’d like to encourage wider use, and so even if you aren’t following the forum a lot currently, I’d like your input! Please take a look at the Adding -team to (almost) all of the tags in Project Discussion? thread and add your thoughts.