So far, I'm liking the more fine-grained breakout of various topics. However, it may be a bit much.
First example: the "Topics" section. I don't really know what any of the subcategories are for. Is it for exhibition? Then say so and get rid of the single Exhibition topic. Is it for project guidance? Then say so and get rid of the Project Guidance section. It seems like people will just randomly start using them to talk about problems they're having with their project, when the question would fit better into the "Using Arduino" section where they need to pick a more relevant category. Since no one has posted in the "Topics" forum yet, you could do a quick vanish..
Next example: Right now, the description of "Products and Services" looks exactly like that of "Gigs and Collaborations". I was hoping that "Products and Services" could be a place where people could announce new Arduino-related products, or offer PCB, laser, or 3D printing services, etc. Actually I would recommend separate "Products" and "Services" categories.
Your comments are really valuable indeed. My suggestion is that we see how this new structure develops and we make sure things are falling nicely in place. If a category doesn't go on properly, we look for ways of merging it with something else or we kill it completely.
I must say that the current list of categories is something we sketched about a year ago, when we first went into prototyping the new forum and the whole new line of web services for Arduino. Some of the topics we identified then might not be relevant nowadays, while some others could just be posted as subcategories of other boards. Let's give ourselves some time to see how the data flows into the database before we move things too much.
Thanks again, if you identify any other things, please let us know.
I second macegr's comment about the topics section. It's not clear whether it's for questions or for exhibition of projects in the respective categories.
Why not change the section title to something more meaningful than "topics"?
I understand this better now. Topics is more like Areas of Work, but it is not about exhibition. It is about help needed when using a certain more specific technology.
I thought it could be interesting to give people a place to talk more generally about particular Arduino-related topics, outside of the specific troubleshooting nature of the "using Arduino" section of the forum. For example, for e-textiles, it could be a place to discuss various types of conductive thread, or approaches to attaching standard components to textiles. This is something that some Arduino users might be interested in, but it doesn't specifically relate to Arduino itself.
In any case, I'm not entirely convinced they make sense either, but maybe we can see how it goes? If they don't develop good discussions / communities, it probably makes sense to get rid of them.
The problem I see is that people will post hardware-related questions in the "topics" section. For example, I could post a motor question both in the "robotics" and the "motors, mechanics and power" category. The categories of the two sections are overlapping to quite a big extent I'm afraid. Would only make sense if the posts are tagged with "motors", "robotics" etc. and the different categories are just different entry points to the same forum posts.
So, maybe it would already help to make sure that there is no danger of overlapping topics? The e-textile example you mention makes sense and I agree that it's good to have a dedicated area for such things.
While many/most will see some benefits from increased "granularity", I think there might be an unfortunate side-effect to increasing the number of categories.
I'm an "embedded systems generalist": I've worked in a lot of different industries, usually doing firmware, sometimes designing hardware. So I know a little about a lot of areas, without a specialist's expertise in any.
So, from my perspective, having only one "Hardware Interfacing" category was a big plus: most of the questions I could be helpful with wound up there, so I only needed to track that one. Now there are several, and I'm probably not going to spend the extra time needed to track them all.
Of course, people who are more specialized are probably going to be happy that there's less "irrelevant" stuff for them to sift through to get to the postings they're interested in, but I wonder whether we have more "specialists" than "generalists", and whether having questions spread across multiple categories will result in fewer connections between people seeking knowledge/advice and those who have it to offer.
Also, you should take into account that we have much better search function now, it allows you selecting which boards you want to look into, etc. And since it runs from a database (and not straight from the file system as it was before), it happens to go pretty quick.
