This is one of the incremental changes implementing the English language category restructuring discussed in general at:
The specific changes being proposed can be seen here. They consist of:
Change the category's name from "Hardware" to "Official Hardware"
Change category "slug" (cosmetic text in category page URL) to official-hardware
This category serves as a container for dedicated subcategories for the individual products sold by the Arduino company.
The forum contains several other categories used for discussion of subjects related to hardware not specific to an official product.
The previous ambiguous "Hardware" category name did not clearly communicate the scope of this category and this ambiguity might have made it difficult for users to determine where to create or search for topics related to other hardware. The new name clearly communicates the scope of the category.
Impact on Links
The name change will not break any links.
Links to Category Page
Although the forum software adds a cosmetic text "slug" to the category page URL, the only technically significant part of the URL is the ID (e.g., 12). Even though the "slug" text will be changed as part of the renaming, the previous links will still lead to the category page as always.
Links to Topics and Posts
Topic and post URLs are not category dependent so there is no impact on links to any topics or posts under the renamed category.
The deficiencies of the forum interface are for discussion elsewhere but if it were not for the wasted space it would not be an issue. As it is the forum software does not even deal with its own presentation properly, ie
It's a drop-down menu. It is perfectly reasonable and standard for such a menu to overlap the underlying content during the time the user has the menu open.
Purely theoretically, you could already do that, and I don't want to influence you either. But if we put an "official" in front of it, then there should also be discussions about "inofficial" hardware, right? Does that mean ESP or Pi?
No. The purpose is to clearly define the scope of the category as a container for the official product-specific categories the Arduino company uses for product support and as a source of user feedback for specific products.
@sterretje I sometimes feel the same way. There I am typing and I'm typing for a detailed description, and while I'm typing, the same thing I wanted to say comes up! @pert Is there a more precise distinction then, what else can be put into the unofficial category and what not? Can you put all your technology questions in there, which also have less / not at all to do with Arduino?
