Just a big 
for the re-organisation of the forum.
Not sure if it's 100% complete but I do like it.
Thanks @pert . It might take a bit of getting used to to find things but that will not be a problem.
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Did you mean "just a bug" ? 
I see a lot of topics with the same title "How to get the best out of this forum".
Was it planned like this?
Every category has that. They have a link to one real topic in IDE 1 x
Has always been like that except in the very beginning.
I am not convinced that adding more and more forum categories is such a good idea. If anything I have always thought that having fewer categories was a better way to organise things
As an example, many new topics relate to programming problems so, logically belong in the Programming category. However, for some (but not all boards) there are board specific categories. Experience tells me that we will not be able to rely on new users posting in the right category and will end up asking what board is being used
This is not helped by "Arduino" using similar names for very different products. When is a "Nano" not a Nano and when is a "Uno" not a Uno ?
I hope that I am wrong and that new users post in the category relevant to their board, but experience tells me otherwise. Just look at how many posts are made in the Uncategorised category despite its description telling users not to post there
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It seems to me that many users do not pay attention to categories at all and view the forum as one big list.
That's what I do
There is one pinned to each category. You will see that one topic at the top of the category (until you unpin it for your account). You will also see the newly created "How to get the best out of this forum" topics in the parent category listings and the aggregate topic listings (e.g., "Latest"), but they are only normal topics there, not pinned, and so they will be replaced in those listings by more active topics as usual.
You will recall that I proposed a major reduction in the number of categories. However, there was not a sufficient level of support from the forum community to justify making such a significant change. So I instead went for a less dramatic change (as proposed by @sterretje, thanks!) that focuses more on rearranging the existing child categories under a logical set of top level categories. This work will result in the removal of multiple superfluous or redundant categories. I have already removed six categories (done in a manner that does not result in the loss of any topics or breakage of any links). A few more categories will eventually be removed (per @sterretje's proposal). The removal of a category requires the manual recategorization of all topics in the category, which is a lot of work, so this will take some time.
I did create the following new official product categories (per @sterretje's proposal):
The Arduino company has specified that there should be a dedicated category for each of the active official products. These categories were created sporadically and so we ended up with a situation where we had categories for only a somewhat random list of the official products, missing some of the most significant boards. My opinion is that, if we are going have these product categories, they should be reasonably comprehensive (I would refrain from creating categories for products that aren't much discussed here unless explicitly directed to do so by the Arduino company management).
While the restructuring of the product categories was in process, I actually received feedback from multiple people who noticed the absence of categories for products like the UNO (example), even though we never had such categories before now.
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True , but I had also suggested creating a single "Classic AVR" category instead of all the different "UNO R3, Leonardo, Micro, ..." categories 
Guglielmo
I am afraid that "Classic AVR" would me mean nothing to the average new user.
EDIT : fixed a mistake
1 Like
... possible ...
Guglielmo
I'm likely reading too much into this, but - will each product category be moved elsewhere when they become "inactive", presuming that means "retired"?
Perhaps I would be able to find the answer if I went looking for categories for already retired products, but I thought I'd question the intent of the directive, not infer something from evidence on the site.
I would probably lean towards leaving the category where it is even after its product was retired.
The motivation behind creating the Retired category was to serve as a container for the existing categories for retired products, for which we don't have an established classification. The product categories you now see under the Retired category were previously directly under the top level Official Hardware category, where they took up a lot of space on the "Categories" page (which is the default home page for the forum).
I added the "active" qualifier in the sentence to avoid anyone getting the impression that we would be adding categories for all of the many now obscure retired products.
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I know that reducing the number of categories was one of the purposes. Reason for that was to make it easier for beginners to find the correct category. We now have a category for each official board and although the sum of all (sub) categories might have increased due to additional boards in the "Official Hardware" category my feeling is that it will be a lot easier for beginners to the forum to find the correct category for a problem. There will always be a grey line where even experienced users will have some doubts in which category to place a question and just will throw a dice to decide.
In short, I think that this is an improvement.
We are now at a net decrease in categories. When I wrote post #6, we were at +7, -6, but since that time I completed the work to merge away two more categories (Arduino SIM and Intel®-based platforms). So we are now at +7, -8.
Per @sterretje's proposal, an additional eight categories are to be merged away. So the final result will be a more significant decrease in the number of categories.
You all do a fantastic job, and I’ve been happy with the forum ever since I joined. I truly appreciate everything that has been done; it's far better than I could have ever imagined. Thank you to everyone for the amazing work you’ve done and continue to do!
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Thanks @pert!
Things are a lot easier to find. Also for categories like Hardware, it is nice not having to scroll and scroll and scroll, to get to new messages.
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Why the need to " scroll and scroll and scroll, to get to new messages" ?
Every day I start here:
https://forum.arduino.cc/unread to see what's new in what I've been tracking
then here:
https://forum.arduino.cc/new to see what's new generally
and finally, here:
Arduino Forum to see if anything's brewing on things I stopped following
That's my daily walk through the forum. Some days, I traverse it once, some days several times.
I use links to do something similar. I start with https://forum.arduino.cc/unread then use https://forum.arduino.cc/new?ascending=true&order=posts
The link presents new posts sorted with those with the lowest number of replies displayed first
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