What just happened to the Projects category?

[dccontrarian]

It seem like all the recent posts are gone, and several sub-categories are gone.

[pert]

Hi @dccontrarian. We are in the process of restructuring the forum categories, as planned here:

Restructuring forum categories

An issue that has been raised repeatedly over the years by the forum community is that there are too many English language forum categories, and that the scope of some of those categories is not well defined or communicated. One of the most common moderation actions is moving topics to the appropriate category. The current category structure and documentation may be a contributing factor in users selecting inappropriate categories. There is a lot of subject matter overlap in the current catego…

The subcategories have been moved to Other Hardware. No posts have or will be lost.

[dccontrarian]

Thanks. Is there a reason "Other Hardware" doesn't show up in the list of categories on the left?

[pert]

Thanks for pointing that out. I have now added it to the sidebar categories.

[dccontrarian]

Thanks.

[westfw]

@pert

We are in the process of restructuring the forum categories

Gotta say: this seems to have gone pretty smoothly!
I haven't noticed any bad side-effects, and the changes seem to actually be working in term of creating fewer posts in less-appropriate categories.

Good job!

[pert]

Thanks for your positivity @westfw.

@westfw

I haven't noticed any bad side-effects

I did notice one side effect:

Prior to the category restructuring, an average of 0.07 miscategorized topics were created in the #development-tools:arduino-cli category per day.

Since the time of the restructuring, the average has increased to 0.62.

This is odd because that category is not at the top of the category listings.

My hypothesis is that the scenario goes like this:

1. URGENT Need halp with schoolwork. PROJECT IS DO IN TOO OURS!!!
2. Write post.
3. Click the "+ Create Topic" button.
   The "An error occurred: Category can't be blank" dialog appears.
   
   
4. Type the brilliant search query "arduino" in the category selection menu's search field.
5. Select the first item in the search results (which happens to be #development-tools:arduino-cli).

@westfw

the changes seem to actually be working in term of creating fewer posts in less-appropriate categories.

I just checked the data and unfortunately it doesn't seem to support this impression. Over the period of 2024-06-06 - 2024-12-22 (the restructuring work began around 2024-12-23), there was an average of 16.4 miscategorized topics per day.

Over the period of 2025-01-27 - 2025-04-04 (I ran out of time to work on restructuring on 2025-01-26), there was an average of 16.7 miscategorized topics per day.

I published the full reports here:

Proposal: Add dedicated category to catch topics created in first category arbitrarily

An updated set of reports: I split the data into two intervals (2024-06-06 - 2024-12-22 and 2025-01-27 - 2025-04-04) in order to exclude the data for 2024-12-23 - 2025-01-26. The reason is that we recategorized a huge number of topics during that period while reworking the category structure (Updated web site ). Those recategorizations were different than the typical ones which are performed due to the topic creator having chosen an inappropriate category. Miscategorized Topics per Category 2…

I don't think the increase is significant, but I do think it indicates that the restructuring did not result in a significant decrease in creation of miscategorized topics.

However, I do find that it made the task of recategorizing topics easier and more pleasant. Previously, I often had to spend some time looking through the previous illogical and overlapping collection of categories to decide which one was appropriate. And I was often unsatisfied due to having to make an arbitrary choice between multiple equally appropriate categories.