This is a mistake. Putting everything into one category loses the benefit of sectioning discussions based on product.
“But we’re going to use tags for that.”
Please note while reading the following – I created the majority of the tags currently in use. I know what they’re good for. But like everything, they come at a cost…
Tags or Categories
Tags are for ad-hoc sub-categorization. Tags are “soft” groupings of related items to aid filtering. Products have hard lines between them, deserving of a category devoted to each.
Policing the current categories is easy – if a new user posts to the wrong category, it is easily noticed and easily fixed. The forum software makes it easy.
On the other hand, policing tags – meaningful tags – is not so easy. Some topics can belong “loosely” under a particular tag in the eyes of one user and have nothing to do with the same tag to another – ad hoc, like I said.
There could be hundreds of tags, especially if you promote their adoption like you’re proposing. You could alleviate that to some degree by educating users as to their purpose. But that’s not necessary under the status quo. It’s only necessary going forward because you chose a path requiring it.
The worst case scenario is a race condition between users – @Brandon_Hein adds a tag browser-issue, @Russ_Thomas removes it and adds firefox-issue. Brandon doesn’t notice what I’ve done and re-adds browser-issue. Okay, big deal you say, what’s the problem? @duyluong decides it’s neither because the problem was actually caused by the driver, so he adds geckodriver-issue and leaves the existing tags intact. That same topic could have, in addition to the tags mentioned, 10, 20 other tags. Pretty soon, spread across the entire knowledge base, we have a mountain of essentially meaningless tag noise that most people will (learn to) ignore.
Tags Summary
There’s no doubt that clicking a tag to see all topics under that tag is a positive benefit for users. But to police them is not so easy.
Segmented categories require low cognitive load. Free and easy access to tags means they increase exponentially and therefore increase cognitive load exponentially.
Tip & Tricks
Elsewhere, I read:
Have a question about using Katalon? Got stuck somewhere on your automation testing journey? Or you just simply want to share this amazing tip/trick you just learned? Then this channel is for you!
Tips&Tricks are “How to” statements of fact. Every other kind of user topic begins as a question. The two should not be mixed otherwise this simple demarcation is lost.