[Forum Revamp 2] Progress update Apr 15, 2022

[Update as of April 29th 2022]
Based on your feedback, we have decided to keep the following categories:

  • Katalon Studio
  • Katalon TestOps
  • Katalon Recorder
  • Katalon TestCloud

:arrow_forward: These categories will be moved under Community Discussion going forward.

The current sub-categories under the above categories will be removed and/or turned into tags for better organization. All old, inactive topics within them will be archived. For more information, see HERE.


Hi Community members! :wave:

We’ve been working hard to give our forum an overhaul to improve your experiences going forward. Here’re what we’ve been working on so far.

:pushpin: [What has been changed]

  1. “New Topic” button renamed

We’ve renamed the “New Topic” button to “Ask the Community”.

  1. New Announcements & Updates category

We have merged the old Announcements, Documentation, and Events categories into one Announcements & Updates category. Within it, there are three sub-categories as follow:

  • Documentations & Guidelines: Here you’ll find references and tutorials for all Katalon’s products and services.
  • Events & Activities: Information on our upcoming webinars, events, and community-related activities will be announced here.
  • Updates: Information related to new product releases, maintenance, holiday, Katalon Academy will be announced here.

:pushpin: [What we’re working on]

  1. A new Community Discussion category is on the way

Both long-time members of the forum and even newcomers can wholeheartedly agree that the current structure of the categories themselves are rather cluttered and overwhelming. Hence, we’re working to merge all four product-related categories, namely:

  • Katalon Studio
  • Katalon TestOps
  • Katalon TestCloud
  • Katalon Recorder

… into one Community Discussion categories before things becomes to fragmented. We’ll send out details on the migration process of existing topics and the implementation period soon.

  1. A bigger focus on Tags

Tags are nimble, flexible, lightweight, and at the moment … underutilized. Thus, we’re planning to focus more on Tags as a way for you to filter and organize topics more efficiently.

  1. Smaller UI/UX changes on the horizon

Over the coming weeks, you’ll see small changes here and there in terms of color schemes, more illustrations being used next to each category’s header, etc. to improve your overall navigation experience on the forum.

Decluttering and revamping is never an easy process; hence, any feedback and suggestion is welcome!

Please comment below or send us an email at: Community@katalon.com to let us know what you’d like to see in the future. :smile:

3 Likes

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.

Please don’t lose posts or change URLs! There are still plenty of links in the wild that result in 404 errors (from the last forum change) - and it’s usually the one that sounds like the answer to your problem!

1 Like

Like this post.

Only the mention of “Test Case” hints that he might be using Katalon Studio. Do I (we) need to ask everyone which product before I can offer help?

This is a BAD IDEA.

I’m re-pinning this topic to get greater visibility.