Forum Categories vs. Groups Explained

[ricmarques (Ricardo Dias Marques)]

The distinction between “categories” and “groups”, in Discourse, is a bit confusing.

The following post by “pfaffman” (Jay Pfaffman") - Support Expert of “Discourse” - that he posted in September 2017, in the “Discourse Meta” forum, explains the difference:

To reiterate what he writes there:

@pfaffman

• Categories are collections of topics.
• Groups are collections of Users.
• You can restrict access to categories to particular groups.
• People can watch particular categories to get notifications for that category.

Here, in the LinuxCommunity.io , we have for example:

1. Categories, for example “MATE Desktop” category (forum = collection of topics).
   
   
2. Groups, for example “MATE Companions” group (collection of members).
   
   

The group being a collection of members, and not a collection of topics - does NOT have a forum, with one small exception: you can send a message to all the members of a group (and that message will be visible only to the members of the group). Group messages are treated as discussion topics (but only other members of the group can reply to them).

[hydn (Hayden James)]

Stickied. Please also see the related announcement here:

New Distro Groups Are Live! Find Your Linux Family

We’re excited to roll out a new way for our members to connect: Distro-based user groups are now available and open for all members to join! [image] Why We Created This We know many of you are running different Linux distros, from daily drivers, to servers, to testing boxes and these new groups help you to: Align with members running the same distro Join distro-specific conversations Message and connect with fellow users easily Rep and display your preferred Linux distro interests. How It…

I will unstick that topic so this one can replace it. Thanks!

[ericmarceau]

Ricardo, thank you very much for that clarification!

I have to think, because I do want Topics to be open for all Site Members, but I want an easy way to

• exclusively reach those who have expressed a desire to be recognized as being MATE adherants,

• have something like the main forum, but with “filter” to show MATE-centric topics, and

• exclusively search those Topics that are MATE-centric.

I don’t know that a #MATEdesktop tag is the way to go, because OPs may not include that, so those might be missed.

Is there a way that a cron job could scan recent posts (window to be specified) to locate instances of keywords or phrases that would be MATE-relevant, and generate a message to myself, or other Moderators, to edit those posts to add the necessary “tag”, which would then facilitate points 2 and 3 above?

As an aside, kind of, is it possible to have a mouse-over function, which when hovering over “Scope …”, it would offer a pop-up window with a checklist of tags to reduce the list portrayed in the Forum’s default list. There would also be a “reset” option.

Is that too complicated to implement?