CLOSED: What do you think of the Fing community categories?

KenD

It's great to see this up and running. Great way to share knowledge and insights that you sometimes can't find easily on the Internet.

David

I’d not go too crazy with the number of categories. Once you break things down into too many small boxes, you can lose the ‘water cooler’ effect of people stumbling across interesting topics.

adam

I think that the categories are fine although I'd suggest that certainly more TAGS could be added.   Right now I assume that this is an admin only feature.  Writing the few posts I had made I already found a few I would have liked, such as "feature request", "intrusion detection"

VioletChepil

Thanks @adam I'll be adding those tags now. I can look into expanding Tagging permissions to members which I'll do with our platform provider just now and revert.
@David thanks for this feedback and this was the idea from the start. We'd start with less and identify key themes and pull those out and see if new categories were needed. 
@KenD great! Yes, I/we have been very excited to get this launched, it's been a long time an idea and several months in the making and it's amazing to see the whole thing come together now. 

Romulus

I agree that keeping the number of categories down will help prevent fragmentation of the discussions.

Given there are probably people with a huge range of knowledge and technical abilities, I'm wondering if it might be useful to have a place for both beginners, people that need very basic assistance with networking and also one for experts to discuss things with much more technical depth.

VioletChepil

@adam I've added in tags #featurerequests and #intrustiondetection now. If you have any more let me know and I'll revert back on the permissioning. 

VioletChepil

@adam I've also enabled end-users to be able to add tags, I'll announce it too. Thanks a lot for the suggestion

Nickoletta100

Looks good, thanks!

adam

VioletChepil said:

@adam I've also enabled end-users to be able to add tags, I'll announce it too. Thanks a lot for the suggestion

Thanks so much!

Chiefplumber

It might be interesting to start a Tool category.  This kind of discussion would really clutter up the General Discussion and off-topic category.  IFTTT is good example of a topic that does not have a home yet.  The community would then have a place comment on new tools or integration opportunities with other systems or devices.

KibaKurosakiUK

It's an excellent start to the community 😁

Maybe you could add an interests subsection to the forum as I think it could possibly help the community blend together and it'd probably be able to offer advice on, for example "which electric guitar costing under£500 should I buy and why?"

VioletChepil

@Chiefplumber this is a very good point. I've elaborated the description of Devices & Security to cover this. If we see big trends in topics, then we're definitely going to develop categories based on that too. 
https://community.fing.com/categories/devices 
Smart home, IoT, tools (IFTTT etc.), device recommendations, troubleshooting and tips about devices and security best practices.  
In the meantime, if you can add the tags to your discussions/posts this will help us to identify trends too! 

VioletChepil

@KibaKurosakiUK thanks a lot for this. We can post these in General Discussion/Weird & Wonderful for now:
https://community.fing.com/discussion/37/welcome-to-the-general-discussion-category-on-the-community#latest 
Then after, if we have lots of tags being used, for similar interests we could pull those out.
I did some training prior to the launch and suggestions were to narrow communities from the start and then identify trends and expand as we grow! Already since the feedback from this thread I've improved descriptions quite a bit. Thanks again for the feedback. 

KibaKurosakiUK

@VioletChepil awesome.

Also feedback makes things work better.

go_robot_go

I think these categories look good.

anotherfinguser

All categories that need to be are there :)

pdeinselen

Maybe not needed now, but maybe as the community grows create an offline meet and greet category where we can meet those we have bee interacting with in the real world, from drinks and food at a restaurant, to group trips or maybe meeting during larger conferences.

Wildside

VioletChepil said:

FingLover said:

@VioletChepil - maybe add some geographically based categories. Not countries, maybe continents but why not countries even. It would give people ability to discuss things locally... As every area has its specifics.

It's just 1 of the ideas. I'll publish more.

Regards

internetconnectivity.jpg

Good idea!
We have started doing this in the ISP categories: so users can discuss local ISPs and outages.
Check it out here:
https://community.fing.com/categories/isp 

Maybe you`ll add language based categories, because not everyone could explain the issues he has in english.

hopetindall

looks good.  Will we discuss the absence of IPV6?

DarrenHill

Beta stuff and plans for new improvements maybe?
And if you're interested in such things, also the opportunity to volunteer for beta-testing of them?

Bryce

Maybe a category for 'Feature Requests', where one can search to see if a feature is already requested, use can say the use case of something that is missing (or add to an existing request with other use cases), and other users can up vote if they too would like that feature.  Otherwise seems to be well rounded categories.
<edit> Just thought of another category while trying to find an issue - Something like 'bugs' or 'known issues' that have already been reported so one doesn't repeat oneself?  Could then just add your 2 cents worth to it if needed, or vote again for priority.

Hronos

The categories look good for me, I think to much categories will make hard to find a place for the post.  So far, it's good.

CIndelicato

I am late to the party but I like what I see! This community will serve the user base well, I predict!

Paul

Looks good

UnixGuru

I like the idea of Education. I have a lot of older esoteric TCP/IP knowledge but there are folks you have invited you can contribute to a general knowledge section. Otherwise, I say we live with it for now and see what is needed.

Pixelpopper

I may have missed it but I couldn’t find a “Streaming” category, only a few posts which contain the word. Bearing in mind the popularity of many streaming services in use and the problems users experience, I consider this an essential category which is like to become very “busy.” Otherwise I am sure the existing categories will develop as the user base increases.

grouts

Loving the Content and categories,  would definitely like to see the most recent post at the top, instead of scrolling Waaaayyyy down..

ThinkFing

Hello Violet, I think you have a great set of topics for now, adding too many at the start could make it hard for people to find their way around and contribute usefully. That said, as users get a monthly summary of connectivity, you will have a lot of data that could be mined anonymously, for example showing geographic areas that have service outages. A forum section covering geographic data mined from your servers could be very useful. Also, many forums like this also have a buying / selling / wants section, although this may be hard to police and could be restricted to Fingbox related items. Overall - its a great start to the community interaction! I'm looking forward to being part of it!

yozh

Honestly I would like to see a fully separate Security section and not meshed in with devices, FINGs primary function is security isnt ? For devices, maybe make it more clear such as network devices, or general device support.. Otherways digging this so far !

VioletChepil

@ThinkFing great idea. @Carlo_from_Fing could be interesting to share more on trends etc. we did do a post of this sort in the beginning on our blog but there could definitely be opoprtunities to do more sharing of this on the community. Also, especially in realtion to ISP speeds/outages etc. perhaps there is definitely more we can share on the country level on this threads: https://community.fing.com/categories/isp