Forum sections naming to help keep support manageable for a growing user-base and user cases.

[marcusquinn]

Making a separate post for this from here.

Also related to discussion on pricing tiers and overall support time balancing here.

On the subject of preserving Cloudron development time for all the wonder features and apps we all want, I wonder if there should be some separation of Forum Categories to help, eg:

Cloudron Support: Announcements
Cloudron Support: Apps Setup & Issues
Cloudron Support: Platform Feature Requests
Cloudron Support: Platform Setup & Issues
Community Support: Apps Wishlist
Community Support: Custom Apps Packaging
Community Support: General Discussion
Community Support: Help Wanted or Offered

I'm thinking that this naming would help to set attention expectations and notifications reasonably, and make it a bit easier to mute the community sections, and just look at things where someone specifically @mentions Girish, Nebulon or App Devs.

I'm sure the community here is happy to pick up some of the communications work, and maybe make some official moderators so that you can trust the community aspect remains monitored to your standards and rules for your platform.

@girish & @nebulon obviously can still participate, but without expectation to look at every discussion every day, unless specifically tagged. I just know what it's like doing everything in a business, and separation of responsibilities and delegation within an experienced framework is the first part of making anything scaleable.

Lastly, I'm sure there's a few people here that like to help other, by managing more Cloudrons than just for themselves, perhaps there could be an additional section for those paying for multiple Cloudrons:

Reseller Support: Onboarding, Security & Reseller Features

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn I'm still considered somewhat new to Cloudron and I certainly am one of those folk who seek help on the forum but I never expected an answer from the Cloudron team. I would open a support ticket for that but I got on the forum because I felt bad opening a ticket for random questions. It was quite refreshing to see them this active on the forum though but like you said, it does take away from their development time. It would be great to have moderators to help out.

I'm against expanding the forum categories since trying to find the right section to post in becomes a hassle. For example, it took me this whole time to stumble upon the "Help Wanted or Offered" section under "App Packaging & Development" and that's only one category deep. Since these categories are meant to help newcomers and people with no coding skills (like myself), they should be the first thing we see.

After frequenting the forums lately, I've noticed that most of the regulars on here are developers but Cloudron is meant to connect regular people with better hosting and apps so the main focus of the forum should be around that goal. To keep the development channel clean, perhaps there should be a special group for app developers with their own sub-forum. You can limit replies and new topics to the group or making those categories hidden from other users altogether.

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty Mostly agreed. The changes suggested are just renaming what's already there.

"Help Offered or Wanted" I think should be a top-level section. I think it was, so not sure why that changed. I also think "Worked Offered or Wanted" would be more appropriate, as that was the hoped intention of that section. I know Girish said he doesn't want it to become a jobs board - but I kinda see that as inevitable as there's so many skills needed online nowadays that we can't all know or do everything but often can network those skills and needs on our travels.

I think it you're looking at self-hosting apps, whether for home or business, you're already very technically competent, so I can't see it ever being SaaS level easy, but maybe as time goes by it will, and certainly a good community of contributors is essential to that.

It's hard to know usage and user-needs without the passage of time and watching what happens, so I'm sure that's being studied and learned from as we go. I can only suggest as it's not my product, but then the best products are usually ones that customers feel an affinity close to ownership.

Growth is always a blessing and a challenge, so just hoping my suggestions can make it more scaleable without getting unhealthy for time-needs, and please most of the people most of the time.