I’d like to suggest splitting the Lampshade Bar and Grill category. I’ll propose a couple of names to avoid bikeshedding, but the point of the proposal isn’t the names:
Lampshade Bar and Grill — general discussion, fun, and games. Home to the hall-of-spam, people introducing themselves with their first-post, real-life discussions, the book-club, and so forth. If someone wants to bring back South Pacific University to talk about real-life stuff, it would fit well here.
I think there actually isn’t a great place on the forum right now to just talk about NationStates, like, in general. Some of our institutions have their own categories, but these are often working areas: the Assembly category is a working area for legislation, the High Court category is a working area for receiving and ruling on cases, and so forth.
I think the conventional wisdom — which I genuinely agree with — is that we shouldn’t be trigger-happy with categories, because unused categories just accumulate cruft and make it harder to find things. But I think what’s developing is a situation where a single category is hosting topics about meaningfully different things, and if they’re competing with each other, then it’s worth avoiding that. We don’t need a complicated forum structure under a ‘Civic Discussion Center,’ but it would be nice to have a place to chat about NationStates, for anything from “how do I increase my civil rights score?” to “I wrote a news article about our political goings-on.” Some people may enjoy chatting about real-life politics but not be that interested in journalism about the Prime Minister’s last political maneuvers; some people may be interested in approval polling but not in the hall of spam. And a ‘Civic Discussion Center’ also gives an outlet for citizens to participate.
Historically, TSPU was under the other category you’re recommending be made, but I like this idea more.
That said, it might also be worth remembering that we can use tags a little more liberally, and that we have the function to block certain categories and tags? I have hall-of-spam muted, as an example, but I still look at damn near every other Lampshade Bar and Grill topic that comes up.
Tags are great! But they’re great for organizing one category that can host discussions about related but not identical subjects, and for indexing topics that are located across different categories but which relate to a shared subject. If we get to the point where one category is home to two meaningfully distinct types of content, I think that’s where a category becomes useful. The user interface isn’t designed to encourage tagging every Lampshade Bar topic either #ns or #rl, but I think that is a distinction in the current content there and both kinds of content could be better supported by having their own categories.
I think the new category would be about NS specifically. To my understanding, Lampshade Bar and Grill is already more similar to the General category on the NS forums — both category/forum descriptions say they’re for talk/discussion “about anything.”
Oddly, we’ve had a bunch of new people apply to be citizens as their first post but they haven’t done a first post (since July 12) introducing themselves otherwise. did something change in the welcome wizard?
I too am in favor of this change. I’d wager that if citizenship applications were more visible by being separate, then we’d receive more applications. As of now, it’s possible (and perhaps likely) that new users get lost in the forums.