I am trying to reconcile the notion of organizing information and not have many channels as you point out. Could you explain?
As a user of many forums, in many different fields (home improvements, mrexcel, StackOverlow, Microsoft answers, surrogacy, sports, dating, language betterment, fitness and health, products communities, etc) at various levels of involvement (influencer, regular, occasional, one-off or so consumer of information) and various level of subject matter expertise (novice, expert, etc) it has been my experience that the “hierarchy “ organization of information aka forum table of content, is rarely my approach to finding information, except to look for pinned topics (provided there aren’t too many of those).
Discourse search engine is so good that tagging isn’t necessary, at this time anyway. So first step, search engine. If a search doesn’t turn up what you’ve been searching for, it is most likely not here yet. Next step is therefore to ask your question.
Because of the amazing connectivity and unified way communications and notifications work in Discourse, the time to respond varies between one minute to four hours according to the site usage reports.
I am certain improvements can be made. The structuration of channels gets adjusted over time.
The community self regulates. Some members have editors rights that enable them to relocate branches that derail.
At the same time, although the knowledge base functionality is very important, the soup caters the need for socializing with peers that is culturally distinctive to the fm ecosystem users and developers.
When Community, the vendors forum, got transitioned to a highly compartmented platform that didn’t fulfill either needs so well anymore, or in a pleasurable user experience, people moved away from it.
The fm community is made of incredibly cooperative and generous people. The soup tries to enable such people.
Incidentally I know very little of gaming communities/sites. I can’t really establish if the needs of gamers are comparable to the ones of the FileMaker community.