This has become a bit of a mess. See the main categories (courses) settings for details.
A mess in the global order or on the home page?
Both, but the main page is the one to perhaps be more concerned about.
What exactly is messy about it? Too much stuff?
What exactly is messy about it?
Hi Sam. I appreciate sometimes asking a question is a good way to bat the issue back, so it doesn’t have to be dealt with any time soon, but - seriously?
I don’t intend to go through every sub-category at take screenshots of all the position number of each of them, but as an example, “S01 Intro - New!” - is currently position 21. Whilst I appreciate you may believe this is behind the scenes so to speak, there are views within Discourse which expose this, as an example;
Batting a question back to you - do you seriously not see a problem with either of these screenshots?
Oh yeah, I missed the Unity 2D issue. This should probably be temporary as we are patching the course.
@Rick_Davidson, perhaps we could move replaced sections into a graveyard subcategory?
@Rob where is the second screenshot from? I can’t figure out where to find it.
From the burger icon;
Those are already sub-categories by the way Sam, you won’t be able to put sub-categories into sub-categories, only a main category, which would mean potentially creating a third category for the Unity course… and this still wouldn’t be a lot of benefit if the sub-categories are all mixed up.
I was thinking of a Unity Deprecated top level category
Wouldn’t that then require something similar for other courses in time also, which means you could, potentially, end up with a graveyard category for each course?
There are already posts going into the wrong sub-categories, showcase (Unity, Unity 2.0, Unity 2D, Unity 3D, and then lounge when people are not sure at all), duplicate “intro” categories/topics.
Looks like Discourse is a bit **** for allowing us to easily reorder categories. I’ve reshuffled the order of the new Unity 2D sections so that they at least work within the flow of Unity.
I’m pretty new to Discourse. Do you see a way out of the mess Rob, given your knowledge of the system?
Do you see a way out of the mess Rob, given your knowledge of the system?
More planning before making changes. 
I’ve not heard back with regards to the use of the slugs and the automation, so I can only go on what I was made aware of in the past, I’m not kept in the loop these days so I could be utterly wrong on much of this.
At the moment it looks like new sections are being added to Udemy, the automation then creates a new sub-category on the forum. Because you are adding the word “new” to the sections, these are being added to the forum slugs and sub-category titles. As I’ve already raised in another topic here (22 days ago, no response), it looks like this could cause longer term issues.
Questions I would have thought would have been covered from the outset with this approach;
- how long are we going to call a new section “new” for
- who will rename the sections in Udemy after this time period
- will the automation rename the sub-category title and slug on the forum, or will it create another sub-category
- if we do nothing, does the slug having the word “new” in the title matter
- what happens when we do this next time, do we call the sub-category “Text101 - new new” etc
If these were being swapped out one for one as they were finished then do you still need the original sub-categories? Appreciating that students may have asked questions and were working through it, but if you have removed the original course section, and it isn’t available to anyone, that makes their questions/need for help a little redudant doesn’t it?
Suffixing “(Original)” to all of the original sub-categories I think looks messy and just creates clutter. The fact that some of the sub-categories have “new” stamped on them surely suggests that if a sub-category doesn’t have that stamped on it then it isn’t new and must therefore be original?
The changing of the colour to grey seemed like a good indication that a section wasn’t to be considered “live” anymore, but again I ask the question, how long do these remain for? Forever?
I’m not sure the forum needs another main category called “graveyard” etc, the Unity related content is already spread across a number of categories which are not even in a block together in the listings.
If the forum had another tier then you could effectively get around some of this by having a category for “Unity”, sub-categories for the courses and then the third tier for the sections. But there isn’t, not in the “category” definition anyway, there are the tags but the filtering isn’t quite the same and these are being used for lectures.
Whist each category has a position, I believe these are global, not specific to a parent category, for example, if Unity was position 1, the position numbers of the sub-category within it do not necessarily appear as “1,2,3”, they could be, and are, more like “23, 35, 62”. The interface for sorting this out looks fairly straight forward to me, in fact I have used it myself, several times in the passed to tidy up previously, but this isn’t currently part of your automation process from what I can see, so when there isn’t anyone on top of it, it goes to hell…
If you scroll further down that view you will see that whilst you have now got the “new” ones in Unity grouped together, they are no longer grouped with the actual Unity 2D section.
Maybe none of this matters and I’m the only one who cares, in which case maybe leave it all, as mentioned above I raised part of this 22 days ago and heard nothing back, so I’m guessing its not really on anyone’s radar. I do suspect that if you don’t do anything though, in time, not only will it end up more of a mess you’ll also run into problems with the automation pushing new sections from Udemy to the forum and then wondering where they are. If I had to guess, the solution at that point would probably end up being to look for another forum solution rather than tackling the underlying issues.
Note my use of “you” is in reference to GameDev.tv as opposed to any one individual etc.
Would it work if I went in and reordered the categories so that they are neater, and then we made a point for any new categories to be manually placed where they should be? I’m assuming we can have non-consecutive numbers, so I could leave big space between categories. Eg. one categories is the 100s, next is the 200s, and so on.
Or is there a reason why I should avoid doing that?
In terms of the questions of naming the Unity sections new and original, I plan for this to be a temporary approach just during the transition. I’ll remove new once more than half of the course is new, and will likely create a new course category for the old original Unity course.
Nope. At least, when I tried that some time ago, they all got re-numbered to consecutive numbers.
Whilst you can manually rename the sections and slugs, I am fairly certain there was a reason why @sampattuzzi didnt want the slugs to be changed previously, I can only assume this is because of the automation.
“Unity 1.0/2.0/2D/3D/Original Graveyard”? 
Are you planning on moving the old contwnt on Udemy to the graveyard course? If there are no links in there to the forum, is it worth keeping? What is the intended audience for this category? The course content wont be supported via Udemy, or here, and as those students who have any recollection of it move on there wont be anyone left who remembers what it was to help them with it. I am probably missing something with regards to the purpose of keeping this in a separate category.
The challenge we have with the unity course is that we need to keep the original content available forever to students who have purchased it already (Udemy’s guarantee). So we shift the lectures to a graveyard course on Udemy. We have mention of the forum and support baked into the course, so we need a place for those folks to go in order to ask questions. There will be double ups in sections (Text101 old and Text101 new) so I think we need a way to know which version of the content someone is talking about / asking about, hence splitting the categories.
I’m pretty sure over time there will be less and less student involvement in the original content, so we should see a pretty steady dropoff in terms of the activity with that old content.
But you are updating the content, not removing it. How is this different to making patches and uploading the new videos, you dont keep every single version of each lecture because someome bought it (Udemy guarantee).
With regards to Text101, are you saying that you are going to supoort it? I thought official support was only via Q&A, is that going to be provided via Q&A in the graveyard course now?
How is the drop off measured? Number of posts on the forum?