I tried the same search again and this is the result:
What have I been doing wrong all these years?
Hmmm I too get but one result, is the URL you’re using
[noparse]http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search.php?search_type=1[/noparse]
In any event, whether or not and to what extent Tags or Search will affect the forum heirarchy is uncertain at this point.
What is certain is that there can be 2 levels of categories i.e Categories and Sub-Categories
Interesting. How deep are we currently?
Right now the public forums have 6 Categories, 33 Sub-Categories and 3 Sub-Sub-Categories
IMHO the deeper a forum gets, the less visible it becomes, but the more categories there are the more “clutter” there is which can also make a forum difficult to “see”.
The trick is to find a balance I guess. Enough categories but not too many. The goal being to make navigation and locating the easiest possible for members.
[ot]No the URL I get evey time is similar to this:
[noparse]http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search.php?searchid=1097473[/noparse]
When in the Forums I use the “Search Forums” type here which is located second line down on the far right.
Is there a link to: [noparse]http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search.php?search_type=1[/noparse]
[/ot]
[ot]
That’s the Advanced Search, which (AFAIK) has not been available via direct link since the last forum “upgrade”. I keep it bookmarked for easy use.[/ot]
I like the way the Ubuntu Forums do it, with everything visible on the front page, and a little more information available if you dig into the section headings. However, while that works well for a full page on vBulletin, I don’t think it would translate into Discourse, with all the icons, etc. in the index page, and the category drop-down menu.
Many thanks, I will sleep soundly tonight 
You can look at their Discourse page… http://discourse.ubuntu.com/
It might not be part of the initial migration, but I’d look at running a script after the data has been imported to add tags to posts.
Indeed, look at Twitter, @something and #something are just tags and the cornerstone of their system. I agree a regular search (either simple or advanced) is always good for general queries.
Partially I agree and it’s true you could end up with a stupid amount of them. However if you look at the sort of topics/subjects that Sitepoint generates then probably around 20-30 tags would cover the vast majority of posts (think regulars like CSS, SEO, PHP, ASP, HTML5, responsive etc). Perhaps it would be a case of adding a fixed set of tags to cover all bases for the poster to choose from (they must select at least one)? After all “tags” are another form of classification like categories…
On the EE forum module did you mean the forum wide search and the search in forums search?
[ot]
I’ve already seen that, but it isn’t the same thing as the Ubuntu forums, so not a direct comparison.[/ot]
I meant the comprehensive EE forum wide search and especially the advanced option because of the ease of filtering results.
[ot]@HAWK;
I find it difficult to imagine all the forum posts being imported to the proposed forum and searching for particular posts.
Is it possible to create a read-only, test-bed, Discourse forum with a limited amount of posts (say the last 1,000). It would be easier to work with something concrete rather than trying to think of every eventuality.
[/ot]
This is putting the cart before the horse, I think, to let the interface dictate the information architecture, rather than the other way around.
I can’t argue that point.
In fact we are discussing how the drop-down menu can be reorganized and restyled to better reflect whatever hierarchy we do decide to go with.
I don’t know why many of the Discourse sites haven’t modified their look from the default, but it’s something I think would need to be done.
Yup, we’re currently in the process of importing some test data.