Struggling to Set up a Category Structure for Your Forum? Here's How We Did It

Building the foundation of your “Communication Pyramid” (for reference, see last essay) is essential. We use discourse for most of our asynchronous communication.

After playing around with different category setups, we settled with a simple structure.

TRIGO is a software development business. There are very specific categories for our needs, but you should be able to map them to your business.

Let's dive into them:

Announcements

All kind of company-wide announcements goes here. New hires, policy changes, process adoptions. Things everyone should be aware of.

Water cooler

This category is for all non-project related stuff. For instance, discussions if we should do a Christmas cleaning for our notion pages (we got a LOT!) or how we want to use our Discord server happens in this category.

Events

We like to see each other in-person from time to time. Believe it or not. Planning for such happenings goes here.

Engineering

This is the place for all discussions about code guidelines, software architecture, the newest OpenShift improvements and more.

Areas of Interest

We exchange ideas about new UX trends or an upcoming marketing campaign here. We have created some sub-categories here over time: User Experience, Cloud-Native, User Interface, Developer Experience, Marketing, Sales and Project Management.

Projects

Finally, all project related stuff goes here. From Discussions about software requirements, software architecture and how to handle a certain situation with a customer.

Don't overcomplicate things, people will get overwhelmed by the new medium this way. Keep it straight and simple.