We should enter a topic/category aliong with our question

In order to facilitate search and archival, we should have to choose the category of our question from a pull-down tab. If we have a new topic, then we enter it, possibly creating another item in the pull-down if a moderator sees this as fit.

I try to facilitate this process by using key words in my topic that will allow others to find my post via a search later, but some nice topics (and sometimes a post will span topics, so one need be able to select several ... so scratch the pulldown, make it a set of checkboxes) To some, Perl is an art form. To others it is a religion. What is it to you?

Comment on We should enter a topic/category aliong with our question

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(Guildenstern) RE: We should enter a topic/category aliong with our question by Guildenstern (Deacon) on Aug 20, 2000 at 03:29 UTC
i don't know if having a list to choose from would be the best answer. there are so many different topics that come up within posts that it might be a logistical nightmare to try to categorize them. rather than a dropdown box, it may be easier to implement a freeform field to enter a short description of what category the author believes it fits in. then, the post title and category could be shown. i do agree that it would be a tremendous help for people to give posts as descriptive a name as possible. when i'm looking through Newest Nodes, i only look at postings that i feel i can answer or that might be informative to me. i'm a lot more likely to click through to a question about interesting flaws in regex (excellent discussion, BTW) than i am to visit something called "help" or "problems". just my 2e-2	[reply]
(jeffa) RE: We should enter a topic/category aliong with our question by jeffa (Bishop) on Aug 20, 2000 at 04:12 UTC
I think that the Title of the post should serve as the category, that is, if you have a descriptive title, it will be more likely to show up in a search for the keywords you want to match. kudra addressed this issue a while back in her post Suggestion for post-naming convention. As for art vs. religion - well, I haven't really had any religious experiences while programming yet - but I can definetly attest to programming being an art form. I liken my religion to those moments when I am meditating, and typing and meditating don't go together well for me. Sometimes I find that programming takes away from my meditation experiences, but meditating always helps my programming experiences.	[reply]
RE: We should enter a topic/category aliong with our question by mrmick (Curate) on Aug 20, 2000 at 18:03 UTC
I think that by categorizing posts, we will be limited (psychologically, at least) by the categories themselves when either posting or searching for posts. People will be tempted to only look in a particular category and probably miss some very good posts. If one is to look for posts on a particular issue, PerlMonks has a wonderful search engine ( SuperSearch ). I have used it successfully several times, so far. Mick	[reply]
RE: We should enter a topic/category aliong with our question by ivory (Pilgrim) on Aug 20, 2000 at 13:48 UTC
I guess it depends on how specific you want the categories to be. It seems that there are only a few broad categories that posts fall into (e.g. regex, modules, etc.) but I am not sure that these broad categories would be any more informative than the titles. ivory	[reply]