Missing category: ProcessWire discussion that isn't a support question

[Peter Knight]

I've been meaning to raise this for a few years, and ironically, anytime I went to highlight it, I didn't know where to post it.

Would it be worth adding a General Discussion area under Community Support for ProcessWire-related topics that aren't support questions?

The gap I keep running into is topics that are

1. clearly on-topic for PW
2. but don't fit any of the support categories
3. and aren't off-topic enough for the Pub or Dev Talk.

Here are three sample posts to illustrate the issue:

1. "How do you pitch ProcessWire to clients who only know WordPress?" - not a support question, not off-topic, not a tutorial
2. "What's your experience of the PW community compared to other CMS communities?" - clearly PW-related but doesn't belong in any support board
3. "I'm seeing more agencies adopt PW in Germany - anyone else noticing regional growth?" - on-topic community discussion with nowhere to land

I recently spoke with three PW users, and one told me they don't visit the forums at all because there's nowhere to simply chat about ProcessWire. Another wasn't aware of many of the recent Module developments because module-related content gets buried within Modules rather than somewhere more visible.

I suspect both of those things would improve with a single well-placed General Discussion board.

Just to recap, I think the boards are structured very well and cater for *most* topics. But has anyone else felt this gap or had posts they couldn't find a home for?

 

[Peter Knight]

1 hour ago, Peter Knight said:

I recently spoke with three PW users

 

Missed the third developer's input.
They said they spend 90% of their day working in Processwire, work solo with no real PW interaction apart from the forums. They often wish they could jump into the forums and share PW stuff without feeling like it needs to be support related or forced into off-topic. 
 

[BrendonKoz]

This may be my own interpretation of it, but both Pub and Dev are splits of a General Discussion, whereas Dev Talk is generic/general but leaning more towards business and professional areas of discussion, and Pub is the otherwise-named category where non-tech (more-often) conversations would go because, realistically, it needs to be named something else (other than General Discussion) to not be a catch-all for Dev Talk as well.

I can see the reason for naming them differently and for separating them out, but I'd imagine they could both be enveloped into a single General Discussion instead. Inevitably people would post technically or professionally-minded conversations in both Dev Talk and Pub, and vice-versa. I'm not entirely sure there's a massive benefit to provide a distinction of categorization here, especially if there are people who explicitly don't converse in the community forums because of the categorization.

To clarify: I'm not being critical of the naming, just analytical. As we all know: Naming things is hard!

[Peter Knight]

Yes, maybe it’s just semantics and labels but it does seem like if a topic is neither support or off topic, its not welcomed or at least has no natural home.

I agree Pub and Dev are close. But as Dev itself describes itself as 

general development and coding discussions 

and live under a category of Off Topic, it adds to the perceived issue.

But I agree that a general bucket called PW topics or whatever will add to moderation issues.

Is there a middle ground that doesn’t resort to calling itself General? In my original post, that was just an example label.