Country Specific Forum Ideas

[Eric_Inovelli]

We just added the ability to add your country flag next to your name which I think is a good start: National Flags for Profiles

@Melerann

This is the crux of the problem, how to add more topics, without getting cluttered. My first thoughts were a chat either on site, or on discord, but that defeats the point of a searchable forum. I then thought of something like extra reddit boards, but I imagine they will just get forgotten.

Another possibility would be to add sub-categories within each category.

For example, if you go to, “Suggestions & Wishlist”, you can select an additional sub-category to better organize things:

Maybe we could add country specific sub-categories (as well as a catch-all that is the default) and then make sure if you have a country specific post, it goes in that countries sub-category as well as tagged.

An example would be if a post is not country agnostic, it would go into the main category, but if it’s something Canadian specific, we’d file it under the Canadian sub-category.

@Melerann

The only thing I can think of was asking what your plan if there was another hub that became popular? You would need another button anyways, so maybe it might work to have just a “Hubs” button which then prompts you to select your hub, then you can add things like a “regional” button.

Yeah, likely we’d add another button or throw it in the, “Other Hubs” if it still is #4 behind ST, Hubitat and Home Assistant. If it gets too crazy, then we could just have a category named, “Hubs” and then all the sub-categories would be the specific Hubs.

@Melerann

(At the same time I think it would also be good to add a corperate department category, so we can chat and bring ideas to specific people, rather than expecting all team members to be aware of all posts at all time incase they are needed, like a marketing, engineering or website thread)

What do you mean by this? I think I understand and am aligned, I’m just curious!

@Melerann

I think that will be perfect in the meantime, with the ability to filter search results by country and potentially language!

I’ve always wondered about this – I’ve been to Xiaomi’s forum and it’s crazy bc it’s a Chinese company, but the forum is primarily English and I’ve seen it where people will start speaking another language and people will say, “English please”. I’m not suggesting this is right, I just found it interesting.

But, I am curious how to handle multiple language sections. How would we moderate it (I’m a classic American who knows only English lol)? I suppose once that happens, we’d hire someone who spoke that language as we’d need that for customer service anyway.