Forum Basics: Managing Categories & Forums

[Captured Enigma]

Forum basics: Managing Categories & Forums​

This is a basic guide on how to manage categories and forums. It will outline the differences between them and explain why one should be used and not the other.

Introduction

When you are making a forum, you will be asked to make categories and forums, but what's the difference? How do you know when to use a category and not a forum?

Category

A category is a collection of forums that all have a subject in common. I will give an example below, regarding a gaming forum.

Games <------CATEGORY

PC Games <---- FORUM

Xbox Games <---FORUM

PS Games <-----FORUM

The category, 'Games' is a broad overview that has several areas that can be broken down. We do this by creating forums. Otherwise there would be so many threads (threads are topics created by users) all talking about a lot of different things. It makes it easy to find information that you are looking for and it also makes it easier to find the right place to post something. If you don't have an Xbox, why would you want to read threads about Xbox games?

It can go further than this. What if you have a category, 'Games' and forums each talking about different gaming platforms, but you wanted to talk about specific PC games? You can create a forum inside another forum! These are called subforums. It gets confusing, it's like a web developer creating a div inside another div. I will give you an example:

Games <------CATEGORY

PC Games <---- FORUM

Skyrim <---- Subforum
Team Fortress 2 <---- Subforum
Xbox Games <---FORUM

PS Games <-----FORUM

The forum, 'PC games' holds more forums, 'Skyrim' and 'Team Fortress 2'. If you click on 'PC Games' you will see the subforums inside it and you can use them as a normal forum. This saves cluttering up the Category 'Games' with a lot of forums on the index page.

I hope this helps some people. I wanted to make this so that people starting out can have some information to stop them getting confused 🙂

This article was created by MrGravyCakes for ForumPromotion.

 

[Sapett]

Good article. 🙂 Thanks for sharing with us!

 

[Migi]

Moved to a more suitable section. 🙂

Thank you for writing the article, by the way! Hopefully it will be able to help those who are confused.

 

[pandaa]

Great article, thanks for sharing! What do you think the best way is to make sure that your categories/forums are broad and not specific enough? How should you know whether or not you need to add or get rid of more forums?

 

[Deleted member 25872]

Thank you for writing this article and explaining how to do this. I found this very descriptive and helpful.

 

[Reddyash]

Your article was very informative. I had few of my questions answered. Thanks,