Separate forums for JollaPhone and Tablet

Well that makes no sense at all - talk.maemo.org might be enough for you, but youare not the community. I've never sent anything to the mailing list (which mailing list?) or read anything on talk.maemo.org. There's lots of links here to talk.maemo.org which I find confusing, and I venture to say that so will a lot of new users.

I am assuming you want the community to grow from a what it is now to an all singing and dancing let's have all people and their parents here, as opposed to just developers and nothing but developers. This forum is fairly accessible to non technical people - the kind I want more of. It is also focussed around Jolla, the branding is very important. Youmight understand the history of the OS and that having a talk.maemo.org forum for things related to Jolla makes sense, but the millions of ordinary users will neither understand nor care.

The split(s) at stackexchange into various subfora for all kinds of topics is really good, having a similar split here makes perfect sense to me. I don't find the tags a useful way to organise semantically unrelated content, having this forum is great, but moving forward we should have better wikis for instance. Tagging a post as a [wiki] is hardly good enough, since you then have to wade through all the various answers to find something useful.

More moderators will be needed, but how is that an argument against something. Jolla needs more people on the software development team (presumably) but that doesn't stop them from adding features or things to their roadmap. In the end the support (for all people - not just you) around a product is what adds pull to certain products and makes their adoption easier and less painful. Making this forum, and Jolla's user guides, wikis etc. better is what we should be doing. talk.maemo.org and the mailing list is absolutely not enough. It suits the developers, but we are not all developers.

So lets say I make a nice new application - even now I need to post about it to talk.maemo.org, here and maybe to the list. Then reply on the all these places to any questions, probably answering similar questions multiple times due to the different communication channels. And the same thing all over again for any updates or interesting changes in the application. Add more channels and you add even more burden to developers wanting to make their users informed due to the fragmentation.

Actually I just don't get why a tablet would need a separate "forum" at all - it is more or less just a bigger Jolla without a modem anyway.

I think you are missing the point when you think about the tablet from what hardware it has. It's a bigger phone to youbut for the mum using the tablet it's a completely different thing. The phone is for making phone calls and maybe checking emails, where as the tablet is for reading newspapers and looking up recipies. Do you really want questions about "where can I find a recipe for fish soup?" or "how do I turn off the alarm?" at talk.maemo.org or the mailing list?

If the communications channels for disseminating information about new app releases are badly formed currently then surely what we want to do is make them better, not stick to the bad solution that exists now? The point about organising this place well is not to create more fragmentation but less. Make this forum well organised and the go to place for all things Jolla.

Interesting aspect, but I honestly think this separation is artificial. Maybe some other mum is using the phone instead to look up fish soup recipies and as an alarm clock? Maybe we should consider something else... :-)

From a simple user point of view I make the selection based on what I have (e.g. table or phone) which "support" area is the most appropriate. In addition I get bored if I'm greeted by items not relevant for a search (like with talk.maemo.org where I give up in most cases due to time constraints and noise).

So from a user point of view the split is sensible because it makes at least browsing/searching simpler (provides an additional name space). From a contributors point of view it requires features which enable parallel/posting/merging across forums to minimized the overhead. In this context I agree that splitting into sub forums is probably counter productive if the support tools for the contributors is not good enough.

For example if someone asks the above fish soup question it should be possible to make it appear as the same (so any votes/answers/stats are counted once only) post on phone and tablet (it is probably relevant to both). (an real world example is that the screen sharing/miracast posts are not just relevant to the tablet even if tagged as such currently). On the contrary example if an other half keyboard is discussed I don't want to see it when I search in the context of the tablet.

Then I see the need more for independent hardware and software related separation. Talking about a not yet existent product clogs even its software related questions.

I don't think that's a long term solution. The community will keep growing (of course it will), and at some point I would imaginge we will want to have separate forums for sailfish os, jolla phone (as in phone usage as opposed to hacking the os), and tablet and so on and so on. Call it future proofing.

..that would work only if all the tablet related questions are tagged that way. for now it is. but when the new product takes the central stage, the tagging practice might not be strictly followed

how to add ignored tags?

Ignored tags can be added to the right hand side of the main page. Ignored tags

I'd imagine that it will be possible to link/share between the one post is relevant to other sub forums as well. Similarly to move posts if required. If not I can see cases where either the same post needs to be posted in multiple sub forums adding work load or parts of the community missing interesting posts reducing the number of contributors.