I think this was discussed already, and it’s up to @Salt and @msiep to decide mainly, but I still think it makes sense to allow posting a topic in “Clearing the path” or other such top-level categories, and moderators can reassign to a sub-topic if appropriate.
At the very least, there’s a risk of this happening when we don’t want it given that moderators are allowed to do this (and then non-mods can’t reply). My view is at least we should open this to everyone or figure out how to remove the “new topic” button even for mods if we don’t want to allow topics that have no sub-category marked.
Depending on how we set things up, sub-topics could be tags instead, and then all posts are in the top-level category and we don’t need to worry about people posting in the wrong place at all.
Possible downside: I’m not sure if this plays nicely with pseudo-mailing-list functionality.
Yeah, we definitely want people to be able to subscribe to only a sub-topic.
Also, if we used tags (which I like generally), it’s potentially less likely for people to remember to tag their posts while posting (not certain).
I’m fairly certain that is possible. I’m not certain you could retain the ability to create a new thread from email that way.
@Salt primarily (but others can weigh in):
Now that we’ve rearranged the topics, and definitely allow top-level posting in Announcements (but team only allowed to post), Welcome, and Unsure, I think it’s fair to revisit whether we should or shouldn’t have top-level posting in Clearing The Path and Meta categories. I’m not sure we should now.
Overall, the new category structure is an improvement and I feel less sure about this question.
I do want to be sure that if we have any top-level category we want nobody posting in, we want to remove the new-topic button for even higher-permission users.