Ask HN Do we need a forum? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN Do we need a forum?

7 pointsgeetarista9 comments

I'm seeing more and more Ask HN, Tell HN, etc. posted here lately. I'm wondering if we need to have a forum.ycombinator.com or something similar to distinguish news from talk.

We have "ask" and "jobs" navigation at the top, but the main stream still includes everything.

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Well, we have the "ask" tab at the top. I don't see a need for a separate domain or anything like that.

We do have the "ask" tab, but everything is included in the main stream of news. I would just prefer to keep things separated and organized a little better.

I'm not sure what the solution would be exactly; the subdomain/forum idea is just a suggestion. If it was a separate forum, it could house all talk-related items and categorize them as "Questions", "Job Postings", etc.

I just wanted to see if anyone else had the same preference and if there are any better suggestions.

I setup SaaSaholics.com a month or so ago, got it seeded with a bunch of content, but never got around to getting it posted here to get some users. Everything is ready to go, I really strongly believe a SaaS forum could be a useful thing for us to all collaborate at.

I'll host the site for free with no ads for the indefinite future in the interest of getting it going. I think a submission here would potentially get it rolling, but it ultimately is in that awkward "who talks first" mode...

"Ask HN" needs topic categories and an ability to filter by a category, i.e.

  http://news.ycombinator.com/ask/programming
  http://news.ycombinator.com/ask/launched
  http://news.ycombinator.com/ask/meta
  ...

Throw in an index page for categories that shows new/total counters for each one, and I know I will use it a lot.

Who would be in charge of categorizing posts?

Submitters. One category per post.

And so continues HN's recapitulation of Reddit

I am pretty new to this community. I feel the functions of the YCnews are very limited. I know keeping simple is always good, which is a principle of many hackers. However, a little bit improved functions could make YCnews much better!

Underwhelmed with the functionality, newbies have been saying that for years :)

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