Quick heads-up: when you start a new topic you now need to choose a category. If you don't, you'll see "You must choose a category" when you click Create Topic.
Not sure which one to pick?
questions – help requests, problems and "how do I…"
General Discussion – news, articles and chat
code – code and techniques you're sharing
Announcements – free or open-source tool releases
marketplace – paid products and jobs
Adding a tag or two is optional but really helps people find your topic later.
If you pick the wrong category, don't worry, we'll move it for you.
Good question, Rich! The tidy-up wasn't done by anything built into the forum. It was me running an AI assistant against ClarionHub from my own machine and checking the results as it went.
ClarionHub runs on our own copy of Discourse, hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet that costs about £37 a month. For comparison, Discourse's own hosting starts at $100 a month (roughly £75) for their Pro plan and goes up to $500 a month for Business. Those plans come with an AI allowance built in. Because we host it ourselves, we'd have to connect and pay for an AI service separately to get auto-categorising, and that isn't something I want to take on for a free community site.
So for now, picking a category is down to you, and I'll keep doing a quick sweep every so often to tidy up anything that's landed in the wrong place or could do with a tag.
