I hope someone at Hubitat actually finds this post, its long been past due that something is done about some new sub-forums. Specifically the Joe Page Hubitat Dashboard is over 3k posts now and has become impossible to parse for the information needed. Plenty of other long term projects such as Echo Speaks, HPM, etc need to have their own sub-forum. You have left the community to pick up the slack on some of the development, but it is long past time that they need more than a single post full of uncounted replies to successfully keep the ecosystem going.
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I have not seen any sub-categories for popular community-developed apps or drivers.
I would be surprised if they did that.
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Same. Amongst other things, creating a new category can make it more difficult for developers of community integrations to keep track of queries from users of their apps/drivers.
Plus the forum search engine is quite robust, and even has the ability to search within a single thread.
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How the heck are you supposed to parse some of these massive threads? The beauty of Hubitat is community involvement, but let's be brutally honest. How the hell are you supposed to go through a single thread of that size. It's impossible!
User/Devs are spending their own time, sweat, and tears bringing this ecosystem forward, far beyond what can be officially supported. Users deserve the be able to find this information. It feels like the 1990s around here tbh. We need some separation of some of the bigger projects.
If you think I'm wrong please tell me why. We all know some projects are so big and important that the ecosystem would severely be harmed without them. Time to give them the space they need on the forums. We all want Hubitat to be the next big thing. How is that possible without catagorical forums.
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I can see this both ways: some users may find it easier to search smaller threads, but Hubitat creating "official" categories for third-party apps and drivers may wreak possibly unintended consequences, like whether they are playing "favorites" (who decides what apps/drivers/developers get what?), to say nothing of the fact that it's more maintenance for them on the forums for things they don't officially support.
Whether this ever happens or not, two things may be helpful:
- the search feature @aaiyar mentioned can be scoped to specific threads and is thus just as good for finding certain posts, regardless of where they are made
- it's not often-used, but there is the ability to add "tags" to post (regardless of what category they're in), and I don't believe that requires any official maintenance. Perhaps that use could be encouraged?
FWIW, I am the OP of an 800+-post thread for an app/driver and don't have much trouble with it, though occasonially people post about it elsewhere. I don't mind--I normally see it or someone tags me anyway. Some developers do prefer to keep everything in one thread. I don't really have a preference.
To play devil's advocate for a second, I disagree with this point. 
Forum users can "subscribe" to categories (watch, track, etc.) in a similar fashion to the way they can for individual posts. (That being said, I've noticed some oddities with this myself where I only seem to get replies and not the first post for such categories marked as unread when "watching," at least some of the time...Discourse bug or feature, I'm not sure yet! But it seems odd to me and I'm pretty sure it used to work.)
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Personally, for issues with any contributions I post I would rather people post an issue report on GitHub but hardly anyone actually does that. For questions / help, it is easier if people just make a totally new post, and tag me in it. For feedback they can reply to the original thread.
Now in reality everyone just replies on the same thread and when you have 5 convos going on it can be a bit much.
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I can see your point, it's one thing to have been around while a long thread has evolved and slowly consumed the conversations over that time, but to come in fresh it can be a bit daunting and time consuming to find what you need. I can also see how some threads become large enough that they could warrant a way to more easily organise the different conversations that occur, some being bug reports, some enhancement requests, some asking general questions about setup steps, etc.
All that said, given the number of threads where this could be an issue is likely to be quite low, and with some of the points already raised by @bertabcd1234 and @aaiyar in particular, if their suggestions do not give you what you are looking for, I would suggest talking directly with the developers or "owners" of the threads that you would want to see better organised. Many are open to feedback and suggestions and, within reason, may look at changes to their thread.
In terms of what you could request.... You could look at producing or expanding documentation for the app / driver, for example in the first post of the thread or documentation within a GitHub repository. Introducing a list of FAQ's that is maintained as people ask questions may also provide a central spot for finding what you need, again either on the Community thread or elsewhere.
Just a few ideas....
Simon
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I think what I'd do if I was lucky enough to be able to create an app that so many people loved is set up my own website or forum for it - maybe a reddit or facebook group or something (various options anyway). Then put link in original top post.
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You are bringing up a valid point. I can see that it might be difficult to browse a topic of 3000 posts. Usually, if a new major update to a community project is released, the topic for the old version is closed, and a new topic is created. We really don't mind creating subcategories for popular projects, but it is up to the developer to let us know how they would like to manage the feedback they receive from users.
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An example of a board that has user sub-forums is Homeseer. They have sub-forums for Devs that either have one popular app or for several apps.
For one major app, it didn't make much of a difference but for devs that have several (like Blade) it was great to be able to go to his sub-forum and see all of his posts/apps in one spot.
Another nice thing is that the dev have admin controls over his/her sub-forum.
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Just wonder if it might be a bit divisive if some devs get their own forum space and others don't. And how soon after the dev's last login would you decide there is no one looking after the section any longer? The criteria would have to be very consistent to avoid bad feelings. Discord might work too, - for an individual dev to decide to start a server, as it has threads now. Not sure having Hubitat staff being the arbiter of who is in and who is out would be a wise move. Mind you, I am not having trouble using the thread as it is. I have often used the "Search within thread" to see if something has already been discussed, and it does seem to work.
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I see this as a very valid concern.
Hubitat has, in general, taken a pretty hands off approach to anything that might give the appearance of them officially or even unofficially supporting community-developed apps and drivers.
One exception being the developer plus program (if I’m calling it by the right name) but that clearly involves a different relationship between the dev and Hubitat.
The OP is implying that Hubitat Inc. is somehow grossly deficient in their management of this forum by not making the community developer apps and drivers threads more organized for users, and there’s no good reason why they haven’t done so.
I agree with @bertabcd1234 that it’s not that simple.
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Unfortunately, Discourse doesn't work the same way as Homeseer community platform works when it comes to moderators and admins.
As others mentioned, I think leveraging tags might be the better solution without making things more complicated than they are already.
UPDATE: I just created a new tag category called "Developers". Anyone can create their own tag like @bptworld has done in the past.
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Are the tags a "per thread" thing? They are not something you could set per post?
Yup. The first post in a thread sets the tag. Off course, users of a particular community app or driver have the option of directly tagging that integration's author in a response to bring an issue to the author's attention.
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I guess I didn't make my point effectively. For example, I would wager it is more work to follow N posts within a sub-forum for CoCoHue than it would be to follow N responses in a single thread. In addition, I think the likelihood of CoCoHue users chipping in to help out also decreases.
Everyone loves hashtags. Nothing prevents anyone to use any keywords and then search for the specific keyword for quick access. Here is an example I just did now, for testing purposes, using the keyword #multisonant:
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