Add Topics for Users to Post Under (and Grant Privileges Based On Reputation)

[AnthonyMadia]

Adding topics will reduce the application from being general.

The topics will be "Foundational Topics" that the users will post under. Some topics (subject to change) are:

• Science & Technology
• Philosophy
• Politics
• Business
• Literature
• Music
• Fitness
• Photography
• News

Because the application is based on gaining reputation, I am proposing we allow users to create their own sub-topics and "Foundational Topics" when they gain a certain amount of reputation (amount is TBD). This adds utility to the reputation because users can do something with it (gain privileges) other than upvote/downvote/comment/post.

Note that the "grant privileges" part of this issue can be made into its own issue. I am writing it here for ideation purposes.

Adding topics will change the UI, so I included some initial wireframes here.

The topics would be links that link to their own page. For example, clicking on the Philosophy topic would link the user to localhost:3000/philosophy and a user can post on that page.

[ChialiT]

I agree. Currently, users feel lack of topics for discussion. we will include this for v2. Thank you for the proposal, it's very needed.

[AnthonyMadia]

The topics can also be user-generated. This is probably a better approach than hard-coding topics.

[AnthonyMadia]

To make user-generated topics work well, search needs to be implemented effectively to find topics users create. After a topic page is found, a user can 'join' a particular topic page (this would coincide with issue #54 )

Other add-on features would include:

• adding all the topic pages a user joins on a separate page that can be linked to from the landing page
• the landing page would be changed to include only the posts from the relevant topics a user 'joins' or 'follows'

[CJ-Rose]

Could we hardcode Foundational Topics in the horizontal nav bar as is currently, and have user-generated Subtopics appear in a drop-down menu under each category? Each Foundational Topic could have a General subheading to start.

I think letting users start new topics by spending rep would be a great bonus in adding utility and increasing engagement.

[AnthonyMadia]

That would be difficult to manage because it would not scale well. We could end up having so many topics under a Foundational Topic. I definitely agree with having users either spend a certain amount of rep or have a certain amount of rep to create their own topic or both.