The Technical Development > Inform Extensions category

A discussion I’ve meant to raise: are we well-served today by having the Inform Extensions subcategory under the Technical Development category instead of just encouraging those topics being posted to Authoring > Inform 7?

I can see it made a lot of sense in 2014-2015 in the wake of the 6G60->6L02 transition breaking most extensions, when there was a lot of per-extension discussion going on. But today it’s little used. Personally, I don’t see value in splitting the I7 discussion between the two places. (And I think a newcomer coming across it is liable to be confused by the three different pinned topics talking about 6L02 and 6L38.)

It wouldn’t shock me if the 6M62->subsequent version transition again broke most extensions and a separate category would make sense again… but in that case I think it’d be more feature than bug to create a new sub-category then than to have those discussions intermingled with others dating to the 6G60->6L02 shift.

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There was originally a separate category because it was restricted for who could post there, so that only official Public Library extensions would be there. I don’t remember if that’s still the case.

While we can’t make a tertiary level category (putting extensions under Inform 7 under Authoring) we may not need a category at all now that we have tags. So merging it all into the I7 category does have some merits. If people generally like that idea we can do it.

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If it’s restricted, it’s not restricted beyond being a regular, 'cause I’ve started topics there.

I believe it was restricted back when the board was phpBB and there was some mechanism that auto-created topics as extensions were published?

Well, there’s no visible objection to this proposal… but I may be the only one who actually cares about it.

I believe we’ll likely keep the extension sub-category because those are historical forum discussions grandfathered in that we want to keep around - or potentially merge if necessary.

Going forward, we can certainly discuss extensions in these categories or any other topic people wish to. The entire paradigm may change when Inform7 is ultimately updated.

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Cool.

(I had always imagined merging; I wouldn’t want the content lost.)

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