Hello there, Apes.
First I’ll start by thanking everyone who provided feedback when I posted this as an idea a month back.
Today AIP-7 will go live as a Snapshot vote, and your support would mean that this forum gets a big upgrade in clarity, organization, and will better enable collaboration. Here’s the official note…feel free to read it if you want all of the details:
Rationale
I go into a fair bit of this in the official AIP, but will call out a few important details here.
Topic visibility and hierarchy
First, I’ll call out one big problem with the current structure and configuration of this forum:
There are very few categories currently making the overall navigation experience quite challenging. There’s no logical place for ideas to be separated from general discussion, or even for new members looking for critical information to find it quickly and easily.
Worse yet, by defaulting to a reverse chronological ordering for its layout, long-running discussions that might not get constant attention gets quickly buried. Any topic that gets posted that gets no replies will be buried by default. And which topics would that be? Well…how about the AIP in question: AIP-7.
Here is a screenshot from just now:
Because Live AIPs cannot be replied to, this will just get buried and visibility to the topic will go away quickly.
Solving this will take two components. First is to redo the overall forum structure, open up new categories, and re-arrange a few existing ones. Here’s the proposal:
Start Here
└── Announcements
Live AIPs
General
└── Events
AIP Ideas
AIP Drafts
└── Core: Ecosystem Fund Allocation
└── Core: Brand Decision
└── Process
└── Informational
Final AIPs
└── Implemented AIPs
└── Accepted AIPs
└── Rejected AIPs
Help & Resources
└── FAQs
└── Get Help
└── Stay Safe
The second is to use a different layout for Discourse, one that displays the current topics, but also highlights the overall navigation of the forum—its categories and subcategories. See here in AIP-7:
AIP Draft process & transparency
The second big thing this could enable is a far more transparent process in submitting proposals to the forum in going from Idea → Draft → Live AIP. Currently when an AIP is in “Draft” mode, it is submitted directly to the forum moderators (Cartan Group) and discussion happens in private through messages.
By restructuring the format and introducing the AIP Drafts category, the discussion with the moderators could become public, and presented alongside questions from the community. This could help to surface critical feedback and shape the drafts themselves into what would best be fit for a vote.
Ideas voting
One other feature that we could roll out as a part of this change is to add a voting plugin within the AIP Ideas category, which could give some lift to the most interesting ideas. The vote count could also be another tool in gauging the community’s interest in a particular idea, to see it move to draft and vote.
Feedback is welcome!
Please, by all means post your feedback to AIP-7 here. I’d be happy to answer any questions.
Let’s get this passed! 
Such a simple and needed change. I’ll be voting for AIP-7. 