consider a parabolic subgroup of a reductive group g. by a theorem of richardson (1974), the adjoint action of p on its nilpotent radical has an open dense orbit. in general, there is an infinite family of orbits, so the description of the p-orbits is a ``wild'' problem.in type a there exists a translation of this problem into a question of representation-type of a category of representations of an algebra due to hille and r\"ohrle (1999). in this talk i will describe their approach and explain how it can be extended to deal with parabolic subgroups of orthognal groups.