Let users configure categories for /Latest

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

The discussion is centered around allowing users to configure categories for the “/Latest” page. DiscoWolf suggests this feature would be useful for users who want to see additional categories in “/Latest” beyond what administrators have selected.

Some possible implementation methods are proposed, such as adding checkboxes to category pages or creating a separate “/Latest” configuration site within user preferences. However, DiscoWolf notes that this feature overlaps with muting topics, so consolidation may be necessary.

Stephen asks for examples of communities that use this feature heavily, and DiscoWolf shares a discussion from the e.foundation community where language-specific categories are suppressed from “/Latest” for non-native speakers.

RosemaryOrchard mentions that users on the Mac Power Users forum might appreciate the ability to exclude certain categories from “/Latest”. Falco shares a broken plugin that used to provide this functionality.

Stephen highlights the challenges of solving this issue with the current options, citing the example of Bethesda’s community site, where users may be confused by non-native language posts. He suggests using groups or forum structure to accommodate language-specific categories.

Falco proposes using separate instances per locale/language, citing the example of big gaming companies. Stephen notes that Bethesda’s language selector is not easily visible and has limitations, such as losing language preferences between pages.

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Administrators can specify with the “Suppress category from latest topics.”-option of a category, if posts of a category should be seen by users in /Latest.
However as a registered user I would like to be able to view additional categories in /Latest in addition the the ones selected by administrators.

There are several ways I can imagine, how a functionality for chosing categories for /Latest could be implemented in the user interface, for example:

  • Add a checkbox (do not display in latest, display category in latest) on the website of each category
  • Add a separate “/Latest”-configuration site within the user-preferences

Such a feature overlaps in its functionality a bit with muting of topics (in Userpreferences/Categories), so it is likely that some kind of consolidation is necessary in order to realize this featurerequest.

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Can you give us an example of a community which uses this feature heavily?

Have you spoken to the site owners to understand their rationale?

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The rationale for suppressing categories from latest topics is that languagespecific categories should not appear in /Latest for the bulk of englishspeaking users.
Here is a link to the currently ongoing discussion of the e.foundation community.

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I know quite a few users of the Mac Power Users forum really like the latest page, we haven’t excluded categories but it would be nice for users who don’t care about the Mac (for example) to be able to exclude the Mac category if they chose to do so. I could imagine this being equally as useful on the Automators forum - I run both.

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This broken plugin used to do that:

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That’s going to be a tricky one to solve with the current options - I can understand the position it puts them in completely.

Users can quickly become confused if they land on a page which is mostly not their language, with no obvious way to filter.

Bethesda has this exact issue over on their community site. The top three posts in that subforum are German, Russian and French.

Groups could become the solution here if category status can be tied directly to a group - currently that’s not in core though.

The forum structure could also accommodate this, if each language is a parent category then you get the equivalent of /latest across subcategories from the parent category page.

@falco Would fixing that up be easier than the above? We already have plugins such as GitHub - discourse/discourse-watch-category-mcneel: Watches a category for all the users in a particular group · GitHub - if that could be generalised to tie subscription statuses to groups then users could use groups to opt into different languages and subject areas.

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I have seen some big gaming companies sites using a different instance per locale/language.

I think it’s the way to go. Of course there are some pros to running everything in one instance, but it’s way better to have individual ones.

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Their solution is a language selector, but it’s tucked up there with the column headings and takes a while to spot. The initial reaction is just confusion:

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When I first saw it I instinctively thought I had arrived at the wrong site or category.

Oh and they pass the selected language between pages using a querystring, which means each time you click a link from their launcher or search results the language preference is lost.

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