I think the desire to split sidebar appearance from tracking level is more apparent when we look at the UI… having a dropdown with 5+ options that each require their own explanation feels like a lot.
So with the sidebar combined here, these descriptions get longer and the functionality gets less apparent… for example, Watching would become:
You will automatically watch all topics in this category and a link will be added to your sidebar. You will be notified of every new post in every topic, and a count of new replies will be shown.
That feels like a lot to understand. I suspect that there are already many Discourse users that can’t explain the difference between watching and tracking without referring to this menu.
I’d like to work towards simpler more universally understood concepts that require less explanation.
We’re also considering future functionality like the concept of personalized homepages where a user can aggregate topics from specific categories/tags/etc. The “tracked” link in the sidebar is kind of an early version of this.
So maybe in the future “tracked” becomes “subscribed”, and at that point we can follow a pattern that requires less explanation. YouTube, for example:
In their case “Subscribe” means I want to see this on my homepage and in my subscription list, and their notification options are very simple. We’ll still require more detail than that, but if we have a separate “subscribe” button perhaps we can focus on making the existing tracking menu more notification focused, and as a result, easier to understand at a glance.
(just an example, we don’t have set plans for something like this at the moment)
I agree with this generally, I’d like to see the ability to add categories or tags to the sidebar from the category or tag pages directly rather than an isolated preferences menu… but I hope we can come up with a way that isn’t further complicating some already complicated concepts.