Category hashtag floating cards and subcategory hashtag display improvements 🎈

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

We are making some changes and improvements to how subcategory hashtags display per Can we make inline links to subcategories more concise?, and at the same time are adding the same floating card functionality that you already see for user mentions e.g. if you click on @martin .

This card will show the category title, icon/emoji, description, as well as links to any parent categories. Users with permission can see the “Edit description” button, as well as the “New Topic” button, which is also category context dependent (e.g. Events categories will have a “New Event” button).

Also shown in the card is a list of the 3 latest categories in the topic. Users without permission to see a category will simply follow the hashtag link, and see no card.

Subcategory hashtags will have the > separator removed, and only show the child category. See below for a before & after:

This behaviour is all gated behind the Enable category hashtag cards upcoming change:

It’s enabled here if you want to see for yourself before you try it on your own site. Click any category hashtag in a post to take a look, e.g. News and Events or Community Building

[bartv (Bart)]

Will we be able to permanently disable these cards? As a user, if I click on that link I just want to go to the category page, not some intermediary step.

Also as UX feedback: how would you go from the card to the category topic list? It’s not clear from the screenshots.

[Moin]

I think you can click on the category name in the card—just like you can click on a username on the usercard to open the profile.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

The feature is enabled here, so you can try it out before you tinker on your own forum.

• News and Events

It’s still a work in progress, so we’ll take feedback here into consideration and make tweaks to it before we promote the Upcoming Change to beta/stable (it’s currently still in the experimental phase).

I agree the click target could be more obvious. Perhaps the whole card should be a click target aside from any more specific elements.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Having a few examples in the first post would be nice for people who won’t read replies and just want to see the feature in action

[satonotdead]

Seems great to test it, thanks. How a subcategory like Announcements - Discourse Meta actually looks?

My bad, they need to be called manually (#) like this: News and Events > Announcements

I wonder if displaying the top category only on the card makes more sense now that the information of the categories is on the modal? I mean not inline anymore when using #.

[Moin]

I think that was the idea

@martin

See here Community Building Community Building > Praise Contribute > Bug

(Edit: Hmm hashtag separator is still showing but shouldn’t, will investigate)

[putty]

@martin

See here Community Building Community Building > Praise Contribute > Bug

(Edit: Hmm hashtag separator is still showing but shouldn’t, will investigate)

I’ll definitely implement this when the separator bug is fixed! I have dozens of categories with the same slug, so including the parent category in the hastag is mandatory. I’m hoping with this change I can update the category display names to include the parent name, though. Doing so with the old method was clunky, like 1Secure > 1Secure Ideas—but this new change could flatten it to just 1Secure Ideas.

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

I don’t think we will keep this as an option…we have so many settings What I think I will do at least is if you double click, it will take you to the category. Also you can click the category name in the card popup.

Also you can just do this if you want a direct link to a category https://meta.discourse.org/c/news-and-events/announcements/67 it will turn into Announcements - Discourse Meta .

@bartv

Also as UX feedback: how would you go from the card to the category topic list? It’s not clear from the screenshots.

Good point – I think we could add a “Go to topics” link here:

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

I’m OK letting this simmer a bit in experimental while we tinker with the design though, @martin and @awesomerobot.

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

For sure, it doesn’t need to move forward for a while (we will be busy with meetup shortly anyway )