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 )

[bartv (Bart)]

I’m sorry but I’m skeptical about this feature. For users, being able to glance at their data in a card makes sense. But for categories or tags I fail to see the added value. If anything, this makes things worse by adding a meaningless extra step.

@martin

Also you can just do this if you want a direct link to a category Announcements - Discourse Meta it will turn into Announcements - Discourse Meta .

That’s not a realistic workaround, as it would require a user to first find that category link somewhere else. This is also making the UX worse.

Sorry, not a fan

[Jagster (Jakke Flemming)]

@bartv

first find that category link somewhere else

Quite many of my users are using PWA. Then getting any links is a bit harder task. Otherhand, they aren’t linking categories and I bet that is true in majority of non-technical forums, where userbase is from social media, not from gaming, tech, IT etc.

I’m not a fan either. It seems like nowadays system is moving toward all-cards desing instead of getting what is looking for. Perhaps I’m so old school that I’m expecting a link beeing a easy way to get the target.

But if I as an admin can choose not to use it, then it doesn’t matter (and in my circles users, those few who has an opinion, don’t like it and if theirs taste changes, and I will move to cards right away. After all my forum is for discussion by users, not for me).

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

First, thanks so much for this! I started shuffling categories on my Discourse install again and realised the parent category > child category display of hashtags in text was really niggling at me again (we have lots of categories and we mention our categories and subcategories a lot to guide our users around). So I checked back to see if things had moved forward since our first discussions about this, and it has! So happy.

I personally wouldn’t have needed the cards (just the more concise subcategory link) but on second thought I quite liked the idea. At least for my population of users, being able to see a preview of a category or hashtag really makes sense. I did, however, imagine it as a hover", and when I realised it was on clic my reaction was “oh wait, what, another step? double-clicking on hyperlinks?!”

@bartv

For users, being able to glance at their data in a card makes sense. But for categories or tags I fail to see the added value. If anything, this makes things worse by adding a meaningless extra step.

This was exactly my reaction: we’re just adding an extra click to open a link… meh.

But then I tried it on my phone and changed my mind: the card gives me a really good overview of what the category is (if I had any doubts… remembering that people using a taxonomy generally find it less intuitive than those who came up with it) and gives me a hint of what the latest posts are, which actually gives me a chance to not head over to that tag or category if it wasn’t what I wanted.

My users are not that comfortable in digital spaces and get lost. This is definitely, as I see it, going to help them not lose track of where they are, not end up somewhere they didn’t really want to be because they clicked on a few words that looked promising to them but weren’t actually the right call.

So, right now, quite enthusiastic and have enabled the preview for my community. We’ll see how it works in practice.

@martin

I don’t think we will keep this as an option…we have so many settings

But… I can imagine other community scenarios where this would not work. I agree that we don’t want to make everything a setting (we’re already drowning in them, I complained about that enough). But… I feel this does “break” the expected pattern of how things work online: click on a link, get taken to the destination. Type a hashtag, that means people can click on it to see everything related to that hashtag. So I’m not really sure what the way around this is.

Perhaps the solution is on another level, in how Discourse as a tool deals with two apparently conflicting intentions:

1. be very flexible and customizable
2. offer a great experience “out of the box”

The team might already be on this (or this might be an idea that doesn’t work, or maybe I’m stating the obvious, or late to the game, or beside the point or displaying my ignorance of how things work) but it seems to me that the “solution” to reconcile the two is:

• be ruthless in making decisions about UX/functionalities for the “basic, out-of the box, plug-and-play” experience
• be ruthless in paring down options and settings to cover 95% of use cases (or is it 80%? 99%? whatever %)
• offer a second layer of settings for power-users or edge-cases and people who want to tweak very specific stuff; this wouldn’t be integrated in the interface that provides the “normal” settings, but probably more config-file-like

So in this case, if the team’s conclusion is that hashtag/category preview cards are the way to go, and that subcategories should display inline without mentioning the parent category, and that there isn’t sufficient justification to make this a general admin setting, it could still be a “hidden setting” accessible by adding “hashtag_preview_cards: OFF” or “show_hashtag_subcategory_parent_inline: ON” somewhere.

Writing this, I’m pretty sure there are dev implications in addition to UX regarding the multiplication of settings…