A sense of place: Meta's new sidebar

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In this announcement, manuel introduces a new sidebar for topic lists on the Meta Branded theme. This feature is the latest step in improving how Meta serves diverse conversation types by providing a stronger sense of place. The sidebar includes five panels that display context about the current space (purpose, activity, leaders) and the wider community, helping users understand where they are and where to go next.

The discussion highlights mixed but generally positive initial reactions. NateDhaliwal and Bas note that while the sidebar is excellent for new users, regulars may find some content redundant or wish for user preferences to hide it. Andrew_Bond praises it as a monumental improvement that provides a better Single Point of Generalization (SPOG).

manuel responds to the feedback, acknowledging that dynamic hiding of the sidebar is not currently possible due to lack of UI patterns. He emphasizes that the goal is to move toward more unique, space-specific content (like custom leaderboards and resources) rather than generic global links. chapoi agrees with the utility of the dynamic navigation but finds the term “spaces” slightly confusing compared to “categories.” Finally, Andrew_Bond shares a custom panel he built using the public demo component found at discourse-discovery-sidebar, demonstrating the extensibility of the new feature.

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What we launch today

Starting today, topic lists on the Meta Branded theme have a sidebar. It shows where you are, what is happening there and where to go next. It is the latest step in a question we have worked on all year: how do we better serve the many different kinds of conversation we host on Meta?

Initially, we grouped Meta’s categories into spaces, each bringing related conversations together. Then we redesigned the homepage to welcome members to the community as a whole. The sidebar now carries that welcome into each space, giving it a better sense of place while keeping the wider community in view.

Why place matters

A technical question, a feature proposal and a story about growing a community are different conversations. Each needs its own tone, expectations and type of engagement to flourish. Offline, a place tells us a lot: we ask questions differently in a classroom, debate differently in a town hall, or share stories differently in a bar. Online, those cues are easily lost, and then people might end up talking past each other. Online spaces have to give some cues by design.

Each space

So we aim to provide more context about each space at a glance: what it is for, what is currently happening, who shapes it and what to read first. Someone landing in Product Support should see right away that this is where questions get answered, who tends to answer them, and which guides to check before posting. Someone coming to Community Building should understand that the space is about stories and the people behind them. That gives each space a sense of place, and helps members arrive knowing how to take part.

The wider community

Every space also sits inside the wider community. Members should know what other spaces exist, what is happening across them, and how to get there. A support regular may care little about community building; a community manager may never look for development discussions. But a community is stronger when members at least know what others are talking about. That is how a support regular can become a contributor, or a community manager can find an idea in a development thread.

How the sidebar puts this into practice

The sidebar adds five panels next to all topic lists. The Panels show the wider community by default, and either adapt automatically or can be tailored to a space:

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What’s next

We have already tailored some of the panels, above all in our main spaces: Community Building, Product Support and Contribute. We will continue to add content specific to each space where it makes sense, such as dedicated leaderboards, unique resources, and custom featured lists. We will also explore new types of panels as we go.

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Discourse community hangout (fortnightly)
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I sort of like it and don’t like it. On one hand, it provides great info to new users, and easy links to other parts of the forum. On the other, as a regular here, I don’t really need links of the different categories (when the left sidebar already provides that), nor upcoming events or the leaderboard. I don’t suppose this is possible to be a user preference?

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Yes! This is monumental!

For me this changes discourse for the better. It gives people an easier SPOG that has a view into many other areas such as events and things outside there normal focus topics.

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Same for me! But over the years I’ve learned to lean into it in those moments. Evaluate after a week of use and evaluate then :slight_smile:

I think it’s a 100% amazing addition for new users, let’s see how the regulars feel after getting used to it a bit more.

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I’m also still exploring it myself :slight_smile: We have used it for some time on a sandbox, but it’s always different on the real live site. My feelings so far:

  • I love the dynamic navigation. I think it surfaces the actual community map much better than the sidebar links or the category page. As a user I feel it gives me a better understanding where I am and where I can go. As an admin on Meta, I think it helps us further clarify the architecture.

  • Also love the Resources panel. We’ve added custom resources on three spaces so far, but here as well, it’s a great tool to surface the resources we currently have. Which then helps us discover inconsistencies and outdated content and improve on them.

  • I think custom leaderboards are a great use case as well. We had the ability to scope leaderboards to categories for a while, but we also need to show these leaderboards in the right context. Otherwise we just link to a list of leaderboards from the left sidebar. As with the other panels so far, this also put a spotlight on the feature and surfaced that category scoping of leaderboards doesn’t work reliably right now.

  • I feel showing global content on the category panels doesn’t add much value though. So the events panel feels a bit redundant. On the Featured Topics panel we do show a category scoped filter of hot topics by default, but it also feels a bit too generic to me. I think this panel becomes much more interesting with very unique filters and panel titles that explain them. Like showing topics that are waiting for a solution after x hours. Showing PRs from the community. Or the most liked ideas.

So overall I think the further direction is to show more unique content and also more unique panels on each space.

Dynamically hiding the sidebar is unfortunately not something we can quickly add as a feature. The reason is that we don’t have a good pattern for this. We hide the left sidebar with a menu icon on the header, we can’t apply that elsewhere. I think we need to explore a more generic solution for showing and hiding a contextual sidebar to make this work well.

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As always, anything new makes us all go

شكرا

However I totally agree with this:

I think it’s far more useful than the real sidebar (which I personally rarely use anyway).

Only the nomenclature of “spaces” I find adds some friction, as it’s mildly confusing since it’s the same list as categories ofc. I know what’s behind it but not sure renaming it in that section specifically is helping much.

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11

That was ridiculously easy to add and powerful.

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Thank you for developing this.

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That’s cool! How did you build it, just have an agent have a go at it?

We do have a public demo component available: GitHub - discourse/discourse-discovery-sidebar: Demo component for discovery-sidebar blocks · GitHub

Right now that’s just what we use here on Meta as well, as we wanted to focus on a generic foundation in this initial step. Though as said, I think there’s many useful and fun features we can surface with more custom panels.

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I used the Right Sidebar Blocks then customised it to how I wanted it.

I too think we can extend the functionality with custom work but for now , its great!

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