A discussion is taking place about whether excerpts should be collapsed by default on mobile. sam introduced two site settings to control excerpt behavior for pinned topics and believes that on mobile, excerpts should be suppressed by default. This is due to issues such as misalignment, limited space on the front page, and anonymous users not being able to unpin topics.
sam shared images to illustrate the issue, which include examples of the front page on mobile with and without excerpts. erlend_sh agrees with sam and also suggests reevaluating the concept of pinned topics, referencing Reddit’s use of an informative sidebar.
codinghorror sees no huge problem with the current status quo but agrees that it’s a disadvantage for anonymous users. They also mention that the issue might be related to the categories page, which is a separate concern.
sam clarifies that their issue with the categories page is unrelated to the current discussion. ron_jeremy responds with a humorous image, but doesn’t contribute to the discussion.
I’ve kept a note about this in the back of my head as well. good change!
In the long term, I’d like to challenge the concept of “pinned topics”. I find them to be in my way a bit too often. Reddit opts for an informative sidebar:
The idea is that people read it to the bottom, then by default it is auto-unpinned. I don’t see a huge problem with the status quo at the moment, though I agree it sucks to be anon in this case.
We could hold an anon cookie to clear the pinned topics later but that feels like a complex change?
It also seems you have beef with the categories page – where excerpts are expanded by default on mobile which I agree is weird – but what is shown above is 100% latest page.
good change!
