Thanks for taking the time to go into more detail here and providing mockups
The problem with this is that topic statuses are somewhat infrequent relative to the total number of topics on a page. A new column takes space away from all topics. We could alternatively only show the icons after the title when available and not make it a dedicated column, but I’m not sure that putting the icons after the title instead of before is an improvement over what we have now.
I think dropping the iconography would almost always make these statuses harder to read. I still strongly believe that statuses need to be significantly different in appearance and placement when used with tags. Here’s a rough example with only 3 tags. We’d be simultaneously making it harder to read statuses and tags by combining them. A user would have no way of prioritizing one over the other when scanning the topic list.
To me pins and locks make sense at the beginning of topic and shouldn’t go anywhere. Solved/bookmarked could potentially be handled in better ways.
I think an alternative way forward might be to look at ways to handle individual statuses that improves upon them individually, rather than just assuming they should all be treated the same. For example, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to say that the solved checkmark on its own could be somewhat ambiguous. Maybe it should stand out more on its own as a badge…
Another example: maybe the bookmark icon just isn’t clear as literal bookmark (it’s kind of ugly too). Many browsers and email clients use stars now for bookmarking… maybe we should too (we used to have a “favorite” system that used stars in addition to a bookmarking system, but we’re divorced from that by a few years now)… would it be clearer as a bookmark in another location?
The friendliest UI in the world is worthless if it doesn’t work. You can’t pit the two against each other. It’s pointless and divisive. We have to find more ways to bridge the gap.
Please, discuss it as much as you’d like. Open-source software could certainly use more people talking about design. Things do tend to skew a bit towards engineering.