The discussion highlights a potential issue with sidebar customization in Discourse. Canapin points out that editing a sidebar section applies the changes globally, but there is no clear indication of this. JimmyHoke and HAWK agree that this can be ambiguous, especially for admins who may not realize the edit button’s global impact.
awesomerobot suggests adding a clear indicator, such as a tooltip or checkbox, to clarify that changes will be applied globally. An example of this is proposed, where a “Make this section public and visible to everyone” checkbox appears with a tooltip explaining the section’s content is always public.
The conversation briefly diverges to discuss navigating to the latest post in a topic, with Disco sharing a method that didn’t work, and JammyDodger providing alternative solutions using /latest and /last in the topic URL.
I encountered this issue on one of my forums. One of the admins edited the sidebar sections, thinking it would only customize his own sidebar. It changed the sidebar for everyone and I needed to fix it later.
When you edit a section, for example Community, there’s no mention anywhere that the modification is global and not applied only to the current user. The user being an admin, he didn’t know the edit button didn’t exist for regular users, who have a New Topic button instead of an Edit Section button.
Here I’m showing the “Make this section public and visible to everyone” checkbox like we do in custom sections, but it can’t be deselected. On hover/tap a tooltip appears to clarify that this section’s content is always public.
