Can we make inline links to subcategories more concise?

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Continuing the discussion from Updating how categories are organized on Meta:

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Updating how categories are organized on Meta
Category mentions are seen as repeated links
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This is something that is bugging me a lot in my own community category structure, fwiw.

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It was added last year
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/31188

And while I donā€™t really like it I understand how it help to distinguish subcategories with identical names like Documentation > Self-Hosting and Support > Self-hosting

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Leonardo DiCaprio Points: 'Yes, That's It!'

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are they fond memories at least? :grin:

maybe we could only clarify with the full path if thereā€™s an actual case of matching names across subcategories? is that too expensive of a lookup?

Or maybe itā€™s an opt-in customization instead? My personal use case for these mentions is usually meant in a ā€œclick there to go thereā€ reference, a link to the full place rather than a map of how to get there. If Iā€™m unsure of which category is being referenced, the click to find out doesnā€™t cost me anything.

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Checking in to see if we have anything for this now?

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Wonder if something like this would be too annoying @awesomerobot ?

It has a bit of a delay on expand/collapse so it wonā€™t keep happening if you roll over the link by accident. Also itā€™s a hand pointer for the cursor IRL, screen studio just replaces the cursor.

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maybe better to have a DToolip on focus & hover that shows the full path? text reflow could make the whole page taller temporarily, cause repaints, etc

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I know thereā€™s probably a good reason for this, but I find that in these times, it can be re-analyzed:

Community Building looks good! But Community Building > Praise not so much.

In the age of AI and Social Media, users want simple and direct links to what they are looking for.

The excess information for a subcategory is not technically necessary, and in that case, it will be shown when entering it from the top navigation bar that Discourse keeps in almost all its places.

I understand that it would be productive to simplify this UX detail and that subcategories look simply linked like categories, without extending the space they occupy and without offering more information than the direct link does.

Opinions and comments are always welcome, as workarounds. But I think this could be good to have for everyone.

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Removing this might create issues.

For example: if you have products as categories, and each product uses similar subcategories like ā€œinstallationā€, ā€œsupportā€, etc.

You would not be able to tell one subcategory apart from the other.

Another example:

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I agree we should make this nicer: Can we make inline links to subcategories more concise?

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I would love to have horizontally scrollable tabs.

Maybe for tags as well.

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Note: moderator combined previous 4 replies with this topic as per topicā€™s author as they were duplicate subject

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Makes sense, will try a demo of that.

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I wonder if something like a ā€œuser cardā€ for categories would make sense (we have something similar for groups).

We could include things like:

  • full name
  • full mention
  • description
  • who has access
  • recent activity metrics

A click on a category badge would pop that up, and then a click on the card itself would take you through to the category.

Then, we could use the shorter name unconditionally for the inline mention.

I could see doing the same for tags.

Maybe overkill? But maybe not? Perhaps worth an experiment to see how it feels?

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Oh yeah thatā€™s a cool idea actually! Iā€™ll give that a shot instead. This could be done for other things on the hashtags too like chat channels etc but category feels like the most impactful.

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Iā€™ve made a very rough draft PR here, @awesomerobot can you please maybe work on it with what you think would be some nice UI elements? I basically just set up the very basic skeleton for it to work, and to not show for private categories if the user has no access:

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In the first screenshot, I would expect Fiction > Horror in the post to just read as Horror, and then when I click to see Fiction > Horror in the card that opens.

That way, we get more concise inline mentions, with a place to add as much context as we want on click.

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Yes for sure, didnā€™t do any changes to the hashtags themselves yet, just got the hover card working.