Favorites - select your favorite categories

Discourse can now operate in a mode where all categories are default muted and users can opt in for categories they are interested in

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Using the new feature (“all categories muted”) to what is being asked for here is like using hammer in place of a scalpel. Imagine if bookmarking didn’t exist, no one would want to implement that using this new feature.

Favoriting categories (and tags too) also has nothing to do notification level, mixing those two things together is very confusing; specially now that notifications levels have a “bell” icon.

Creating favorites is basically about users creating a feed of topics they are likely interested in for the same purpose as the Bookmark feature. In fact I think it should work identically to bookmarks from how its enabled/disabled, optional placement in tab bar, etc. The only additional item would be a “Star” button by the category notification level button.

Why favorite categories and tags? Some communities are large enough, that scrolling the topic feed is simply tedious. That doesn’t mean I want those categories or topics hidden if I do want to see all latest across the community, or if someone mentions a user that is not favorited that category or tag.

3 Likes

Hello,

What’s the latest status of this discussion? I’m on v2.7.0.beta5 and I’m seeing the “Favorite categories” field in the User Preferences>Interface page, so I assume someone’s added it as a core feature? However I can’t select any of the options, and/so I don’t see the expected Favorites tab on top, or in the drop down. (EDIT: turns out it wasn’t part of core, it was because of the plugin)

Also, the plugin doesn’t seem to be working. So is this a broken plugin, and a broken feature? has everyone settled on just muting the categories they don’t want to see?

Thanks.

Guess so, it’s still in #plugin:broken-plugin

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My users have been asking for functionality like this. There is one very active category on our forum, to the point where maybe 1/2 of the topics in the Latest tab are from that category and you start to miss other topics.

Muting the category doesn’t really fit our use case. I would remember to unmute the category but a lot of my users wouldn’t, to the detriment of the forum. What we would like is the option to browse all topics including the high-traffic category (on days when we have a lot of concentration and time) or all topics minus that category (on days when we’re a little short of either). Anyway, +1 for including this feature in core.

Our long term solution here is to carry the sidebar concept and bring it to core:

Then you just click tracked when you are interested in the list of topics you have tracked due to categories being tracked, etc.

Is that the same as the current Unread page, or is it something different?

You can experiment on meta … pick the “Focused Sidebar” theme from the header… then track a few categories and tags.

Oh, that’s really cool. Yeah, that does everything we were looking for. Can’t wait!

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