Finding Groups by Site Search

Our ratio of groups to members is high, so we’d love to be able to find a group off the main site search, e.g. if I wanted to find the Discourse Team, it does not come up:

Surprised that at least the group description text is not in the index. Nor do Groups support tags, correct?

Or am I missing something?

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If the group is NOT private you can already search for groups:

image

and there is also a group page in the hamburger menu

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Not Private in the sense that it’s visible?

We’re trying to train users to search for everything in one place.

The Visibility should be set to Everyone
image

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I think the request is for this:

We do have room here, having a dedicated section for groups below users there seems reasonable.

Does not solve the dedicated /search page problem though cause we would have to splinter off to /g and /u routes for those searches since we do not unify there.

@awesomerobot what are your thoughts here?

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Right, this part seems like a simple addition

It would be nice if we were consistent on the full /search page, minimally for the UI we could do something like this to duplicate the header search

Longer-term there are probably some advanced controls that could be applied specifically to users (maybe categories/tags too, but probably less useful)… so maybe we toggle search types? which would then swap out the advanced filters available.

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I like, I worry though that this prioritizes users/categories too much on full page

Maybe instead we can do these below the advanced search and make it collapsible, not sure

@joffreyjaffeux can you take this ?

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True, we should definitely limit the height — as mocked it’s about the height of one topic result and I don’t think it should be taller than that. I guess the only real situation where it would need to be taller anyway is if there are a lot of category/tag matches (for many user matches it seems easy enough to link to a filtered user page?).

We don’t have a great way to handle many tags/categories in search (I guess maybe it should only show the most relevant 8 category/tag… but then what would we link to for more...?)

A 3-column layout would be possible too with some layout shifting (stacking might be best for smaller screens though)

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Yeah I super dislike this. I figure the quick search is sufficient for things like that and it would just get in the way for advanced search when I am trying to really dig into stuff.

Honestly I feel users, categories, tags, groups has no place on the advanced search page. Maybe as an explicit opt in?

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I think we should do an opt in here, cause on mobile it is awkward to have to go to 4 different spots for all your searching needs (groups page, users page, categories and search)

As an opt-in this would require one extra combo box flick (default to topics), but if you opt for the pain then we don’t need to go 3 columns, we can just do @awesomerobot’s original mockup and display users/categories/groups on top!

Search: <- combo box
   [Topics]
   [Users]
   [Groups]
   [Categories]
   [Everything] 
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Sorry for the delayed response; had to get the latest version installed to see that Group>Interactions>Visibility feature.

Agree, our users would not be digging around in the advanced search. We’d want to see groups come up off the search glass icon on the main header, which they are not even with the latest beta and group visibility turned on.

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This is now implemented thanks to @joffreyjaffeux :confetti_ball:

@awesomerobot / @joffreyjaffeux I wonder though… should we move categories below groups ?

I think it is more “natural” to have them below groups. There is often logical coupling of groups and categories so having them close together is handy.

I also think even though it is a bit noisy separators between users / groups / categories make sense.

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Awesome! Is there a setting to enable it? I’m pulling from beta, and I think have the latest with this commit:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/dc4001370ca83cb782026afc5a3b4e24ebd85cca
But don’t see any groups coming up in the quick search, just tags and users.

You are going to have to wait a week or so here, this is in tests-passed only.

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Labels for those different sections (users, groups, topics, categories) would be a big help for new users.

Having a look, it seems to search on Group Name, but not Full Name, which is not the logical search string for multi-word Group names. e.g. one cannot type new owner, but must type:

I’ve wondered if Group Name should really be called Group Slug, since that’s what it seems to be relative to the Category Slug: An important field, but not necessarily containing the name a human will use, i.e. search on.

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Agreed, will change it and other minor tweaks reported in this topic. Thanks.

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Ok most of it will be done in:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/7114

Will merge tomorrow morning.

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Seriously. Labels. I have no idea which “cat is cool” I’m supposed to click on, and I’m an admin.

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It’s pretty clear to me as it’s using the same patterns you can find anywhere in the app, but I’m not opposed to it.

@awesomerobot what do you think ?

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