Discourse groups are great, but their home is still quite puritan - and their presentation inconsistent. This is the way the group metadata are shown on /groups:
The group ID is the most prominent element, even though there’s a nice “phenotype” available.
On the group page itself it’s the other way round:
I wonder why the ID is shown at all - instead of just showing the full name and the title that the members get?
What I would also love to see here is an editable banner / descriptive text that briefly explains what groups are and why the users should join them.
Same goes for /tags: Nice minimal layout, but wouldn’t this be good place to briefly explain what you can do with tags, eg. that you can watch, track or mute them individually? And maybe you could add the to change the watch settings for each tag on the spot?
@awesomerobot any mockups of how you would see the groups page look when about group exists? What if about group is super long do we just render it all on the directory?
This is a rough mock-up, but with a card-style layout you can fit the same number of groups in the same amount of space as the table, and get the bonus of space for a description (we’d just need to truncate long descriptions and save the long one for the individual group page).
I think we’d also want to enable descriptions for automatic groups here, because then you could have a really nice public group directory and have a good understanding of what all the groups are without specifically navigating to any individual group.
Looks great! Small suggestion, could be nice to make title case consistent. Feels a bit off to have some groups title case, but translators and moderators lower case. Maybe b/c the defaults have only name but not full name set? Default descriptions sounds like a good idea too!
(And perhaps enforce a full name max length? Truncation aside the super long sentence case name of Forum moderators who migrated to Discourse from other platforms feels kinda out of place anyway.)
I think that lack of consistency is mostly our fault when naming groups here on Meta… though our automatic groups default to lowercase and since we don’t have a full name field for those someone has to edit the text in admin > customize > text content (or apply case with CSS).
I don’t want to force sentence or title case with CSS by default because inevitably someone complains that we’re forcing case with CSS instead of using text as entered.
encountered a strange behaviour here: If member title = Full/nice name then the headline of the groups in the boxes is the ID instead of the full/nice name. Otherwise great!
if I’m not mistaken, the number of groups shown on /g is limited to 30. Any chance to increase this limit? My community will rely heavily on groups, but some won’t be found the way it is now.
Maybe if no image is selected we pull in an auto-generated color + letter like we do for users. Some added visuals can help give groups more distinct identities.
to change the watch settings for each tag on the spot?
, group backgrounds?