And fast follow-up — how do I not show category icons in posts?
Icons are just an decorative component, nothing more. But in texts as bug it only adds more noise — as does colors too, but they aren’t that dominant.
Well, we can say that it hasn’t been any issue with tags like unsupported-install but then that icon acts as an informative data — it tells that link is a tag, nothing else. And that’s why I wasn`t super happy when you started use icons as official that isn’t telling if it’s a category, tag or what. You arent using simplier version of avatars either when mention a person, as @Jagster — because you want to tell that is a person, not category or tag.
But you do what you do here, it is not my business. But ordinary johns and janes must learn that difference before they know what is what and for that there is one demand: they must remember names of categories at minimum.
We use minimal decorations when inlining oneboxes to avoid noise. Same type problem with these.
In a perfect world categories should use an uniform icon no matter what icon we use in menus. Same thing with tags.
Hmm, initially I added a default-enabled setting for showing the category/tag icon in the body text. Later we decided it would be more consistent to have consistent icons everywhere, and removed this setting.
Tricky, eh? @Jagster is right that having both category and tag icons appearing in posts at the same time will be a bit confusing.
It will be fine if a forum only uses one or the other.
I agree that it would sure be nice if there was a visual way of differentiating tags from categories if icons are used. Personally I’d be happy with also having the tag symbol present for tags and also a category bullet if a category. Or at least have the option to do so.
A tooltip would help (for desktop), but we really need something for both mobile + desktop.