Yeah as a past game design student, I wholeheartedly agree with you there. (I remember you’re designer for Audacity. Btw I use Audacity a lot, very grateful for it!)
I think as well that the whole experience could be rethought from the ground up (starting with thinking: “what would an admin like to do, and how can we best help them do that?” for all use cases) to both have the processes be conveyed much better and also have the processes themselves be as straightforward as possible.
For the example there — of not allowing you to delete a category if there are topics in it — a more graceful way of the software handling that could be like this. When you try to delete a category with topics in it, it could first suggest if you would like to:
- move all the existing topics to another category, or
- put all the existing topics into Uncategorized, or
- delete all topics in the category
and then confirming that you would like to delete the category.
I guess seeing that the Discourse team was going for more incremental changes at this stage:
I was appealing for a lower hanging fruit – adding some links to the most popular/common/major docs where it would be most relevant.
(I might also make a new topic later on for the feedback/suggestions we have talked about here, on improving the experience for deleting categories.)