Introducing experimental admin sidebar navigation

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@tobiaseigen

I’ve thought we might like to move Users up into the first section because it is accessed frequently by moderators while the other items are settings that you’d set once at the start or only occasionally.

What other items in the admin section do you access daily?

This probably deserves more rigorous research, but I’d say something roughly like:

Very Frequently^[1]

• Review queue (both pending and recent)
• Pageviews graph on the admin dashboard
• Imaginary feature which lets me toggle admin permissions on and off ^[2]

Often

• Users (which I’ve renamed to “People”, FWIW, because of ambiguity of Discourse site users vs. Fedora Linux users)^[3]
• Tag Group management (currently annoyingly hard to get to)
• Theme Components (This bounces up and down depending on how inspired I am to mess with the site as a distraction from my Real Job Priorities)
• Staff action logs ^[4]

Occasionally (like, monthy?)

• Form templates (I think. new to actually using these.)
• Data explorer (would probably use more if I had a quick link to it, tbh)
• AI (as we try new things)
• Automation (would use more often if it were more flexible. see Pie-in-the-sky idea: arbitrary automation scripts via docker image)
• webhooks (because things keep breaking, sigh)
• search logs (really, need to set up a data explorer repeating query to make a public report…)

Rarely — when something specific comes up

• permalinks
• trust level config^[5]
• user fields
• watched words^[6]
• customize text
• chat integrations
• backups
• API keys
• email templates / style
• custom emoji
• screened emails / IPs
• posting (actually, most of this stuff is probably very rare, once the site is up and going, but can take a lot of fiddling to get right at first)
• files (ditto)
• developer (when some interesting new experiment appears…)
• other (ditto)
• default user preferences

Initially, and then maybe like once every five years

• required settings
• basic setup
• branding
• login/auth config
• details of username / group configuration and rules
• legal / policy URLs
• navigation stuff
• email config
• colors
• embeddings
• security settings
• spam settings
• rate limits
• search settings
• api settings
• user api
• tag settings (the config page, not the tag list)
• dashboard (I didn’t know this existed. I am going to configure some stuff now!)

Basically Never

• Badges config (because we haven an external integration)
• calendar plugin config
• rss polling (because we don’t use this currently)
• screened URLs (because this just seems to be a report? In our case, mostly domains that were erroneously tagged as spam. can this list be edited somehow?)
• error logs (we’re paying you for hosting for a reason, right? )
• onebox (I honestly just expect the defaults to get this right)

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1. probably daily, give or take ↩︎

2. I know, this is another thing that I won’t let go ↩︎

3. actually, this is a lie. I would use this often, but instead I usually search for names with the general site search. possibly I need to do some self-reflection on my workflow ergonomics ↩︎

4. “whose fault was that?” … “oh. it’s me. I’m the problem it’s me” ↩︎

5. for example, now that Reactions can be counted as Likes… ↩︎

6. I wish this were instead better integrated with the Automation plugin! ↩︎