I’m not really sure I really like this evolved behaviour:
I appreciate it wasn’t 100% intuitive replacing a dropdown with a new set of dropdown options like its somehow a different scope, but now we have to navigate … to a sidebar … 
Also the dropdown gave you TWO columns which was quite nice, versus the sidebar’s one.
Don’t fully hate it but can see the benefits of the older experimental admin menu approach.
My only real complaint is the About, Faq, TOS is buried in community
Imho it should have a top first section just for those that iirc used to be in the footer of the hamburger menu.
Or at least just above or below community in it’s own header dropdown.
Let’s stick to discussing improvements to the admin-sidebar here, as introduced by Martin in the first post above 
. If you want to give feedback or suggest improvements to the main sidebar introduced in 2022 take a look at sidebar topics or start a new one with that tag.
As a reminder, the admin sidebar can be enabled separately from the main sidebar, using the admin_sidebar_enabled_groups.
It is experimental but we think it is already a vast improvement over the old horizontal navigation, and are currently rolling it out more widely. We’ve already made it the default on new sites and are moving our customers on self-serve plans to it as well. Eventually it will be the only navigation for the admin section and we will remove the admin_sidebar_enabled_groups setting. Until then, if you are finding it inadequate for your needs or your moderators don’t like it, you can specify who sees it using the admin setting.
This latest feedback, esp from Michael, is super helpful. Thank you! Keep it coming - actionable feedback is very welcome and we take it all on board. I agree that currently some of these items are confusing and don’t totally make sense where they are in the menu and what they link to. There will be many more changes until we are through.
That said, we are not going to be making significant changes for the moment while we work on other aspects of the admin section that we expect will make the admin section more delightful to use, especially for people who are new to discourse and currently find it complicated. This includes a new admin landing page, landing pages for each section, and a consistent page layout including crumbtrail navigation and third level navigation. We’re also working on new config pages that will let you look at and configure items that belong together.
The “All Site Settings” destination will always be available for advanced users who want to drink the firehose and find settings that way. The sidebar search filter is also handy for power users who know what they are looking for. We are looking forward to making improvements there as well to make it easier to quickly get to where you need to go, beyond the items that are in the sidebar.
I agree with this feedback.
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?
That said, every site is unique and everyone has different needs and preferences, so the answer here is likely a custom siebar section like we have in the main sidebar. That way everyone can have what they want at their fingertips.
I get this too and yes, Hawk has it right that the community section is intended to be the place for community building actions.
If the goal really is to make this about community-building tools, how about “Community Tools” or “Community Building” to help focus on that? I think that might help remove the temptation to put arbitrary hard-to-fit things here.
Site nav configuration shouldn’t be part of that. Users and groups might fit, but I think it’s actually semantically better to put that under accounts.
This probably deserves more rigorous research, but I’d say something roughly like:
)probably daily, give or take ↩︎
I know, this is another thing that I won’t let go ↩︎
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 ↩︎
“whose fault was that?” … “oh. it’s me. I’m the problem it’s me” ↩︎
for example, now that Reactions can be counted as Likes… ↩︎
I wish this were instead better integrated with the Automation plugin! ↩︎
2 posts were split to a new topic: Feedback on admin sidebar when header dropdown navigation selected
