Maybe just remove the "Community" header in the sidebar? (A plea!)

Feature
,
45

We’ve done a bit more research on this to see how other sites are using the navigation menu today and what the impact of a change like this would be. There are also handful of moving pieces to this, but here’s a description of what we plan to do now and why:

We want to remove the heading from the primary section in the navigation menu because we think it is not necessary.

  • less important links are already hidden behind “More…”
  • the name “Community” has been a bit contentious
  • we observe others where it seems in conflict with the rest of their site design
  • having a fixed section at the top with no heading follows a pattern established by other apps

In order to remove it we have to make a few other changes:

  • Remove section heading from Primary section unconditionally
    Don’t show it in the modal at all. I haven’t seen cases where it’s “too busy” and there are lots of sites on header dropdown now anyway. I have seen clashes of the term “Community”.
  • Move Edit section... to be last item under More...
    (Don’t allow this to be customized; don’t show this in the edit section UI)
  • Make /new-topic work correctly
    When included, clicking it should open the composer without navigating you away from the current page.

Finally, here’s one change we’ve decided not to do:

  • We won’t bother adding a + New Topic by default right now
    We can revisit this based on feedback, but our assumption is that most sites don’t need this. This has been partially validated by some informal surveying we’ve done previously. Those that want it can add it. Individuals on sites that don’t have it and miss it can add it into their own custom section. In the future we may allow personalization of the Primary section.
8 Likes