I’ve made lots of comments about how I think it could be improved but I think you’re right. I am pretty sure that the old hamburger menu got used very, very seldom, and that the sidebar will get used more. The notification pane isn’t so different that anybody can really complain.
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They will, trust me 
Except if your users are using mobiles because then they don’t need sidebar at all.
I get complaints all the time because it is messy and difficult. And I’m not the only admin struggling with that.
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I wonder whether they are “really complaining” within the meaning of my sentence. Only joking. Your experience in practice is more useful than my assertion (I’ve not enabled these features yet).
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I agree that this is awkward. Personally, I’d be in favor of having no heading at all for the first section. It would just sit directly under the site heading. Removing it creates a problem however because it then can’t be minimized. But it is forever short so does it need to be minimizable? 
I’d be in favor of removing this + link from the sidebar, and making it more persistently available somewhere else in the UI. An obvious place would be in the top right corner where it already exists when looking at a topic list or the categories page. When reading a topic, you can start a new topic by selecting the timestamp of a post, but that is not immediately obvious. It also quotes that post in the new topic, which you don’t necessarily always want to do.
I’ve also been advocating for a popup to show when you select My Posts or n drafts from the sidebar. This would give you more direct access to your drafts without having to leave the page you are on. This popup could also have a + New Topic button.
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Couple of things I noticed that were confusing to me
Tracked. I expected this to be all things I am tracking not just unread. ( starting to make me wonder about the use cases for Watching vs Tracking vs Bookmarking. )
The top nav options latest, Top, … etc feel like they would be sorts/filters for the thing i selected in sidebar but they are not necessarily. Like I selected Top here, Tracked is still focused by being bold. but I am not tracking most of these topics and it is really just the forum wide “top”.
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hmm yeah this is a good point, I see topics I don’t track at https://meta.discourse.org/top?f=tracked too — we should either show the top tracked topics, and if we can’t we should hide top from that menu (docs really shouldn’t be there either)
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I’m assuming this isn’t something related to this but rather the plugin itself has to be changed, but Reactions don’t show up in any of the notification lists. They show up normally when you press the arrow at the bottom to get the full list of all the notifications, but otherwise they’re completely skipped in all of the categories whereas before they appeared fine (and had specific icons). These could probably just be rolled into the Like menu they don’t need a specific one (IMO) but nonetheless they aren’t there.
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Are you on the latest version of the discourse-reactions plugin? Let us know if it still doesn’t work after upgrading.
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I’ve enabled the settings but I can’t see the new notifications menu enabled. I’m on beta9, is there a reason for that?
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Changes are being made to the notifications menu all the time. If you haven’t done an upgrade in the past day, you should do an upgrade now and try again.
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14 posts were split to a new topic: Which branch am I / should I be tracking? beta or tests-passed or main?
FYI, we recently made this change here:
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Would it be possible for these defaults to show up for all users the first time the sidebar is enabled?
At the minute, I think existing logged-in users will all see the “You have not added any categories. Click here to get started.” message. I’d like to save them the trouble of doing that. I’d like them to have the same categories appear by default as (a) non-logged-in users and (b) users who register from now onwards (which I think is what you mean by “new users” in this context).
For some site settings there is a popup asking a question along the lines of “Do you want this setting to be applied to all users retrospectively?” This would be good here. Maybe “Do you want this setting to be applied to all users who have not already chosen their sidebar categories?”
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Would it be possible to list untagged posts within the “Tags” section of the sidebar?
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I’ve upgraded Discourse, but there is no mention of the sidebar on the admin panel, where new features are usually shown and explained:
But nothing here after the update:
My guess is it’s because it’s still an experimental feature?
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I’ve just done the same today.
Search settings for “sidebar”. One of them (can’t remember which one) isn’t ticked by default.
Also I think you might have to refresh the page for everything to show up properly (e.g. hamburger icon on left instead of right, new notification pane).
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