For the Sidebar, I think the following options are needed:
-
Option to not open the sidebar by default. (Only open it when the user clicks the menu.)
The sidebar adds a lot of visual noise which makes the front page of the forum look overwhelming to new users. Given we have our front page set to show the category list, the extra information is redundant and thus pure noise for new users.
-
Show categories in the proper order.
The categories list is alphabetical. Discourse categories have a specified order explicitly set by the admins, but the sidebar currently ignores that and makes quite a jumble of things.
-
Option to hide Tags entirely.
None of the tags on our site are likely to be thing people want to filter on from a top level. Most of them are fairly esoteric (e.g. programming language of scripts, so people can filter on that) and shouldn’t be there on the side of every page in every area (e.g. not all areas involve scripts). Tags are also not added to most posts, so it might mislead people into thinking they are good for search/filtering when they aren’t. I’d much rather they were not there in the sidebar at all on our site, and only available via the older methods (which were fine).
This would also be nice to have (but not having it wouldn’t prevent me from turning on this new feature):
-
More control over Community menu.
We have a plugin which adds an important item to the hamburger menu. This item is now really hidden, as you have to open the menu (or sidebar), then click “Community > More”.
It’s an item we want all users to use at some point after they have created their accounts, so it’d be great if we could make it visible at the top level.
Same with the extra links you can add into that menu. (I’m not sure how those are added, but I see “Cakeday” and “Docs” in the “Community > More” menu here on this site. Would be great to include custom links like that at the top level, as an option.
Misc feedback:
- The + icon on the right of Community and Messages creates a new post/message. I find it a bit surprising to have those actions there, and with just a small + icon. I expected clicking the icon would let me add things to the menus, not take me to a full screen post editor.
Edit: The new user/notifications menu (the other half of this change) is great and helps keep track of differnet notification types really well.
But I think it has made one old flaw a little bit worse: It’s really hard to find the user’s settings page. It has been for a while as it’s just another unlabeled icon in a row (now column) of icons in a menu which looks like it’s about notifications rather than settings.
It’d be great to make that user settings link more prominent somewhere.
Including it in the sidebar might be the solution, as it could have a label.