And after timeframe X there is no settings and old one is bye gone. Then the same shock effect hits again. So because we can’t avoid that increased huge amount of icons perhaps better solution is start using it right away?
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I suppose that would be a decision for you and your community, but it’s still experimental at the minute and likely to be tweaked here and there. You may want to hold off until it’s closer to its ‘finished’ form?
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Sure. And still the shock is there. You know a way better than me ever, but the consept is ready and the issue here is not if review link is visible or do we get tooltips here, there and everywhere.
The decesion is made and because of small minority called power user we will move from this
to that:
Now I’m trying to convince my user that there is no such thing as too much information and hieroglyphs 
Well, I promise that was the last time I’m complaing about that.
My point stays. It just doesn’t matter if the new one is called as experimental. It just means there can and will be bugs and improvements. But it will come and the transition to new system is front of us and that transition should do now. Not next month or next year.
One strong point is that is the only way to get ideas from basic users. Those are majority of users, not power users.
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I bet it won’t be long until there’s a theme component to remove the unnecessary/extra icons, or a plugin to put them back in the old place.
I quite like the new notification menu but don’t know whether I’m a power user or normal user…
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I think this is really important. 
If people do have a willing community who would be happy to test it out and give that kind of feedback then I think that’s great. Though if you’re looking to minimise disruption (from any tweaks and changes while it’s being actively worked on), or want to delay the change for a while and see what shakes out (including possible customisations, as @Jonathan5 mentions) then the option is there to.
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Changes made by Admin to the sidebar items do not apply to existing users, e…g., a new tag or category that all members should see.
I think there should be a way to force these changes to all users or apply in future only (as available for font settings etc.).
Also, in our case at least, I don’t foresee users taking the time to customize what they see.
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In addition to the admin’s personal settings, there are site settings governing the defaults.
In /admin/site_settings just search for “sidebar” and you’ll see them.
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Yes, but changes made in admin settings don’t update existing users’ preferences.
They seem to apply to new users only.
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That hasn’t been my experience (I’ve just impersonated one of our old users to check). Have you updated recently? It has all been quite dynamic over the past few weeks!
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I think if a user has customised their sidebar, then updating the defaults will not override those choices (and probably shouldn’t).
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Yes, rebuilt yesterday.
What would be the trigger point to say the user has customized? It appears that once a user logs in the first time, the user’s preferences are set and disconnected from admin’s future updates.
An option to push the preferences (like the font example) would be very useful.
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@nathankershaw @JammyDodger
Okay I see changes made in admin apply to existing users. Either something changed or I didn’t do it correctly before.
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Where did the quick theme selector go since the sidebar update? I don’t know where it went.
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A casualty of war I’m afraid. It isn’t compatible with the sidebar (yet).
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We activated the new sidebar on our forum.
Some feedback: I had to disable the animation (I just put the animation time for the sidebar to 0). The animation is great on Firefox: the content is stable and simply moves horizontally. On Chrome, it’s janky, especially if lots of images are present. Seems like Chrome is resizing the content for no reason during the animation (I made sure in our theme that the content was the same width regardless of whether the sidebar is visible or not).
On iPad, the sidebar doesn’t seem to be the right height. The sidebar-footer is outside the screen instead of sticky at the bottom, it’s creating useless scrolling, and it’s visually jarring when scrolling all around.
Outside of that, the sidebar is great, thanks for your arduous work.
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I suppose the vast majority of users will use the forum without customizing anything.
For this reason, I suppose I should carefully choose which categories will be displayed by default on the sidebar.
As for your customization suggestions… They’re good. I was never using new topics and unread buttons in the navigation, but now they are available in the sidebar, along the categories I selected, I use them daily.
It (and I) changed my habits, and my experience is improved.
The only thing that bothers me regarding tags is that some are very underused on meta.
A single example: Topics tagged css
7 CSS tags in the entire meta forum? CSS topics have my attention because I’m skilled enough to help people trying to customize their Discourse, but since the tag is never used, watching it seems useless.
By the way, here is how my sidebar looks like now
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I’m also interested in this question.
And I notice that when I click on a category in the sidebar, it goes to Latest instead of the New page.
If I click on “Everything”, and if there is at least 1 unread message, it goes to Latest as well.
Did it change very recently or did I hallucinate when I wrote this?
Because after a few days of using the sidebar, I was now very used to the links going directly to New messages, and I found it was better than going to Latest. 
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Ah, yes. Glad you brought that up. 
I had a small accident with that one a little while ago when I was tidying up the tag list to make them more useable for everyone… But it is being added to new and existing topics as we go along.
There is still a bit of work to do with the tag list on Meta, but I’m hoping it will be more used and useful now we’ve tweaked it a bit (especially with the new sidebar features too 
).
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It changed recently per: Sidebar topic list links prefer unread and new over latest
Let’s continue the discussion about future changes over there
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