When I remove all tags in sidebar preferences (whatever they had been) the “official” tags is displayed in the sidebar.
3 Likes
Tiny communities where there are only 5 posts a day 1 category and zero chat usage do not really benefit from a sidebar, I can totally see outlier sites turning off enable experimental sidebar hamburger, this will be default on but we will maintain support for disabling
Sites like this don’t really benefit from the hamburger anyway, so the slightly different rendering will not even be noticed
I also hear the objection of “omg new user 10 sections in user menu 3 notifications total”, I can see us adding a heuristic where “tiny amount of notifications, fewer filters”
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2 posts were split to a new topic: Is there a way to enable the sidebar for admins but not other users?
The sidebar produces a lot of spacing / UX issues with the iPad mini in vertical and horizontal mode.
Maybe someone should take a look an that.
Overall very interesting, but not relevant for my use cases.
It reminds me to some sort of Finder / Explorer windows 
5 Likes
With the “bell” notifications on the menu now, the down arrow appears but does nothing. Maybe I’ve got exactly enough to fit on screen and no more. But in that case the down arrow probably shouldn’t appear.
Edit: I’ve tried it again and it does work most of the time. One of the other ones didn’t work first time. I thought it was because the down arrow is so near the bottom of the iPhone screen, but it still was temperamental in landscape mode too. Sorry for being so unspecific here.
4 Likes
The down arrow on the “everything else” option (the three squares and a diamond) goes to “Notifications - all” which is confusing. I wouldn’t have worked out what the option is for without reading it in a comment here.
More generally, it would be good if each menu icon had an equivalence with the preferences “Notifications” sub-options.
3 Likes
It would be good if the new menu icons were optional, so that the old system could be recreated (notifications, bookmarks, messages, preferences). Then the exact meaning of the three squares and a diamond would change according to what other icons were present.
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For me, the sidebar is a big positive step.
One consistent complaint we had with users who were not too tech savvy was that the discourse interface was hard to fathom. While there was so much functionality, users did not know what to do after landing on the home page. The sidebar is something we have been looking for, is practical and so much in the face for users to click and explore. It exposes several functions that should be regularly tracked but are normally tucked away.
The new hamburger behavior however seems non standard - hiding the sidebar on click when one would normally expect it to open a drop down menu.
15 Likes
Agree. Whilst not as pretty or as ‘iconic’ (ahem!), the icon could be a … ‘sidebar’ icon?
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It appears that there is no free “sidebar” icon in font awesome 6 
https://fontawesome.com/v6/search?q=sidebar&o=r
https://fontawesome.com/v6/search?q=sidebar&o=r&m=free
(though there are probably valid alternatives, like arrow-down-wide-short…)
Also maybe I misunderstood your talk about the icon. 
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No you didn’t. My point is the hamburger menu might as well be a Discourse trademark 
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Hamburger Links Theme Component Integration
I’m still not sure where I stand on the new sidebar. My techie self loves it, my user-empathy self thinks it might be confusing.
I will enable it for some and get some real-world user feedback but there is one area that I feel needs a bit more thought.
The new sidebar honours the settings in the Hamburger links theme component. Links added to the Hamburger Links Component do appear in the new sidebar, however, the links are hard-coded in the COMMUNITY section and within that section, they appear behind the More… teaser.
Perhaps my logic and use-case are different to others, but if someone installs the Hamburger Links Theme Component because they believe the user needs to see these links, then I feel they probably deserve a more prominent position - and certainly not hidden behind an extra More… click.
I feel the ideal behaviour would be to allow links that are added in the Hamburger Links Component to specify the section of the sidebar they should appear in. i.e, COMMUNITY, CATEGORIES, TAGS, or MESSAGES.
Perhaps they could specify a different category that would be automatically created in the sidebar?
Perhaps a link could specify no category which would make the link appear outside and below the categories?
Anyway, great work!
Screenshots
Settings From the Hamburger Links Component
Non-expanded Sidebar
Expanded Sidebar - The User has Clicked More…
9 Likes
We do plan to make the sidebar more extensible for plugins and theme components, but aren’t aiming for full backward compatibility with things that had targeted the existing hamburger. It’s a little too early for us to dive deep into this ourselves, but we’ll kick off a discussion about it at some point in the not too distant future. (If there are enough folks who want to talk more about it now, that’s fine too - feel free to start a topic and we’ll join in later).
Separately, we do plan to add some built in ability for folks to add custom links themselves. I’ve started a topic that outlines our initial plans for that feature here: Ability to add a custom section of links to the sidebar
10 Likes
Overall I like the new side bar (reminds me of 1990’s websites with the navigation menu on the left side and ads/other stuff on the right 
) … except when trying to see the Latest. It’s just a small hoop to jump through, clicking All categories and then at the top clicking Latest. Couldn’t the Latest just be added to the side bar along with New and Unread?
8 Likes
Some related discussion going on here if you want to pile on 
Sidebar topic list links prefer unread and new over latest - #24 by ncaming215
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Latest is reachable via Everything. If there are unread topics, those are shown first. So it is indeed one more click away which I don’t especially like myself. Here on meta I don’t want to read everything necessarily or (dismiss it all as read) but do want to know what’s going on Right Now!
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Thanks, I’ll check that out.
1 Like
Great to see a re-design of the menus! 
One ux aspect I’d love to see implemented more is a clearer distinction between
- navigating the forum conversations
- and accessing other features, settings and user actions
This was mixed on the hamburger menu so far. I think the sidebar offers a good opportunity to only use it for navigating the forum conversations.
E.g. the Admin and the More… section. They are on the sidebar now as they have been on the hamburger before. To me they introduce too much information and disrupt browsing the forum structure on the sidebar:
I think these would have a more intuitive place on the user menu. I’d also love to see an option to adjust the icons on the user menu. In my experience more than 3 or 4 icons are overkill for a casual user. E.g. that’s a view I’d like to implement with the new user-menu:
Then have a site-navigation tab that collects the links from More…
And when a staff member is logged in add a staff tab (with additional links and review posts…)
15 Likes
The trouble though is that we are already struggling with too many icons on the user menu, adding another bunch of icons and mixing in even more functionality would add confusion. This change would heavily prioritise super casual users over power users. (Eg: you get 5 notifications a month, who needs all this fancy?)
I do get that the burial of groups/badges and other links is a bit surprising, but clutter is minimised now
4 Likes
Personally, I think it makes total sense that all other links within Community take me to a list of topics or posts, while Admin and the More... links break this mental model. There’s also the plus icon when hovering over Community to create a topic, reinforcing this concept.
I’d love a different default but, at least, being able to customize it (via a TC) to take these 2 options out of that section and put them inside the sidebar footer instead. I think there’s enough room and they are important enough to be there.
5 Likes