After using meta for a while with the new categories, I must say I’m not a fan. I’m not that much annoyed by the new organization, but I prefer the old one.
I still think fewer categories could be more beneficial and less confusing after reading Do users properly use categories? - #6 by Bas and Do users properly use categories? - #9 by noahl and using multiple Discourse forums for several years.
I enjoy the category organizations of those without (or with few) subcategories more.
It’s not really some kind of friction when we try to create a new topic, but I find it weird that we can create topics in some parent categories (i.e. Support), while we are forced to use subcategories for others (i.e. Contribute).
Autocompletion for the categories we want to link in a post or in search can create very long strings:
Community Building > Data & reporting, Documentation > Migrating to Discourse, News and Events > Forum summaries, etc.
Especially on mobile and when we create a new topic, it’s basically impossible to have the full category path shown. Even the parent category is truncated:
The new organization is of course not the only problem here (see Creating/Editing a post on mobile: let's discuss the 2026 Discourse experience ), but it adds to those readability/cluttering issues overall, both on mobile and desktop.
I purposely used a very long one on the search page, but I can’t even see the keywords I’m looking for, because the category string takes up all the space.
I find those long strings like #category:sub-category hard to read in general.
And in the “Categories” sidebar section,
We have emojis, icons, and dual-color bullets that remind me very much of those gums:
Probably there’s still ongoing stuff here, especially for having only icons and no more emoji, but still. The mix of icons and dual-color bullets, which sometimes look like one color (Contribute > Feature) is noisy.
I understand it’s useful when things are tied up and each thing goes in its dedicated space so it’s easier to search for precise information.
I appreciate the collaborative efforts to try to make things better for both users and admins, but so far, I’m not convinced by those recent changes. 