Updating how categories are organized on Meta

[NateDhaliwal]

Well, I’ll definely need some time to adjust to the new colours. Customization > Theme looks like the old #announcements:blog category.

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

One thing that mystifies me is why Community Building > General is now in Community Building — feels wrong that the general category should be a subcategory

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

@mcwumbly

I’ve also updated the default sidebar categories, but haven’t applied them for everyone, so if you want to try out setting your sidebar to the new defaults, you can do this:

I’ve done this but most of the categories it makes sense for me to go to directly are now hidden. So I checked the subcategory boxes I wanted to make them visible, and hid a bunch of top level categories, which makes it more usable for me.

[Moin]

The category filter at the top of the topics page doesn’t show subcategories, which is expected. But usually, you can use search to find them. This doesn’t work for me on Meta, probably because of lazy-load-categories. It reminds me of what I reported here Search in category drop-down missing.

This is what I see here without an option to search:

This is what I miss

I would prefer to have a direct path to, for example, the translations category without visiting the parent category first.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@NateDhaliwal

Well, I’ll definely need some time to adjust to the new colours. Customization > Theme looks like the old #announcements:blog category.

Yeah, perhaps the color choices will need a closer look if we continue down this path.

@stephtara

@mcwumbly

I’ve also updated the default sidebar categories, but haven’t applied them for everyone, so if you want to try out setting your sidebar to the new defaults, you can do this:

I’ve done this but most of the categories it makes sense for me to go to directly are now hidden. So I checked the subcategory boxes I wanted to make them visible, and hid a bunch of top level categories, which makes it more usable for me.

Can you share a few examples of subcategories you decided to add back?

@stephtara

One thing that mystifies me is why Community Building > General is now in Community Building — feels wrong that the general category should be a subcategory

Yeah, will keep thinking about this one…

@Moin

The category filter at the top of the topics page doesn’t show subcategories, which is expected. But usually, you can use search to find them. This doesn’t work for me on Meta

Hmm… can you share a screenshot of this not working for you? Here’s me searching for translations there:

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

@mcwumbly

Can you share a few examples of subcategories you decided to add back?

Here’s what my sidebar looks like now:

[Moin]

@mcwumbly

Hmm… can you share a screenshot of this not working for you?

What kind of screenshot do you expect?
I included this one:

@Moin

This is what I see here without an option to search:

Does it work if you try while being logged out?
Maybe you can see more categories here than me. I think some kind of limit was added if there are less than 10 categories which results in hiding search.
Or more categories are loaded for you because of the ones you configured for your sidebar. I have only one category there (because 0 isn’t possible, then I get all the default categories)

[darkpixlz (Pyx)]

I see that categories were finally updated but can we have the old category style back? Historically I’ve used categories as my homepage but this is not very useful.. whatever the one is that shows the categories and a list of their latest topics is the best because it’s the most organized in my opinion

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@Moin

Does it work if you try while being logged out?
Maybe you can see more categories here than me. I think some kind of limit was added if there are less than 10 categories which results in hiding search.

Ah, OK, I can reproduce the issue when logged out. Thanks.

Will see what we can do to improve this.

@darkpixlz

I see that categories were finally updated but can we have the old category style back? Historically I’ve used categories as my homepage but this is not very useful..

I want to live with this new style for a while and see what we learn.

Can you try changing your homepage to latest for now?

Keep in mind, this part of the experience is likely to change when we get further along on this part of things:

@mcwumbly

We are going to make larger improvements to the theme to make it easier to find content related to different activities.

[darkpixlz (Pyx)]

@mcwumbly

I want to live with this new style for a while and see what we learn.

Can you try changing your homepage to latest for now?

I mean I guess I have to for now, just seems weird to me that we’re aiming for less information density because the page is just not useful at the moment unfortunately

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

I am sorry to say I’m definitely not liking the fact that the topic listing for Community Building is now filled with all sorts of stuff that to me have nothing to do with the “community management” area that this category covered for me previously – between data stuff, praise, general questions, it’s become quite a mess and diluted the value of that category for me:

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

The Support > WordPress category is confusing – I had a general question regarding Discourse and WordPress so posted it in there initially, but it seems to be only about the plugin (did I understand correctly why you moved it to Support, @Moin?). Feels like it should be a topic in Customization > Plugin rather than a whole category? Or if it’s larger than the plugin, description should be updated?

[Moin]

It’s not a Discourse plugin. It’s a WordPress plugin. There are topics about it in Customization > Extras like WP Discourse 1.5 Release, but that’s not a category for support questions.

I enjoy that it has a separate support category instead of just a wp-discourse tag within the general support category, because it helps to decide where I can help. Since I don’t usually use WordPress, I cannot. For me, that’s the difference compared to other official plugins where support happens in the main category but with a tag. Those are still questions about what happens in the Discourse forum.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@stephtara

I am sorry to say I’m definitely not liking the fact that the topic listing for Community Building is now filled with all sorts of stuff that to me have nothing to do with the “community management” area that this category covered for me previously

I’m not loving it either.

Will have a think about what tweak to try here next.

[Moin]

I still think most of Community Building > Data & reporting is more like #sql-help which would be a support category.

Quote for everyone without access to what I said before

@Moin

I would currently assign most topics in #data-reporting::category more to Support than to Community Building. For exchange on which numbers are needed, how to interpret them, and measures to improve them, Community fits well as an overarching topic, and this is certainly an area where more discussion is desirable. How data is selected and what is done with it is also repeatedly addressed in the webinars because it is so important.
For the technical part of how to obtain the data, the Community overarching category seems less fitting to me. Most topics tagged with sql-query are rather asking how to obtain data. For me, that would rather be #sql-help in Support, under which the tag sql-triggered-badge might group queries dealing with badges in the future. I just wonder what remains in #data-reporting::category then.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

I’ll refrain from giving my opinion on this category reorganization because it’s probably worth a try and see how it goes, but nonetheless, I’m not a fan of all those rainbow category bullets on the sidebar.
It’s messy.

My eyes prefer the simplicity of a single color.

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On a sidenote… I don’t like the blue/red combination in general because of the chromatic aberrations in my glasses.

Depending on how I’m looking through my glasses, the Community Building > Data & reporting bullet will look like

or or

Yeah, that’s a thing…