Something like… Category Groups - Theme component? It wouldn’t be hard to come up with category groups to contain everything, though we’d lose the rollup functions of a parent category with subcats.
I’m not having trouble with that, but it’s probably not super intuitive. If the default setup had parent categories in the sidebar list, then setting them all to “Show subcategory list above topics in this category” / “Boxes”, a la Documentation, could be nice:
I think there is a glitch in the description for the Customization category. When I follow « learn more » in the category description I end up in crash course for discourse themes
I understand the advantages of having the subcategories at the top. At the same time, however, when I visit a category now, I no longer see any topics, only static content. I usually visit a category to find and read topics, not the name and description of the subcategories.
I made a couple small changes here, that I think help:
I moved General back out of this category, as an additional top level category
I reordered categories a bit so Community Building is second (1st after News and Events).
I made the category description a bit more concise
I did not add “show subcategories” for this category
(It’s also not shown for Support)
The decision about whether or not to show subcategories is dependent upon whether posting is allowed (or encouraged) at that top level
I did not move out the other three subcategories (data and reporting, praise, comparison).
At the moment, these still feel like the best place for these to me.
So there are now 3 main, top-level discussion categories:
Community Building
General
Support
The other top level categories are more “category group”-like – primarily containers for subcategories.
I want to continue shaping this Community Building category. I’m wondering whether there are ways to provide greater affordances for more of these kinds of discussions for example:
Helping community managers new to Discourse learn their way around the product
Helping site admins new to community management learn their way around the practice
Sharing stories/experiences
But maybe that is something to focus on more separately after some of this other stuff settles down a bit more.
I feel like General is not a really helpful category on Meta. It holds 200 something topics right now, but looking through them many would actually fit right into Site Feedback, Feature or Support.
I think cleaning up the category would only leave maybe around 50 topics that indeed don’t belong anywhere else. And for these topics a more specific category title could make better sense (like Off-topic, Random Talk, Watercooler, …), rather than General.
BUT Subwiki “index” links go to a category instead of the index topic (at least in the case of “Developer wiki”) which requires another click to access the one-shot resources where you can Ctrl+f.
For some reason, the ¨Forum summaries" description is not showing in the News and Events page
The index links in documentation should point to the index topic, not the category (saves a click)
In my categories tab I put all wikis, but I should customize and point to the wiki index topics instead to save a click.
Is Dev a top category or should it be a subcategory of support? Then “solid dev knowledge” should be docs… Not sure here, but it seems a lot of Dev topics are support for developers. I would suggest moving Dev under support, muting it by default, and making a dedicated developer group unmuting that category.
Thanks for all the feedback @hellekin – some comments on each below:
Ah, interesting. The links are correct, but the boxes don’t let you click them. A click anywhere on the box is captured by the box itself, even though the link looks clickable:
Can you share a screenshot of what you’re seeing here?
noted. I still need to open a new topic about Community Building as earlier promised. I was away last week and will be away part of this week as well, so I may wait til next week to do that though.
I don’t think that’s the right spot for it, but let’s dive into it more in that forthcoming topic.
I decided (tentatively) not to show subcategories at the top within parent categories that allow posting in the top level.
The way we address this issue may depend on the direction we go with the next iteration of the theme (cc @manuel)
I moved this one around a few times as I was exploring. First, I had it in Contribute. Then, I put it in Customization. Finally, I decided it needed to be a top level category.
Thinking about the likely participants in each of these different categories, I think this belongs on its own.
That’s just how the default category boxes work right now. We could probably change the default behavior. Though I wonder what’s the intended experience in our documentation categories. It seems the index was added with the category banner in mind, rather than the category box:
At the same time the index topic stays pinned to the top of the topic list, it doesn’t automatically un-pin when the index topic is read. So we’re duplicating this index quite a bit: In the first place it’s meant to generate the sidebar menu. Then we pin it to the top of the topic list. Then we add a link to it to the visible category description.
I think we could actually drop the link from the description in the documentation categories.
Yes, there’s also two settings. I think Automatically unpin topics refers to any manually pinned topic. And Default topics automatic unpin only refers to topics that the system pins by default, like the welcome topic and “About this category” topics.
Maybe he read them when automatically unpinning was still enabled. The index topics were created more than a year before automatic unpinning was disabled.
noted. I still need to open a new topic about 
Maybe he read them when automatically unpinning was still enabled. The index topics were created more than a year before automatic unpinning was disabled.