Updating how categories are organized on Meta

I don’t think so

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Quite likely, but if so, it would have happened long enough ago that I can’t remember for sure.

But this seems the most plausible explanation.

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Maybe you changed the tracking of News and Events > Forum summaries? It’s muted by default, and it seems the description isn’t shown for muted categories :woman_shrugging:

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Ah, indeed, it is muted. @Moin you’re very perceptive. I guess it could be greyed out then, so it doesn’t look weird.

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Seems odd. Would there be a reason to show a category and not its description, or is this probably an oversight?

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. :slight_smile:

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One thing that I find a but frustrating is that I can no longer type #bug to link to Contribute > Bug. The parent category there hinders it.

I generally do not use the autocomplete popup, preferring to type everything out (not to mention that the autocomplete takes a few seconds to show up), so with Bug/UX/Feature in a parent category, I have to first recall the name of the parent, before typing it.

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I can never find anything and end up use ask.discourse.org for almost any question I have, even how to configure some plugin or find some documentation that I know exists. It might be smarter to use Google, at least sometimes.

Want to find the ldap plugin? "ldap #plugin " won’t find it. Where is it? #self-hosting/discourse-ldap-auth? – Google does find it. It’s in the Support > Self-hosting category with a discourse-ldap-auth tag. So you have to guess if a plugin is a #plugin or not? When is a plugin not a plugin?

Seriously, I end up just using ask.discourse.org any time I need to find something.

I don’t know if I notice that much about what category I put a new post in. I mostly put everything in Support, unless maybe I think it has to do with administration and then try to put it in Support > Self-hosting ?

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This open UX request about that could maybe use a bump:
Can we make inline links to subcategories more concise? - Contribute / UX

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