It would be a nice option to have a modifiable home view (say, in Preferences). Thus, a user could select “Latest” as the default home view and another user could have “Categories”.
User-selectable default home view preference
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I was thinking we could extend this further to categories and subcategories, e.g. user Joe could set the “Bugs” category as his default homepage.
Wouldn’t be invasive if it was a field on the user preferences.
I set up a new Discourse forum a few days ago and I’ve got a few people aching for the more “traditional” view. This tells me two things: 1) the button for the category view isn’t intuitive enough (perhaps some glyph implying a hierarchy would be useful?) and 2) some users would prefer to be able to make this their default view.
Personally, I hate it. It makes me do a lot more work to find updates to topics. However, some people find it “cluttered” and “jumbled” and really dislike it.
How far out is this? (“When it’s done” is an acceptable answer.)
You might want to give it more than a few days. But if you want to change the default for everyone, just edit the order of top_menu as I recall.
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Oh, jeez. I misread the date on this. Sorry about that.
Maybe I missed something but is it implemented yet?
If no, How far out is this? My users are asking me 
Same @Sapid’s motivations
In my case newcomers are comfortable with the classic view since they can find immediately what they’re looking for…
On the other hand active members, who want keep updated, like so far “Latest” view.
Are you agree with me? What about you?
in our community I did a vote on categories vs latest as the default homepage.
The votes were almost exactly 50/50…
So I guess a way for the user to set this preference would be the best…
My question remains; what is the best setting to welcome and onboard newcomers?
The latest page gives them a nice (but I find somewhat confusing) overview of currently debated topics.
The categories page give a nice overview of the different categories that are being discussed; thus explaining the meaning and goal of the forum.
I think @codinghorror has recommended it a few times elsewhere, but this setup has worked well for me:
- Make categories the default landing page
- Change the logo click so that it directs you to /latest (ref )
- Encourage active users who are comfortable with discourse to set
yourdomain.com/latestas their bookmarked page for your forum in whatever browser they are using
Categories is the default home view for my forum, but with this setup I never really see it unless I seek it out. And yet it remains available and there by default for newcomers (or those who prefer the more traditional view).
It could still be a good idea to let users set this preference for themselves, but this is a very nice setup in the meantime, I think.
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