Why categories not listed on sidebar?

There is a ‘general’ category on Meta but I was need to go to ‘Display all categories’, turn down (all the page) and then get into ‘General’.

Then I see the category has 3 posts on last month so that’s OK? What’s the point to have categories that almost nobody uses?

Of course I’m asking something related to all Discourse communities and not only focused on Meta. You are doing great here and the whole internet :pray:

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General is what was previously our uncategorized pseudo-category.

It exists so people who suffer from Analysis paralysis won’t give up on creating a new topic because they can’t pick one, but most of the time a moderator will come and better categorize a topic afterwards.

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That’s great to know, thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

So what’s about praise with last activity a year ago? (and only 5 topics with recent activity).

I think that could be improved just erasing the not used categories and using tags because nobody are going into that categories and would use search instead.

So the big question is, sidebar needs to hide some categories or show them all?

Is this about the sidebar? AFAIK you can put any categories you want in there.

We are constantly evaluating the categories here on Meta, and they were massively overhauled last year by our new moderation team. They not only serve people posting here, but internal needs of CDCK, feed automatic systems via API, etc.

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I’m just philosophing about hide or not-hide categories there.

Not questioning about moderation or Meta, as I said (and I can validate without any doubt) you are doing super great (!)

But what’s better for our communities? Why we want to hide some categories (or not)?

Because they are not useful? What’s define what we are showing on sidebar and what not?

Trying to get some opinions here, I think that all the categories needs to be show or erased but I’m getting deep into this and I’m fully open to read different opinions about it.

For example because the sidebar is not replace for all-site navigation but more a tool to get easy access to the most important parts. It is not for admins but users.

So,

Anwer for that is you are defining what you want to see. You as an admin can give a proposal using defaults, nothing else.

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There are non important parts in a solid community? Who and what defines that? Why not to keep the non-important parts archived or not categorized?

That’s a kind of philosophy thread, you better want to ask better than reply because I understand and I know all you said :slight_smile:

I am of course. I don’t follow Dev or Marketplace for example. Why would I like to see those at the sidebar? And for same reason we can mute tags and categories, even users (I’ve muted marketplace).

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