Changes to the Discussion category

We have made some changes to the discussion category to make it less cluttered and confusing. All of the subcategories have been removed so there is only one main category of discussions now. Instead of using subcategories we now use tags to sort/filter the different types of topics. When you post a new topic you will be required to add at least one tag to properly organize this category.

When viewing the category you can see all the posts of a certain tag by either clicking a visible tag:

or by selecting the tag from the dropdown menu labeled ‘select tag’

You can also mute topics with tags you are not interested in by visiting your notifications page and adding the tag you don’t want to see to your ‘muted’ section.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on this change. If this is a hit we may implement it in other categories as well.

I was wondering about this change that I saw yesterday.

I did not find the old listing of the Discussion categories confusing, and it was easy to see if there were new topics, or un-read posts.

Personally, I liked the old way and would be very happy to see it return.
-P

1 Like

Agree with @Preston_Birdwell on this one. I don’t see this as an easier way to view the various discussion topics.

Thanks for the feedback guys. This move was made for many reasons, I’ll try to explain.

  • Many members, especially new members find the main landing page of the forum completely overwhelming. There are simply way too many choices and it prevents them from even trying the site out because it’s too much to take in.
  • Most members just want to read through the list of all the discussions taking place and pick out something they’re interested in, this was possible before by clicking the main category heading, but most people didn’t realize this and thought they had to click through to each subcategory, a painful process.
  • Topics get lost in subcategories because of the last point, the user gets tired of looking through each subcategory and gives up, or certain categories that might not sound as interesting to a user get completely overlooked. With this new list of topics everything is front and center and topics are less likely to get lost.
  • The Discourse software is designed to work with as few categories as possible and tags are the preferred method. This is the way the developers intend the software to be used so we should go along with that rather than fight it. They warned me early on that I should cut back on categories and I wish I would have listened from the start, but I was trying to make the transition from the old site as painless as possible rather than introducing too many new concepts.

You guys are quite used to Discourse now and it makes sense to you, but I have to look at it through the eyes of not only advanced users, but brand new users who find the site confusing. This isn’t a small sample I’m changing it from, I hear this feedback on a regular basis so I need to make some changes to make the site less overwhelming to the new user while still making it quite functional for the advanced user.

1 Like

10-4, David. I’ll roll with the change.
-P

1 Like

New user here, so thought I’d give my two cents. At first I was put off by there being just a single discussion category. Most forums aren’t like that. But since this appears to be a smaller community, i think it works really well. There are only a few posts a day so i agree i wouldn’t want to spend time searching for them in different categories. Hope you don’t mind the opinion :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like