Poll: Remove bugs from front page
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Meta and Bug discussion is swarming here. Its great and all but perhaps we should suppress them a bit.
[poll]
- Remove bugs category from the latest list
- Remove bugs and meta categories from the latest list
- Remove bugs and meta but add a top level nav item for meta
- Leave it as is
[/poll]
Note, once removed from the list you will still be able to see them via http://what.thedailywtf.com/categories , and it will still show up in unread.
By suppressing this it does not mean we (the Discourse team) will look at this stuff any less, just that the general visitors of the site will be less aware of this and that the topics will not dominate.
Anyway, just an idea.
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- Leave it as is, I do
"Latest" is my "home base," "information central," whatever you want to call it for this site. I pretty much never view "Unread," "New," "Categories," etc. If it's not visible as a new post in "Latest," it effectively doesn't exist for me — with a few exceptions like the notification balloon.n'tcareFiled under: I'm doing it wrong.
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Filed under: I'm doing it wrong.
Proud to say I'm doing it wrong too. I use latest & suggested topics on the bottom of the current topic. I liked @PJH's idea of hiding it for the new guys and not logged in people. Meta are internal kitchen discussions of the community so I don't feel like logging in to participate there is not a big thing to ask.
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Meta are internal kitchen discussions of the community so I don't feel like logging in to participate there is not a big thing to ask.
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This post is deleted!
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I think bugs should remain visible while we try to determine how many people are affected by them. They'll drop out of view once they're fixed.
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Meta is supposed to be meta stuff about TDWTF, not your own personal bug tracker for Discourse which is what you guys seems to have acquired it for.
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This is your playground, maybe create a subcategory for "discourse" and just move stuff that is discourse there, leave governance stuff in meta?
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Well, the bugs subcategory can be. Right now the governance is so tied to the platform newness that it's hard to distinguish them. It'll be a different story in a few months.
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I liked @PJH's idea of hiding it for the new guys and not logged in people. Meta are internal kitchen discussions of the community so I don't feel like logging in to participate there is not a big thing to ask.
Yes, I agree. Just don't hide it from those of us who are actively participating in those internal discussions just because we don't follow the One True Way of reading topics.
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It'll be a different story in a few months.
Well, yeah. Does vBulletin even support nested categories?
Filed under: It does
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FYI, I will get the bugs around manual promotion not chucking people in the right groups AND groups not encompassing higher groups (trust_level_1 should include all trust_level_2 and up)
However I am still unclear of what you are really trying to do here, just suppress the entries from the "latest" list for new users and anon, but still allow them access to the topics?
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However I am still unclear of what you are really trying to do here, just suppress the entries from the "latest" list for new users and anon, but still allow them access to the topics?
More or less. Effectively add categories to the Muted section of http://what.thedailywtf.com/my/preferences by default for new users and those not logged in. (Presuming, of course, that doing so would 'hide' posts made in those categories, but still make them available.)
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This is your playground, maybe create a subcategory for "discourse" and just move stuff that is discourse there, leave governance stuff in meta?
Why not create a subcategory for "actual TDWTF conversations" and turn the forum into a meta.discourse fork?
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Effectively add categories to the Muted section of http://what.thedailywtf.com/my/preferences by default for new users and those not logged in
We definitely want to support this, though keep in mind, muted means all new topics are muted. When a user is mentioned on a muted topic they will get no notifications. I think an additional "state" is desired on categories. "Suppressed", where suppressed categories are simply suppressed from the front page.
Either that or change the semantics of muting categories (probably simpler)
@codinghorror thoughts?
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I don't think of this as a per-user setting, I think of it as a per-category setting that only admins can set.
E.g. a checkbox on the edit category page that says "suppress this category from homepage"
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My trouble with muting a category as its designed now is that it is ATOMIC.
Mute a category and you will NEVER hear it anymore when people mention your name on a bunch of topics. I am having a lot of trouble thinking of use cases where people intend:
- Never ever tell me anything when people mention my name in category X.
VS.
- Just yank category X off the latest page.
The latter seems to be the general intent when people use the feature.
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Correct our existing behavior here as seen on howtogeek.com, just with a non insane discoverable simple checkbox UI.
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'non insane discoverable'... words I'm not familiar with in reference to Discourse but maybe we can be friends after all.
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Took the conversation here:
Muted categories are too atomic
When you mute a category now, every new topic in the category is muted. Our implementation is actually a bit simpler and diverges from the explenation. Muted Categories: Are suppressed from latest list. All new topics in the muted category have “muted” state for the user. I think this...
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So, I get the idea (bugs/meta are interfering with normal TDWTF ass-hattery), but hiding bugs sounds like you're realizing the beta test is going worse than you wanted and you want to hide this failure from new users which seems disingenuous.
I'm not sure if hiding is the solution, but it feels ... weird to me.
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More or less
I think there are a bunch of mixed issues here, there is this one as well:
Muted categories are too atomic
When you mute a category now, every new topic in the category is muted. Our implementation is actually a bit simpler and diverges from the explenation. Muted Categories: Are suppressed from latest list. All new topics in the muted category have “muted” state for the user. I think this...
By using mute here a bunch of topics are going to be stuck in muted state which is bad.
I also think you "kind of" want to "automatically" remove it from the mute list when they reach a certain level. Which is its own can of worms.
Regardless I will look at adding default muted option next week.
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Not needed -- what is needed is a "do not show category on homepage" checkbox on the edit category dialog. Replacing the weird mysterious topnav string syntax in use on howtogeek, etc.
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No this is not the case @pjh and many of the experienced users do not want any topics suppressed, they only want them suppressed by default on new and anon accounts. Hence the issues I raised with muting categories, which is way too violent as it stands
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I like that, that someone is prepared to call something violent with respect to software. It's true.
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I don't think of this as a per-user setting, I think of it as a per-category setting that only admins can set.
Well, with a per-user setting and a per-category default you could, at the same time, ...
- show bread-and-butter categories by default and let users opt-out by muting them (e.g., Side Bar WTF) and
- hide less popular categories by default and let users opt-in by unmuting them (e.g., Meta/Bugs or subforums in foreign languages).
- Just yank category X off the latest page.
The latter seems to be the general intent when people use the feature.
I agree, but it's probably not that easy. There are a few cases where the current design makes no sense IMHO.
As an experiment, I muted the Meta/Bug category.
- Bug topics are now hidden from All Categories, but they still appear in the Meta category. They should be hidden there, too.
- All topics from muted categories are hidden. Watched topics should be visible regardless.
- I'm not sure if tracked topics should be visible as well. If yes, the "Automatically track topics" feature should ignore muted categories.
- I agree that
@usernamementions should work. It's a way to invite people to the one interesting topic in an otherwise uninteresting category. - Muted categories should be optional when searching.
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By using mute here a bunch of topics are going to be stuck in muted state which is bad.
Indeed.
I just unmuted Meta/Bug again and spent a few minutes unmuting new unread topics. Of course, they are no longer unread by now because the mute/track/watch dropdown is at the bottom.
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Agree with your points there, the tracking thing is indeed tricky, we can be fancy and just remove stuff that was automatically tracked.
Muted categories should be optional when searching.
I think they should be de-prioritized as opposed to optional in default search (once we get to advanced search we should add a box for ti)
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FYI I did a bunch of cleanup.
see:
Muted categories are too atomic
I just fixed this, will deploy to in the next few days. New behavior (and bugfixes) Topics in muted categories will not be added to new or latest lists (was buggy as numbers would go up via message bus) Topics in muted sub-categories will not show up in category list Unread will work as normal,...
