There is an option in Discourse to change how sub-categories look. I’m looking for feedback on what people think they’d like to see.
For reference, right now when you go to the Software category (https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software) , you’ll see a list of all posts across all of the sub-categories by default:
The option is to show each of the sub-categories (and the last few posts in each of them), with a list of the latest posts under all sub-categories further down. This is similar to how the main [Categories][] page shows up right now.
[Categories]: https://discuss.pixls.us/categories
These are the options without cracking open the styling and manually rewiring some things. We could conceivable use smaller icons to shrink things down a bit… (that is - each projects icon could be much smaller).
Also, I’m not really sure how many folks use this type of view already? That is, the bare Software page view as opposed to specific sub-categories they are interested in?
I like that better. Maybe I’m thinking too far ahead? Should there be ten or fifteen subcategories, they’ll overwhelm the actual posts in the general category.
I think I also like the idea of having all of the sub-category posts visible when entering /c/software. You never can tell where there might be some nice cross-pollination of ideas or answers…
Also, that’s a great point about overwhelming the posts in the Software category itself. I hadn’t thought of that, and now that I’m thinking about it I am leaning towards leaving it…
While I do like the smaller-icon version of the categorized option, I think the way it currently is works best, at least for the time being. As a person who is interested in all projects I can easily keep track of active posts across the board. With the proposed change, I wouldn’t be able to do that, I would only see the latest three topics in each category meaning I would have to go into each category and that would be a tedious pain in the ass. The change wouldn’t result in less clicking, it would require more of it. The only reason I see for using the proposed change is to that when a new person comes here they can more easily find the category which interests them, but then again it only takes a minute of settling in to find that you can click on e.g. “RawTherapee” to go into that category and see only that. So I vote for keeping it as it is.
You can’t see it in the screenshot above, but if you scroll down past the categories the regular list of all the topics is there (just like it is now). It basically pushes the categories above the normal list of all posts.
I’m beginning to lean heavily towards keeping it how it is now too, though.
My thoughts on this : while most messages posted here are interesting for general discussions about photography and free software, I find the Software category a bit invasive at the end, when you mix all the messages together. Messages in Software are often very specific to the use of one software (indeed!), and if you don’t use that software at all, you’ll have almost no interest for the corresponding category of messages.
I’m sure people who don’t use G’MIC, RawTherapee, PhotoFlow,… understands what I mean when they go to http://discuss.pixls.us (see screenshot below!).
I’d suggest then to have a way to separate the “Software” category somehow, or better to let the user customize the category that appear on the main page when accessing discuss.pixls.us.
Is that posslble ?
I agree that seeing posts about software you don’t care about gets in the way, that’s why it’s important that the main categories are unique and necessary. As expressed before, I would merge “critique” and “showcase”. The rest seem sufficiently unique. I’d also add a main category for hardware/gear.
One can also mute a thread or whole category, so there’s that.
