When a Discourse site is new and getting started, the current default view of latest posts only can be helpful. However, when there are multiple categories and different places for discussion, I find showing the categories makes them more visible to the community. It makes it easier for me to see what’s happening in different places on the site.
I thought it would be a helpful change for this Discourse site, given the growing size and activity across different categories.
OK thanks.
With Latest I can see the four recently updates without scrolling.
I think Categories could be good for not logged in people as it looks like classic forums and clearly shows themes.
But once you are active in the forum, Latest is more useful, IMO.
Poor future recent active users, not familiar with Discourse settings, they won’t benefit from the very effective Latest home page (even me did not know its name to set it back).
Unfortunately, it isn’t currently (easily) possible to have Discourse distinguish between the two for this purpose.
The reason I agreed with the change is that I reckon most people come here for a single or a couple of projects(/categories). If you’re completely new and you want to post a question, it’s very easy to “accidentally” post to General chatter instead of a proper category (I’ve moved a bunch of topics anyway). Hopefully putting the categories up more prominently on the first page they see here will make them realise that it’s not just a single project’s forum, and thus will hopefully be more likely to dive into the project/category they’re actually here for. For “regulars” the current view still show the latest topics in the right panel (though more condensed), and any topics/categories/tags they’re watching they can still browse through using the notifications in the upper-right corner.
Anyway, let’s try and see how this works out for a while, and if most people find the change utterly unpalatable, it is easy to revert.
