Most of the category topics (“About the foo category”) are really used only for the description that is visible otherwise, and I’m hoping that reducing the number of active categories reduces the need to go read category topics to figure out where to post to zero. For these posts, if any particular post still needs to be pinned, I would ask why that particular one. The main reason I can think of is a few that actually point to a project home page.
Some of those pinned posts still say this:
Those definitely don’t need to be pinned; probably most of then will go away in the migration but we can check…
For the three pinned posts in the combined Laser area, I’d love to promote the Getting Started with CO2 Lasers category more as a one-stop shop for information about getting started, moving the best advice we have there.
I’m not against pinned posts, I’d just like to make sure that each pin is the best solution right now. If there are too many, eyes glaze over…
With the rebuild, you can now choose whether the sidebar categories take you to the default view that shows all activity, or the “New/Unread” view that shows you only what has changed.
Of course, that won’t be very useful on a read-only site, so I’d encourage you to visit meta.discourse.org to see it really working.
However, you can choose to change which categories and tags you have in your sidebar; I just set up the site default.
I would like to wait until the categories are sorted in site order instead of alphabetical order before turning the sidebar on here, but if y’all disagree with me, go ahead and let me know.
In a few weeks (maybe over (American) Thanksgiving?) I do plan to move forward with this.
I’ve just updated https://staging.makerforums.info/ so that it has an updated version of the sidebar. Now the categories that you chose to put in your sidebar will be ordered the same as they are on the site. Not only that, but subcategories will be ordered with their parent rather than sprinkled around alphabetically.
The overloading between the “Community” tab and the “Community” parent category are the main fly in the ointment here. I suppose we could talk about other potential names for the category, but we’re already using it now.
Does anyone find it just too confusing the way it is?
I did not do this update over Thanksgiving. I was waiting for updated storage, which we just got in place this week for both the current and new servers. I do plan to do it over the Christmas holidays at some point. Our new system has 4 vCPUs and 16GB of RAM, and should improve performance even more than we got this past week from the storage update.
This migration is complete. Thanks for your patience for the not quite two hours that Maker Forums was read-only, or if you encountered strange errors for a few minutes during a minor site misconfiguration during the migration.
I guess completing what I advertised as “Fall cleaning” on the winter solstice was about as far as I could stretch it!
