With the new add-ons categories getting traction, I face a problem.
This site mostly stopped working for me, both new and latest become rather useless, and I have no idea how to configure myself out of there. discourse.org doesn’t seem to come with help either, and searching for “discourse” and “focus” is obviously useless on the web.
HEEELP!
Anyone to share best practices on how to use discourse on a small-ish fraction of the existing categories?
I face this issue as well. I was under the impression that “New” and “Unread” will only show new posts from tracked or watched categories, but this does not seem to be the case. Is there a config where we can change this?
@majken are you able to help out here?
Moved to Discourse category to get more traction.
This might be something we need to modify ourselves. This is an interesting usecase problem when deciding how to manage multiple communities.
The Unread section should show only watched/tracked categories (it does for me). I usually watch the categories for things I’m pretty involved in and track things that I’m just interested in. That way I can get email for things I’m involved in but also use the site notifications as a filter for things I’m interested in.
Making the unread section more useful would be beneficial though as I don’t think it shows new topics from watched/tracked categories?
I guess we’re talking about folks using discourse as a website, and not as an email hub.
And we do see ALL THE THINGS (insert animated gif) in our “new and noteworthy” parts of the web UI.
If “Unread” could also show “new” threads from a tracked category, this would be perfect. Currently I have to go through all the “New” posts and see which ones are important for me and which aren’t.
I’ve been using Discourse without email for a while - I turned off all emails about 8 months ago. What I do is not use the 'watching
I’m still clueless on how to configure discourse to be focused on my interests.
Also, there’s an orthogonal aspect for new users, on whether they’re required to opt-in or opt-out on topics.
I usually “Watch” categories I’m interested and then follow the Unread tab or the notification bubble.
TBH, for the default communication tool of mozilla, the default needs to be a lot better.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the default’. Do you mean the site as it is for somebody who’s never logged in before? If so, then I can’t see how it could be done any differently.
If not, then you need to watch/track the categories/topics you’re interested in.
“default” being the default UX.
Wordings like “you need to watch/track the categories/topics” indicate that discourse isn’t a solution to our communication problem, but just making things worse.
Just way too much jargon, and zarroo help.
PS: I’m trying the tracking stuff now, and the UX is still horrible. I’m still getting nagged by a UX element that I’m missing out on a ton of “New” stuff.
I really don’t understand at all. Do you mean it could be called something different to make it more clear for people used to mailman (and the like)? ‘Subscribe’ or something?
Other than that, I can’t see what you want Discourse to do, short of reading your mind about what topics you’re interested in.
What UX element is that? I’m not seeing anything like what you describe when I track a category or topic.
The problem starts with the taxonomy of having 4 (and it’s more like 8 or 10, if you take all options in those drowdowns) things to choose from.
The New (11) element on the main page. Tries very much to get my attention, and does so to the wrong thing.
Also, the Suggested Topics is full of stuff I don’t want.
Oh, and yes, there are 12 new topic remaing, which I don’t care about either.
You are probably right about Latest vs New, I think discourse dev team wanted to merge them.
But “Unread” should be the place to check for all new/unread content just from the categories you are interested in.
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/weekly-call-2015-07-16/2686 just came in “New” for me, even though I’m tracking the “Meetings” category.
This means that I still need to watch what is within “New” when I want to get updated about my tracked categories and I have to filter out everything that I’m not interested in.
You should get a new topic on a watched category under New AND Unread. I’m getting this behavior.
Try to change tracking for watching.
But that means also getting email, or has that changed?
Email can be disabled or enabled from your preferences.