Should the discussions side-pane be pinned by default?

Toby

Reading some great feedback over at the Discourse forum, I've been thinking about ways to increase the visibility of the discussions slide-out side-pane feature. (I think it's a pretty kick-ass feature and I want people to know about it!)

What does everyone think about pinning it by default? (Only on screens that are wide enough, of course.) It can always be unpinned if someone doesn't want it there. My only concern is that it kind of increases the complexity of the interface from the start for newcomers, rather than slowly introducing it to them ("oh, this pane slid out. oh, it's a list of discussions, cool. oh, I can pin it, great!") But personally I haven't turned it off since I started using the demo forum, I'm sure many others are the same.

Thoughts?

Duncan

Toby, sorry for bumping an old topic, but I went through this very thing today.

Can this be done?

I'd really like to have this default for everyone on my forum

Franz

How will it behave with categories?

Anyway, I totally agree that we can improve discoverability of that one. Maybe by adding a little drag thing on the left edge of the screen (in the middle, vertically)?

Toby

It shows whatever was there when you first clicked into a discussion. So if you had filtered by a category, it would only show discussions in that category.

erlend_sh

Here's a Discourse topic about reading-workflows you might find interesting:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-your-reading-workflow-like/23783?u=erlend_sh

You have to keep in mind that as the developer you are one of the few users on your forum that is interested in practically 100% of all activity. I'm an avid Discourse user and community member, but of all the activity on Meta, I care about

MattDiMu

I agree with both. Yes, the side-pane-feature should be stick by default and it should be filterable. Some sort of multiselect could be suitable. Then every user may select the categories/tags he's interested in, go through these discussions. If these topics contain new/unread posts, they should be highlighted in some way, optionally by showing the number of new posts in this discussion. And a click on them should go directly to the first unread post.

The order of the discussions could be
- followed unread discussions
- unread discussions in selected categories
- followed read discussions
- read discussions in selected categories

Toby

Thanks for the feedback guys. Very helpful. I think most of what you're saying will be possible with the current implementation plan:

You'll be able to hide/unsubscribe from categories you're not interested in.
Upon arriving on the index, you would click on "Following" in the sidebar to give you a list of all the discussions you're following. Naturally, the unread ones will be at the top as they have the most recent activity.
(Optionally you might be able to narrow down the categories by holding Shift and clicking on the categories in the sidebar.)
After clicking into a discussion, that same list of followed discussions will be listed in the sidebar.

I'll keep thinking about other ways to make this even easier/more intuitive. Please let me know if you have any further thoughts!