As we grow, I think it will become annoying for users to see categories they are not interested in in the Latest / New / Top posts lists.
There is a setting called “Mute all categories by default” that as I understand would prevent that. I’m not sure what effect it has on email. I would assume it would also prevent those from showing on daily digests which might take care of some of the complaints people have of not being able to get a meaningful daily digest without going thru every category to mute.
The setting is described as: Set the default notification level of all the categories to muted. Require users opt-in to categories for them to appear in ‘latest’ and ‘categories’ pages. If you wish to amend the defaults for anonymous users set ‘default_categories_’ settings.
I should also add, that according to this thread –
Even if mailing list mode is turned on, it will not send for muted categories.
So maybe it’s okay to have mailing list mode turn back on, as long as we default all categories to being muted and user has to opt-in to watch or track.
In mailing list mode, people also get their own messages as I understand it so that would solve that problem too.
This is done, this changed some things on the UI which may confuse some folks.
The Home page only shows the parent categories with no description, unless you are watching the parent category, then you see the description and the list of sub categories.
I suspect watching the parent category, doesn’t drill down to unmute the subcategories. If that is the case, it might make sense to as we add projects, to add the parent categories to the Unmuted category list by default, and users can then mute them if they want.
Since the parent category doesn’t show subcategories unless you are watching the parent category, I noticed when you click into the parent category, it is hard to see the categories that are joinable. So I changed all of these to match how @jive set GeoNetwork up to show subcategories as boxes.
I think for the most part those sub category names are self-explanatory no?
Like what else would you expect in a GeoNetwork user category, and if you were unsure, you’d click into the category and see the About topic if you are new?
That said I do agree having some sort of descriptor would be nice for some subcategories such as the committees once which is less clear - Committees - OSGeo Discourse
If the categories were not muted, so at least the summary category could show up, and we were disciplined about muting new subcategories as we create them… would that work?
If I compare with lists.osgeo.org I can at least search to find what is available. With this presentation of all categories I have no way to know what is available.
I had changed to mark parent categories that have subcategories as not muted, but I didn’t retroactively change that. As changing retroactively is not reversable. So if you had an account, those ones that got muted don’t unmute. I suppose we could change for existing users as nothing should be posted to those main categories unless they were moved as is sometimes done with QGIS.
If you browse incognito (as an anonymous user), that is more of a realistic view of what you will see. Yah it’s kinda odd that if you watch a subcategory but not the main one it doesn’t show in category view.
I’m indeed also missing a nice overview of the projects and their sub-categories. Experimenting on staging makes sense to me (As well as making sure we see what anonymous users see now, directly on the operational server).
It’s easy I think. I just need to accept that prompt that says do for all users.
I’ll go ahead and do that and update the ticket. I think it’s safe enough to mark all top level categories as tracking by default and allow users to turn it off later, since we have adding topics to the parent category if there is a child category. As long as we stick with this policy we should be okay. The only other thing we need to remember is as we add new projects we need to explicitly mark their parent category as default tracking.
The problem with staging is that we use that for testing loading mboxes from mailman and we don’t bother organizing things. It also doesn’t ever send email so can’t test out how email functionality is impacted. Anyway I switched to apply the normal for root categories and didn’t seem to make a difference for my account on production even though it said it applied to 917 users. Might be it’s a cached setting or I’m missing something.
The other thing I find a little odd, is on my discourse app on my phone, right below the categories, there is a section called Muted Categories and when you click on that you see the full descriptions of all the Muted parent categories.
Not sure why this doesn’t show on the regular web screen, as it was discussed this would show. Are any of you seeing a Muted Categories on your screen. Not sure if it’s just not there or it’s more hidden in the regular web browser view.
Sadly activity summary still seems to send for muted categories.
I reenabled mail list mode. Supposedly mail list mode does not send emails for muted categories, but it has an option to allow you to receive your own posts. So I think this is still the way to go. I’m testing now with mail list mode on to see what I get.
