My suggestion (also taking into account @pevaquark’s): even if Conversations are moved off the front page, they should still be just 1 click away.
They will be available on the dropdown, one click away.
1 Like
Are you still “up in the air” about having a schematic that shows people how all these pieces connect together ?
Does the Discourse vendor have a generic one already? All we would have to do is fine tune it to reflect the unique category names you have set up…
I have no idea what you mean by a schematic.
It would look something like this…
Of course, I don’t actually understand our current layout, so I can only put up empty boxes, with an appearance of sensible organization…
Perhaps a better term would be “flowchart” … everybody loves a good flowchart!
Just a point from an occasional lurker and infrequent commenter. I find the discourse format unhelpful in finding active threads and topics of interest (admittedly purely* religious topics don’t interest me). There doesn’t seem a way to find “hot topics” or sort recent from otherwise. Am I missing something that’s available?
*History of religion, comparative and cultural aspects, archeological investigation, analysis of text and language - everything except testaments of faith or their converse - do interest me.
Yes you are missing something. Look at the buttons, for example, for “top” (Peaceful Science). You can also mute the theology tag in your settings.
Look at the menu bar on front page (https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/), and play around with that to see how to find good topics.
Make sense?
Wow, Joshua! Don’t you sleep at all? 
Yes, that’s helpful. Thanks.
2 Likes
@swamidass is an advanced social AI developed by the real Joshua Swamidass. You are now a part of an advanced Stanford Prison Experiment simulation. 
5 Likes
Bad idea since the Conversation topic has orders of magnitude more replies / more interest than any other category.
We can see how it goes. It might change back. They are still search visible and also visible with one click from home page.
Thus far, the main effects that I see are:
-
The front page shows less;
-
I need to click “Unread” to get to the interesting stuff.
1 Like
Is that a problem? It kinda cleans up our public presence on the front page, which is its main goal.
1 Like
It’s not a problem for me, because by now I know my way around.
I do wonder whether the front page is now too clean. Thinking back to when I first joined the site, if I had seen the cleaned up front page, maybe I would have decided that there wasn’t enough interesting discussion going on, for it to be worth joining.
3 Likes
I was thinking that the point was to “clean” the front page a little so that more interesting stuff (scholars, featured conversations, Office Hours, etc.) could be developed and not get lost. @swamidass may give more insight, but I was getting the impression was this was the first part of a multi-part plan for the forum.
2 Likes
@nwrickert We may need to add “directions” at some point ot the forum to point people to more conversations. Not sure…
@Jordan that is right.
1 Like
The only thing that we would all agree that we are trying to do is:
A) shield newcomers from conversations to or from Trust Level 0 participants.
The other thing that I would hope most of us agree upon is to:
B) shield newcomers from a dozen threads on “ID-can-be-proved-VERSUS-ID-can’t-be-proved”, and
C) shield newcomers from a dozen threads on “Evolution-doesn’t-need-to-be-Guided-VERSUS-Evolution-does-need-to-be-Guided.”
If your changes aren’t accomplishing (A), (B), or (C), then you are probably causing more trouble than good with the change.
It’s kind of weird for Conversation to have subcategories that appear in Latest (like Featured), because if I go to see what’s in Conversation, I’m double-seeing the stuff in the subcategories.