Opening Ask category without the 3 sub-category blocks on the top?

As my focus was and still is on Ask, I would like to know if I can customize the view and how I do it.

The entry point of Discussion is not bad. But I get overwhelmed when there are 150 new requests.
I prefer to take smaller portions and focus just on some Categories.

I saw https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/ask/6/l/new is not a bad entry point but the 3 sub-categorie Blocks are disturbing the flow of reading.

The topics are appearing anyway in the list below.

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You can customize the view to one of these things:
image

However, I am not sure any of those are really what you are looking for.

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I have it there on new, this is ok. But if I do open Discussion it shows all categories.

To focus on Ask I do use the link above. This has the downside of this 3 blocks of the subcategories I don’t want to display.
Otherwise i will have a wound finger at night because of scrolling :laughing:

I can think of many possibilities here:

First

… you could just start at Ask in English - Fedora Discussion and (for example) #português topics separately.

Second

… there are other ways the page for /ask could be configured.

As now (boxes with featured topics):

Just boxes:

Just rows:

Rows with featured topics:

My idea with the current layout was to primarily for when the second nav (which selects the subcategory filter) is set to “none” rather than “all” — there, the top-level category acts like “start here”, with just the FAQ posts and etc., from Ask Fedora itself and nothing from Ask in English Ask in Other Languages or Common Issues.

Third

… right now, we have user-selectable “dark” and “light” themes for the site. We could make one that also does something different with this layout. I don’t like this idea but am putting it here for reference. :classic_smiley:

Fourth

… we could use an existing theme component (Discourse add-on) which provide more options:

… and there are probably more.

Fifth

We could write our own theme component, which gives even more flexibility.

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You can mute the categories that you don’t want to see in the Categories page. Go to the top page of the category then, find the bell link, and select “Muted”.

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Oh, there is another possibility, although I’d like to try things as they are for a bit first — see Ask Fedora merge structure second thoughts. That is, get rid of the separate Ask IN English and just make that Ask Fedora. Then, don’t have either boxes or rows at the top — basically the same as the News & Announcements category.

Thanks for the input but I do not want to mute them. I just want a list of everything underneath ask , so that I can sort by new or unread. Without the blocks of sub categories on the top.

On Discussion they are not on either (The colored blocks). I would like to see how many persons would complain when they are on one day of the other.

For me nothing is separate underneath ask.

Just to see the waste of space and the redundant information I have on my extra wide screen:

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I think maybe what we want is a theme component to show the category boxes only when subcategory posts are not included.

The correct way would be, to let everyone configure, as needed or wanted. A collapse button on the right corner and this boxes would be out of the way.

Maybe! Too much per-user difference can lead to its own confusion. I’d rather find a general solution that works better for (at least almost) everyone.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the “second thoughts” structure is might actually be best:

  • Ask Fedora
    • Common Issues
      • Proposed Common Issues
      • Archived Common Issues
    • Ask in Languages Other than English

It’d make it a little harder to highlight the FAQ / Intro posts (they’d just be pinned posts in the top-level Ask Fedora), and it would make English more “assumed default” rather than explicit.

We could also consider moving Common Issues up to the top level, but I really, really don’t want to have more than 7 top level options. [1]


  1. 5 would be even better… ↩︎

I not asked to change how the categories are ordered. I just wanted a make up in the css/html/js
to hide/un-hide the 3 boxes. As you can see above with my widescreen I always have to scroll to see the list with all information underneath it, I am used to have.

To bring this ahead, should I ask this question on https://meta.discourse.org/ on my selves?

You can!

I’m going on the theory that if you find the boxes inconvenient, that’s a sign that we could have a better general design.

Before we can say this generally we do need more data/feedback. As I’m a creature of habits, I just wanted an option.
For new users this might be very helpful. Getting used with this kind of work might be the right for them.

As a last resort, you can hide the subcategory blocks with a custom filter in uBlock Origin:

discussion.fedoraproject.org###header-list-area
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I not understood this …

That’s a popular ad-blocking browser extension supporting custom filters.
Since you don’t want to see the subcategory blocks, hide them using a custom ad filter.
I.e. install the ad blocker, navigate to its settings and add the mentioned filter to the list.

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This worked very well. Thanks a lot !

The link for Firefox:

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