We can turn off the tags dropdown ... should we?

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#1

The widget at the top of each page shows the current category, subcategory, and tags, serving as both breadcrumbs and a filter.

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The categories behavior can’t be changed, but the tags dropdown can be disabled with a setting, so it’d just be:

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This might make the interface less confusing. I personally don’t find the tags filter very helpful here.

However, note that on Ask there is an additional filter for the “Solved” plugin (which lets users mark an answer as the solution to their problem). That looks like this:

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and with the greater volume on that site I can actually see this being useful (both for people looking for similar questions with a solution, and for people looking to answer unsolved queries on a topic they know about).

What do you think?

#2

One other consideration is that this widget / pattern is common across all Discourse instances — see in action for example at open source photography forum pixls.us. So turning it off might be less confusing to people not familiar with Discourse but more confusing to people who are used to it.

#3

I think the question to ask first is, do we actively use tags? With few exceptions, generally the answer is “no”. The only place where tags are actively used is for CommBlog review requests (which may be a better category to itself instead of mixing with CommOps and using tags).

So, I prefer to hide it from the navigation bar because we don’t have a clear strategy or focus around how we use tags. At least, for now. We can always turn it back on later if we change our minds.