You’ll probably be using the sidebar without thinking much about it. Lots of web sites have them these days. Did you know that this sidebar can be edited to make it better suit the way you use the forum. You can add/remove entries on it, add to the list of categories displayed to show your favourites, and a few other thing too. I’m not going to re-invent the documentation that someone else has written so well, so…
An overview of features in Discourse Sidebar - documentation / users - Discourse Meta
I don’t think about it too much. . . But didn’t “Everything” recently disappear from the sidebar? And “Tags” appear, even though I haven’t defined any?
Subliminal, probably. . .
Those changes did happen. As part of the 25/26th June outages I had to rebuild the forum app. Prior to that the sidebar had been a test feature but since I last rebuilt the software it had become a standard feature and the latest rebuild brought us up to the current standard. I suspect, but don’t know for certain, that if you’d customised the ‘test’ sidebar you’d have kept your customisations.
Tags - you’ve got the standard settings at the moment. You can edit the list if you like, or just collapse it. I think tags might be something we could start to use but I’m not going to push them just yet.
I’ve just done a little more work with tags. There are now tags for weather station manufacturers, e.g. Davis, Ecowitt, some specific station types for those manufacturers, some weather software, e.g. CumulusMX, WD and some web templates, e.g. Saratoga, PWS Dashboard. The list of tags isn’t complete. I think that many of you will be able to create a new one if one is missing.
You might be thinking “Why do I need tags?” Well one way to use them is to mark your message in different ways. For example, if you’re having problems setting up WD connected to your Wittboy station to send a particular value to your PWS Dashboard website you have to decide which category to put it into. So you might choose WD which means people interested in WD might see your question.
However, if you tag it with the tags ‘wd’, ‘ecowitt’ and ‘pws-dashboard’ then people looking at those tags may also see your message and they might know the answer. We’re not really used to using tags just yet, but I thought that if I started the ball rolling by creating some and starting to use them the we could come back to look at how they can be used in a little while.
When you start looking at features you discover all sorts of goodies!
I can set up ‘watched words’ that when seen in a post will auto-tag the post. I’ve set up some already but I will add more as I get a chance.
Also, if you look at the top of the ‘Topics’ or ‘Categories’ views you’ll see an ‘all-tags’ drop down menu. If you select a tag from this menu then you’ll see all messages in that view that have the tag you’ve selected. So for example, if you’re in the PWS Dashboard category and select ‘ecowitt’ then you’ll see messages that refer to both PWS Dashboard and Ecowitt.