7
votes
Should have access to your other groups when you're viewing a group
When you drill into a group, you have to back out to swap to another group, there should be a persistent navigation for this.
When you drill into a group, you have to back out to swap to another group, there should be a persistent navigation for this.
Definitely agreed - something I've been thinking about doing is letting users write custom markdown that will be displayed in the header area, which would go into the big gap between the logo/group and your username.
So that way, people could basically write their own "shortcuts" and organize them however they like. The basic version would be just listing groups you like to go to often, like
~music ~games ~newsor whatever, but people could also label them differently if they want, organize them into multiple rows, etc.What do you think of that idea? Interesting, or too complex?
I think that's an interesting end goal, but might be too complex for the start. I think just starting with an editor that accepts
~locations and displays a horizontal list would be enough. That way I could shortcut to~music ~games ~tildes, but not overly complicate the syntax, or the rendering. If anything, just a dropdown list off the username would be good enough, imo.Are you looking for a short-term stub to help people nav around? It'll work for that, but honestly all people will be doing with it is just linking their subscriptions. All you'd need to do is adapt the Home group list into a simple nav bar up top. That'll last until we start expanding the hierarchy.
When that time comes, though, a simple top nav bar isn't going to cut it. Reddit's horizontal nav bar across the top also kinda sucks, even if you use RES and manage it and the content yourself, I usually forget it's up there.
When you get to the hierarchy, the only way I see that working is a bit like outlook, with a nav bar on the left that pops-out on hover/click, presenting a listing that's similar to usenet newsreaders or outlook's email/folders. If/when the site has a proper calendar that can go in there too - something like a dashboard.
What might work up top is if users create/publish/subscribe to custom sets rather like multi-reddits. Think of it as a way to create multiple 'homes' and have them easy to find up top.
The idea of a markdown based shortcut to arrange your navigation preferences is super cool!
I could definitely see a few common markdowns users could choose from (e.g., "most visited", "random", etc.) that picked a few groups to show you.
A hierarchical group view (when/if that actually starts happening, anyways) would be nifty too
It could further be extended to let the user add / remove information they do / don't want to see, e.g., do I want the group's default sidebar to show? public post metadata? etc.
Seems related to #2 here -- perhaps the top of each group's sidebar could have a directory-tree like structure of links, e.g.:
~parent
|
---~current_group
|
------~current_group.child1
|
------~current_group.child2
|
---~other_group_at_same_level
Not quite, I read that as using the sidebar as a place to describe the current topic the user is viewing.