After adding the ~health.coronavirus group the other day, I've just made a couple more updates to try and keep the site more usable as the flood of news and information keeps coming in.

First, I just added a bar in the header when you're on the home page that has links to two "specialized views" in it. One of these views will show only coronavirus topics, and the other one will filter out all the coronavirus topics. These should be helpful for both logged-in users as well as logged-out ones (who previously didn't have the option of unsubscribing from ~health.coronavirus to hide those topics more easily).

For the purposes of these views, a "coronavirus topic" is one that's either inside ~health.coronavirus or has the "coronaviruses.covid19" tag on it (in any group).

The way I did this was definitely pretty hacky and isn't intended to stay around over the long term, so please let me know if you notice any strange behavior with them.

Second, earlier today I set up a scheduled post in ~health.coronavirus for general chat, questions, minor updates, and so on. The first one is here, and that will continue posting every day for now. If the activity in it starts dropping I'll probably reduce the frequency, but I think it should be good as a general spot for discussion for now.

It's looking like we might be living in this situation for weeks or months, so I'm definitely open to making other changes that will help keep the site usable and enjoyable during it. Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions, thanks!

As suggested, I've created a new group now named ~health.coronavirus that we can use to try to keep the topics about the coronavirus somewhat more quarantined contained. I've subscribed everyone for now, but if you want to segregate the information more easily I'd suggest unsubscribing from it (which you can do from its sidebar or the groups list) and visiting it individually when you want to look at coronavirus news.

I know there are probably some quibbles about the name, but I decided to go with this one for a few reasons, including that it's by far the more commonly-known and used term overall, it's generally easier to type (especially on mobile), and some XKCD-style "the spider" logic.

One specific thing we need to discuss is how to decide when some topics should be in there vs. some of the other groups, especially since there are so many widespread effects. Like most moderation-ish subjects, we won't be able to draw a perfect line, but I think in general we should try to put more "general" updates/advice/discussion in the new group, while topics can go into other groups only when their impact is especially heavy on that group's subject.

For example, I think it makes sense for the announcement that NCAA games will be played without fans to stay in ~sports, because that's a very major announcement for a sports event. E3 being cancelled similarly makes sense to stay in ~games. Those are major, important announcements regardless of the cause being the coronavirus.

Deciding when something goes in ~news vs. ~health.coronavirus will be more difficult, but I'm sure we can probably do a reasonable job of it by trying to base it on only putting the very most significant events in ~news. It's not incredibly important to have everything categorized perfectly and most people probably subscribe/check both groups anyway, so we'll just do the best we can.

I'm going to start trying to move a lot of the existing topics into there, and I'm sure some others will too. This might be kinda chaotic for a bit.

I think it would also be great to start trying to put together some good resources on the ~health.coronavirus wiki. If some people are willing to start taking that on (and feel free to post a topic in there to ask for help/suggestions), it would be much appreciated. And if you don't have wiki permissions but would like to be a part of that, message me about it or leave a comment here asking, and I can give you the ability to create/edit pages.

Anything other feedback or discussion about it to start with? Should we set up any regularly scheduled posts in there or anything?