as many of you probably noticed, a lot of users ask about same issues without searching for already provided answers first. you know, the usual stuff like “why are colours in my animated gif blinking?”, “why are my exports blurry?”, “how can i reduce number of colours?” etc.
i was thinking about writing few threads covering the most common topics, however, due to the nature of the forum i’m afraid those too will soon get burried deep in the forum and ignored.
so, it seems to me it would be useful to have separate ‘tutorials’ category, which would make easier searching for (and reffering to) the answers to most common problems with how to use aseprite, export artworks, create palettes and so on.
second idea is to make “categories” page as default frontpage and put tutorials on top so the users are at least a little bit more encouraged to actually click there and check for existing answers instead of immediately starting new thread. also order of categories shouldn’t change based on the latest threads.
i would also add ‘bookmarks’ link as an addition to top menu. i don’t know about you, but i rarely use them myself (and i can imagine many users don’t even know they exist), but i’d use bookmarks much more if they haven’t been ‘hidden’ in my profile.
Hi @Olga_Galvanova, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’ve enabled the Bookmarks section in the topmenu, and change the Categories as the default landing page instead of Latest. I never liked the Categories as it looks like more noisy, but it might be more helpful for newcomers (and have the same Latest list too, so it’s fine so far).
About the Tutorials category, at the very beginning of the forums I posted some items in the Help category with a “How to …” to explain how to do specific tasks. It was useful to fill the forum with some content initially, but it works more like a “Tutorials” thing.
I’m not sure if this new category should be called “Tutorials” or “Guides” (like Steam guides), and if it will solve the problem of duplicated questions, but might help in some cases. Also I’m not sure if each tutorial should have some specific length as a minimum requirement.
hi, thanks!
i think “guides” is also suitable name. i imagine it could contain both guides how to use aseprite as well tutorials how to do stuff - or at least links?
i’m not sure about the length requirement, that seems a bit tricky. but it might be useful to have some restrictions to prevent things like vague one or two sentences long posts. also adding new topics might be limited to ‘members’ as well? i don’t know.
i was checking some of your topics, and that’s really nice bunch of content (although it seems like images hosted on imgur are gone)! but it shows the issue with forum like this: everything will eventually sink to the bottom and obscurity. so imho, these are good candidates to be eventually moved to the new section.
and of course, i don’t think the problem with users asking about same things over and over again will be solved completely. that won’t happen ;]
but dedicated section could help a bit. at least it could be useful for other users to quickly find and post the link to relevant topic.
btw. speaking of moving topics between categories (if you decide that it is a good idea): i don’t know if you can do it in bulk, but if that’s something what would have to be done manually topic by topic, i’m volunteering to do that.
After using a little the site with the categories by default, I’m not quite convinced that it looks good, I don’t know why, but it looks less welcoming and too noisy.
Some other opinions will be welcome. About the Guides categories, I’ll create the category later and see how it can be visible in some way.
The first Discourse forum I ever used had Categories view as default, and I’ve been switching to it on other Discourse forums as soon as I could, because it doesn’t feel as desolate, and because when I come to the forum to find specific information or to make a post, it makes it easier to get started. When browsing casually, as I suspect a lot of us regular visitors do, the Categories list is pretty useless, but I still prefer to have it there. However, I also only use Discourse on PC, so I have the screen space to make it work. On small screens, Categories add a whole bunch of extra scrolling before you get to any posts, so it’s probably not a wise default, unless Discourse lets you set it as default only for people with larger screens.
Is there any sort of mode that shows the categories and the most recent few posts in each one, like some classic forum software do? I think that would be a good default, as it’s less visually cluttered but delivers similar information, while also showing users what kind of posts are in each category.
The mobile version shows something like that (boxes with 3 or 4 posts inside). I’ve changed the Categories page to show something like that on desktop. What do you think? Is not that bad
The old categories style should remain available, as it’s more useful for casual browsing
It needs styling changes, as it’s inconsistently styled with the other categories, and at least on the dark theme, it’s a bit hard to read because the thread titles are styled as regular links rather than as the larger, higher-contrast thread titles elsewhere.
It doesn’t seem to distinguish between topics that have new posts and those that don’t, that’s a problem.
It looks like just one style for the Categories page can be selected (and cannot be customize from the user’s preferences )
I think the style is correct in the mobile version, but in desktop it looks like they preferred to show links as regular desktop links to know that they are actually links. I have tested some changes but it didn’t get better. I’m not sure what to do here.
It looks like there is an indicator for topics with new posts:
Aye, there is, I noticed it after making my post. It’s really not enough ):
Unfortunately it looks like Discourse generates entirely different HTML for mobile, so this might take more than just some CSS tweaks to fix, it would take tweaking the HTML to output different classes, and it doesn’t look like it would be a trivial change. Ugh.
I was going to ask if we could maybe add a new category for extensions (like (dithering patterns)[New pattern fill / new dithering matrix - #6 by JJHaggar], or palettes, or any other thing we could make in the future), but after seeing the new main page for Aseprite community, I think we probably have too many categories :S
I totally understand this feeling:
Maybe some of them could be merged together?
For example:
Announcementes
Help & Guides
Artwork
Bug Reports & Feature Request
Development & Site Feedback
Scripts & Extensions
Uncategorized
That would be “only” seven categories XD What do you think?
(Also, the fixed order for categories looks like a very nice idea to me ^^)
hi! imo merging help and guides would render the whole idea of guides pointless, because it will create the same issue which made me to come up with it in the first place: help understandably generates a lot of threads, which means all the old - often valuable - threads will be moved down and no one will find them.
other than that i’m not against merging categories. i took a look at usage of categories and managed to cram them into 6 sections:
Announcements & Site feedback — both rarely used (23 anouncements in total and 2 per month side feedbacks)
Guides — (unknown)
Help & Development — help is the most used category by far (23 threads per month). development is technically help, just more specific and some people already put questions from development to help category anyway (2 per month) [note]
Bug Reports & Feature requests — this merge might have a sense for david as these might be his most visited categories? (8 and 9 per month respectively, 17 per month total)
Scripts & Extensions — (6 per month + unknown)
Artwork etc. (etc. = uncategorized) — uncategorized seems to be just full of threads people didn’t bother to categorize, be it help, feature requests, development etc. i’d personally prefer if a new thread had to have a category. (9 per month for artwork and 3 per month for uncategorized) btw. i have artwork muted, so it’s hidden in my list.
[note:] here’s another thing which confuses me from time to time: by description the scripts category is the place to ask questions about scripts, but i personally always felt more inclined to put script related questions to help instead and leave scripts just for publishing.
so, maybe it’s worth to consider to have categories solely for posting specific “info” (announcements, publishing of scripts, extensions etc.) with possible related discussion in these threads and then have everything being “question” or starting with “i need help with…” in help no matter if those are questions about scripting or compiling or functionality of aseprite?
I’m wondering @dacap , could we maybe “pin” or “stick” posts so they won’t go down and get lost? Can it be done on on Discourse? (I’m too old, I just know about the good old forums XD)
If we can “pin” some posts (or even just one), that could solve the issue!
I prefer to keep the new Guides category (instead of merging it with Help)
The only change that I would like to introduce is “Scripts & Extensions”, and make the category only to publish scripts/extensions/plugins (and use Help to ask for help about the Lua API).
The development category is confusing (should we use for C++ questions? Lua questions? a devblog?) and probably something to remove (I would prefer to use GitHub for technical questions, and even more when they are completely related to compilation problems)
I’ve been using the new Categories front page and unfortunately it only marks new threads but not new replies, so I’ve been missing most of the new posts on the forum. I think the previous version of it was more useful, since it had both the categories and the content from Latest.
I agree that this forum should have fewer categories listed. It would make the Categories page a better default, since it wouldn’t be so overwhelming. However! They don’t need to be merged - Discourse supports nested categories, and these are all linked rather tidily in the Categories list. Here’s an example from another forum:
that’s true… on the other hand i just came from section Unread(1) - haven’t missed anything so far.
but yeah, if there was a way to highlight threads with new replies, it would be better.
)
