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Communities drop-down/switcher upgrades
The communities "drop-down"/"switcher" menu next to the user profile could do with a few tweaks. The communities appearing there are sorted after order of community creation. That is: Writing, Codidact Meta, The Great Outdoors, ... This is a strange default order.
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For searchability, it would make more sense if communities were displayed in alphabetic order.
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For user-friendliness, it would make sense if the communities where the user is most active are those appearing on top. I don't think we need to over-engineer some sort of automatic identification system for this, but perhaps just give the users the possibility to customize the order (as seen Somewhere Else).
Similarly, the communities from https://codidact.com/ are also displayed in a strange order - not necessarily random(?) but based on activity or such? This also ought to be in alphabetic order.
Grouping based on some subjective evaluation about which community content that is more closely related to other communities (i.e Mathematics is close to Physics is close to Electrical Engineering...) is bound to get fuzzy and based on subjective opinions, so I would advise against that.
Perhaps with the exceptions of Codidact Meta and Codidact Proposals, that we might allow to get special status: as in always placed first/last in the list.
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Any default order we implement -- including the current one, which is order of creation -- will be suboptimal sometimes. Sorting by activity or reputation also means the order might change from day to day, which those with stronger "muscle memory" will hate. I agree we should reconsider what the default, static order should be, but I think we also need to make this customizable.
I'd like to see some way (TBD) to specify an order, and have that order be followed in all of the following places:
- the community switcher (dropdown list)
- the dashboard
- the "all communities" list when I am viewing my own profile
This way, I can put the communities I care most about -- regardless of how much reputation I've accumulated there or how many posts I've made -- at the top.
The list at https://codidact.com used to follow the same order as the switcher, but that page is a separate "front door" for our network, a static page to attract people to our communities, so we reordered it to put our most active communities first (aside from Meta, which, along with Proposals, we put at the end). That page is not tied into the software that runs the network, so we can't personalize it.
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