Why is the Privacy Guides homepage now bloated?

Site Development
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Recently, a change was made to privacyguides.org, where the hompages now has the top discussions and other elements of the forums. This poses two problems :

  1. Clutters the homepage and degrade the reading experience
    2)Encourage people who have never read the website to ask their question without learning first
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I agree, I think it’s better to move the discussion stuff to the discuss website itself instead of the homepage

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I agree, too.

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That’s what I was worrying about too, I feel like it would be better to have a button for the discuss page where new users won’t usually look but that still brings traffic in the website, maybe around the bottom of the website :thinking:

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That button already exists, and it’s in the perfect place, you can see it by bringing up the hamburger menu.

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Oh really? Didn’t notice that, then it’s working well if I didn’t notice it already

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Screenshot_20240706-145032~2
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Here :+1:

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  1. I don’t think this change encourages people to ask their question without learning first. Since we are mainly highlighting the top discussions, which will already have a lot of informative content themselves generally, if one of them catches their eye it should be a learning experience in itself.

  2. I want to highlight that Privacy Guides is a community first and foremost. The homepage has not changed at all in like, a year. I don’t think a static page you only read once and then ignore forever is indicative of what we’re working on or makes for a good first impression.

  3. There appear to be significant SEO improvements for the forum—in terms of forum posts showing up in more search results—since this change was made.

The design is not great though. This will be improved when this PR is merged:

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@jonah While I agree with some of your points, my main issue is that with someone with ADHD, unwanted recommendations are a trap. On a news site, those will make me lose 15 minutes. When I go to privacyguides.org, I want to see the recommendations. I don’t care about the homepage, because I will look at the menu and see the tool I need. Now, there are forum posts which will make me distracted.

Could there be at least a toggle (that is saved with cookies) to disable those recommendations items ?

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Maybe you could just bookmark https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/ to land straight to the recommendations page.

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If someone submits a PR to do so that could be possible.

Alternatively, this runs client side in a dedicated JavaScript file, so you could block that file in your content blocker and it wouldn’t affect anything else.

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If this negatively affects your experience this could be a good excuse to get familiar with uBO’s element picker and custom filters if you aren’t already.

I use this to clean up the UIs of various sites I frequent based on my personal preferences.

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Disabling javascript on the homepage also does it

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I did, but I still will prefer a toggle.