General Discussions seemed to fit well in the Microsoft Flight Simulator catagory.
Why was it moved down to Interests?
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not everyone is going to agree with these changes - but it’s their house - they can move the furniture around however they like…it DID take me a minute to find my recliner again tho…
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The revamped sidebar is very handy. Use the edit symbol and add your favorite topics, threads and tags if you like.
You can also access it from preferences and edit to your liking.
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While Jorg was away in his office, Mrs. Nuemann decided to rearrange the furniture.
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I get this error message below when I try to save my changes in the sidebar:
An error occurred: You have not completed all the user fields
Same for me! I checked all my other preference pages and on every page I can apply my changes except for the sidebar.
does not answer the question, this reorganisation is a mess, too many categories aligned with too many sub categories. over complexity is a good way to limit discussion, not improve it.
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I’ll pass on the sentiment, thank you 
If you actually click on the link in the banner, you’ll see the whole thought process that has gone into it and the goals of it. But reducing all that effort to a mess, sure, that will work as well 
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Yes, same here.
The following comments are purely my own personal thoughts:
Deciding on how to organise a forum such as this one is not completely straightforward. Achieving a balance between the number of different sub forums/categories and still having a forum that is relatively easy to navigate does present challenges. As has been mentioned in a previous post, there are details about the re-organization in this official post:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/2023-forum-reorganization-announcement/561010
I don’t think anything is ever set in stone concerning forum structure… There have been a number of “changes” over the last two years or so that these forums have been up and running.
In regards to the particular question about GD being under “interests”… I, for one, am quite keen to see how this works out as opposed to it being under “Microsoft Flight Simulator”.
One of the things that makes forums work is the involvement of their community. Finding the correct category to post threads in helps everyone. Having a GD category that is full of threads that could be located in more suitable categories doesn’t help the community. Hence, having GD under “Interests”, with lots of other categories in “Interests” may help folks choose the most appropriate category for their post.
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Agreed. Moving it out of the MSFS category “implies” that it’s for general discussion about anything at all. And we already know that isn’t the case, as anything non-sim related will be locked down. Particularly when this is in the topic description…
MS are free to reorganize the forum as they see fit. And in honesty, it sort of needed it. There were far too many categories IMHO. But there are some odd choices for sure. Overall, they did a good job, but there are a few choices that feel like rearranging your kitchen and storing your cutlery in the bedroom and pots and pans in the garden shed.
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Maybe a change to your user profile is required?
I think for changes to the sidebar to be saved, under preferences>profile this option has to be completed:
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Thanks! It seems this is exactly what was wrong.
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Ah yes, that worked.
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By all means, share them!
Interest as a category seems odd. At least in it’s naming. It just feels wrong to me for the content contained therein.
Putting General under Interests is very unintuitive IMHO as I explained in my previous post. That should be under the main MSFS category for the reasons previously given.
Completely getting rid of the cockpit builders category and grouping its posts in Hardware is another. Yes, technically it involves hardware, but anything home cockpit related is a unique category IMHO and those threads are going to get quickly buried by other hardware posts.
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The points you raise @Crunchmeister71 are fair!
One thing I would say is that to help mitigate the concern you may have for posts concerning home cockpits, these forums do allow for a tagging system that allows for threads to be more easily tracked, wherever on the forums they “live”.
In this particular case the relevant tag is:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/tag/home-cockpit
Making more effective use of the forum tagging system should enable everyone to organise the forums how they like to view them, including adding favourite tags to the sidebar. (Click the little pencil beside tags and add away)
With regards to the whole “interests” category- It could all be merged into MIcrosoft Flight Simulator- but that then becomes a huge category in its own right. I don’t think, based upon conversations I have been involved in, that given a blank piece of paper two different people will come up with the same forum organisation for these forums.
Note a list of all forum tags can be browsed here:
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I completely agree. I fully undertstand my opinion is exactly that. My opinion. And those opinions will differ from person to person.
However, I still think the one big poor decision is burying General Discussion under “Interests”. In my mind, that clearly belongs under the main MSFS category, and should be the main topic there, as it’s the main entry point for most folks.
It would be interesting to see a poll on this to see what other users think. Although that said, like I mentioned earlier, MS are free to organize their forums as they see fit.
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