In this article
The gifts on a profile can be sorted into named collections, shown as filter pills above the grid. One gift can sit in several of them, and the visitor uses the pills to look at one set at a time instead of scrolling everything.
It is an organising tool, and like most organising tools the interesting question is what the arrangement says about you.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Group gifts into collections a visitor can filter by.
- check_circle Name them so they describe the things.
- check_circle Know when a collection is not worth having.
- check_circle Avoid advertising what your profile is worth.
A gift can belong to more than one collection, so nothing has to be filed in a single place.
interests First, whether you need any
Collections solve a problem that only appears at a certain size. A profile with eight gifts on it is already readable, and adding filter pills above eight items produces a piece of furniture rather than an improvement — the visitor now has a navigation system to get through something that fitted on one screen.
The point where they start earning their place is when the grid has stopped being browsable: when there is enough there that a visitor scrolls, gives up, and forms an impression from whatever was at the top. At that size a few honest groupings genuinely help somebody find the thing they came to look at.
So the first decision is not how to organise. It is whether the tab is currently confusing anybody, and for most accounts the answer is no.
Two ways to group the same gifts
The mechanics are identical. What a visitor takes away is not.
palette Named after the things
trending_down Named after the money
Sort by what the things are. Sorting by what they cost turns a profile into a price list.
volunteer_activism Collections on a channel are a thank-you list
A channel can do the same thing with what its readers have sent, and the effect is different because the audience is different. Gathering supporters' gifts into one collection is a public acknowledgement, and for a small community it is a genuinely nice one — people like seeing that the thing they sent is on the wall.
It is also, unavoidably, a leaderboard. Everybody who supported the channel in some other way is absent from it, and everybody who sent something modest can see what sits above them. That is fine when the collection is a wall of everything, and corrosive when it is a wall of the expensive things.
The workable version is the inclusive one: one collection, everything in it, no ordering that implies a ranking. If some readers gave more, they know, and so do you. It does not need to be on display for the rest of the channel to read.
settings Organising them
- Check whether the tab is actually hard to read Under a dozen gifts, it is not.
- Open a gift and add it to a collection New name, or an existing one.
- Put it in more than one where that helps Nothing is being filed away.
- Name collections after the things Not after their value.
- Keep it to three or four pills The filter row is scrollable too.
- On a channel, include everybody A wall, not a ranking.
This page arranges one part of a profile. The curriculum step is the whole of it: which settings decide what a stranger can learn about you, how they interact, and why the defaults are worth an afternoon.
At a glance
- 1Gift collections
Sort gifts into named collections visitors can filter.
- 2Few gifts?
Under a dozen gifts, collections add nothing.
- 3Don't rank by value
Value-sorted collections advertise to scammers.
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