I may be the biggest outlier, in that I -joined- instead of just lurking because trying to figure out the old system felt like too much work. So I just read all the stuff from links on the OG site. Since I was already familiar with Discourse, when the migration happened (well, not too long after, I gave it around a month for the bugs to work out) I jumped in.
I access The Dope only on my computer, not my phone, because I can’t read tiny print and zooming in means reading only a few words a line. I was wary of discourse and crabbed a bit about having to learn its ways, but since I adapted, I’ve liked it waaaaay better than vBulletin, which was a frustrating PITA.
I don’t understand how DIscourse is a worse computer experience. I’m on a Mac, and my default browser is Chrome. Does that have anything to do with it?
I can read the Dope on my phone but I can’t research and compose a long post.
On a computer Discourse is fine, despite its many quirks. vBulletin had even more; I can’t understand the nostalgia for it.
My phone is useless for such purposes; I would also be reading about three words at a time. I’m using Firefox on a Mac desktop and while I still have a grumble or two I find Discourse overall a big improvement over vBulletin. Once I got used to navigating with the sidebar I much prefer the endless and continuously updating page; and the quote function is massively better.
Same here.
The only thing I dislike about Discord is that there’s absolutely no way to just display the text of a thread all at once, or a hundred posts at a time.
The way Discord will only display a handful of posts at once and forces you to use its embedded software to scroll through content feels actively hostile to me.
Everything else is either ‘just fine’ or ‘better than before.’
^Discourse. Discord is another thing all together.
Okay. There’s two things I dislike about Discourse.
Laptop mostly, sometimes the desktop. I don’t do much on the Web with my phone.
The main issue for me is that it’s a handful of words (in tiny type, even) in a sea of white space. There’s about a post and a half visible on my screen at any one time, as long as we’re talking short posts - maybe 2/3 of this one will be visible to me at once after posting.) To follow a thread, I’d have to scroll almost continuously. (And the clunkiness of the scrolling kicks in then.)
It’s been two years since we had to abandon vBulletin, so it’s hard for me to say for sure, but I don’t remember the reply boxes being so damned small. I already can’t see the first four lines of this post as they show up in the box. If I didn’t have this post pretty well organized in my head, I’d be hard pressed to write it here.
And I’m sure this isn’t everybody, but still: I’m the sort who’d remember that there was something I wanted to reply to, back on page eight of the thread. I wouldn’t remember what it was until I got there, but I would quickly be able to locate it once I did. Now, of course, there is no page eight, just amorphous space.
I miss that internal geography, though honestly I’m not sure it would be useful in Discourse anyway, because it relied on being able to scan fairly quickly through fifty posts, which wouldn’t be something I could do here.
FWIW, I was familiar with Discourse before the Dope moved to this format, though I didn’t know it by name. Comments over at Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo have been in Discourse for many years. But it wasn’t an environment that encouraged me to stick around and engage with other commenters; if the post had something I wanted to respond to, I’d say my piece, then move on.
These days, comment threads at the Balloon Juice blog is where I spend more time than anywhere else. (I’m lowtechcyclist in blogworld.) I’m finally getting used to the way threads quickly die once a new front-page post is up. This seems to be the norm at blogs, each thread is a floating crap game with conversations partly about the front-page post, and partly about anything and everything, until a front-pager puts up a new post, and the entire conversation moves there.
That’s still strange to me: the way message boards work makes a hell of a lot more sense to me, with different conversations going on in different threads at the same time, sometimes lasting for a short time, and sometimes going on for days - or even resuming after being quiet for days.
And if Discourse didn’t totally suck ass for me, I’d be back here in a heartbeat. The Dope was my online home for over 20 years, and given that ‘online’ wasn’t even a thing 30 years ago, that’s saying a great deal.
But I remember the circumstances of how we got here, and believe me, the purpose of this post isn’t to try to motivate a change. (I’m not even sure who would have the keys to this place to change things up anyway.) But since I did stimulate some further conversation, i figured I at least should explain where I was coming from, as best I could.
I’m glad Discourse is working for a lot of you. And I really figured at first, back in 2020 when we made the switch, that I’d get used to it and that it would work for me too. But it just never happened.
I don’t understand your comment. When I look at your post on my cheap-ass Moto phone I see the following text, which entirely fills the screen.
When I look at my laptop I see a few more words, although there is white space to the side.
What device are you using and what skin?
You like what you like, so I won’t try to convince you you’re wrong or something. But to address two limitations you raised on the desktop:
- The size of the reply box can be adjusted. Click on the solid bar that separates the reply box from the posts and you can drag it up or down to resize.
- To remember a post you want to go back to, you can click the three dots at the bottom of the post, then choose the icon that looks like a ribbon. This will bookmark that post for easy access later.
- You can also select the text you want to reply to and hit reply, but keep reading. It will paste that into the reply box, and you can minimize the reply box while you continue to read the rest of the thread. You can do this multiple times, so when you get to the end of the thread, you’ll have the quoted posts all waiting for you in the box.
Firefox browser on a Lenovo ThinkPad running Windows 10. Theme is Straight Dope Light.
When I look at my laptop I see a few more words, although there is white space to the side.
My laptop screen is 10 3/4" wide, and the text covers less than 5" width. White space to the left of the text, white space between text and slider, and white space to the right of the slider.
I appreciate your willingness to try to help out. With the second limitation, that really is an ‘I like what I like’ (or maybe ‘my brain works how my brain works’) sort of thing. Short version would be that if I’m catching up on the last 3-4 pages (speaking vBulletinese) of posts, I wouldn’t know what I wanted to reply to until I caught up: Dopers are an intelligent bunch, and most of the things in the first couple of new pages that I’d have bookmarked or quoted would be stuff that someone else had already replied to and said what I would have. I wouldn’t really know until the end what it was I wanted to say in response to whom.
The reply box, OTOH, has more definable problems. It’s both too small and too big at the same time - too small in its default state to show much of my reply at once, yet that default state is already taking up half the screen, leaving maybe part of one post visible at the same time.
Like you say, I can adjust the size of the reply box (or even go to fullscreen composer mode) but it comes down to having too little of one to have enough of the other.
We are looking at the end of globalization and possibly world war famine coming in the next few years, north America is one of the best places to ride it out.
Does North America run Discourse or vBulletin?
Yikes, wrong thread.
Given the way things are going these days, though, I can see how it would have been easy to read the thread title the way you did.
Good observation.
It does seem to me that Discourse had led to posts that aren’t actually all that long looking longer to many. Throw in so many more people reading on their phone, and posts just seem longer.
The other things I don’t like are (1) the constant small updates rather than waiting until stuff is mature (2) that it has to sit there and download the whole app the first time you use it and (3) the dropping of backwards compatibility when such is not technically necessary (largely related to 1). It just seems to me that the best sites keep it simple, and then add everything on top of the simple, so it degrades gracefully.
I also don’t like how “opinionated” it can be in places. There are policy decisions that were decided on the development level, without easy ways to override them. At most, those sorts of things should be options. Discourse is not Stack Exchange, where the software was tailor made for a specific site.
But I do like a lot of the little bells and whistles. I don’t understand what people find hard about navigating it… And I like that we were able to turn off most of the silly “Web 2.0”-style features that were never necessary. I like that it’s open source. And I do like that we have active development, even if I think they should concentrate more on not breaking things by making sure new additions are added on top of an existing solid codebase, and that a minimal version (that includes basic posting) remains functional.