Some Greasemonkey scripts I’ve used while browsing a variety of forums:
Usernotes: lets me color code and make notes on a user (e.g. red dot + “troll”, yellow dot + “either troll or funniest poster ever”, green dot + “helped me with y, facebook profile link”). Much more helpful than a generic join date, reputation, or profile. Count unread posts (e.g. it shows “30 (5)” meaning 30 total posts, 5 I haven’t read) Show x posts per page, where x is not an option for that particular forum
**Thread title takes me to first unread **instead of using a little image Highlight user’s posts within a thread Endless page which loads new posts when I reach the last post of a page Clean look (e.g. ignore avatars, remove unneeded navbars)
http://slickdeals.net is probably my current favorite forum design, but I’ve yet to check out Ravelry.
I have high hopes for your project and love your blog.
Way to entirely misrepresent what I was saying. My point is, there’s a pattern to which posts you respond to, and it contradicts your stated goal. Supposedly you’re here crowdsourcing ideas for your new software. Thus, it would behoove you to respond to novel ideas, and not ones you already have.
The thing you don’t seem to get is that you are an interloper. You are essentially spamming messageboards to get ideas. It’s in your best interest to actually try to ingratiate yourselves to people, rather than paint people with a negative brush because they dared have an issue with you. If multiple people on multiple boards are saying that it doesn’t seem like you are listening, YOU ARE THE ONE WHO HAS A PROBLEM. How hard is it to tell others that you think their idea is good?
That’s social problem solving 101, and it would behoove you to learn it if you are going to try and create communities. Your project is nothing like StackOverflow, where the very rules can be rude and nobody seems to care, where people can go around telling users how they are supposed to vote. None of that will fly on a real messageboard–unless you only want messageboards that are like our Pit.
Oh, and if you are constantly going back and rereading the threads you’ve opened, why in the world did I have to email you to get you to come back? I won’t do that this time, and we’ll see if you come back and respond to any posts, even if not mine.
(And that’s the logic for why I’m resurrecting the thread to respond to him. He says he’ll be back.)
It’s been a month and a half since ANYONE posted to this thread.
**codinghorror **doesn’t owe you an explanation for why he didn’t respond to your posts or jump all over your ideas, any more than he has an obligation to come back to this board because you emailed and told him to or reply to some post baiting him.
This isn’t the first time a new poster’s come along, posted a bunch of stuff, and then dropped off the face of the earth.
You…you’re stalking people and e-mailing them to demand they respond to you on the board? Do you do this with all new posters?
That’s really creepy and if it’s not a Warnable offense by board rules (maybe as a broad interpretation of the “board wars” clause, it should be*)
*That said, who would do that?
Just to be clear, the point of much of this feedback is that people don’t want action. We are happy with our simple ways, our homespun wool, our oxen, and especially with the weekly stoning of heretics.
More accurately, that there is a segment of the board population that is as you describe and are “loud” (more likely to voice and defend their stance, etc.). This position is not the nearly-universal one many seem to think. Some of those who find the board design et al woefully outdated and in need of updating have also chimed in, but others have long since given up even bothering to participate in threads like these because the “traditional” :cough: group is loud enough (and includes enough of the higher ups) that trying to change just about anything is an exercise in futility.
More options for paying members. They should be able to turn text ads on and graphic ads off.
Moderator-friendly graphic posting. Images can be posted by paying members, though each image requires approval by some moderator. The right sort of software could make the process reasonably painless. In other words images waiting for approval would be shunted to a special queue.
Extra-topically, on this board images should be limited to graphs and charts. The actual images would be hosted elsewhere. And those posting images should have to electronically sign a special form. Basically repeat the same rule 4 times and emphasize that this privilege can be suspended or taken away arbitrarily. Place graphic status on the user’s profile.
New user title: Groundskeeper. They are empowered to can spam, approve images, but not issue warnings to legitimate posters. With less power comes less responsibility. Maybe give them a special hidden forum. Of course we could do this now if we felt like it.
Add a user option whereby all posts lacking capital letters are put on auto-ignore.
Thanks for all the feedback on this and the other topics.
Discourse is 100% free, open source software. That hopefully doesn’t suck. We’ve got a long way to go, still, but hopefully we’ve built enough that you’ll agree this is a promising start.
We dialed back the overtly game like aspects of participation based on this, and other feedback. We focused heavily on improving the core UI and how it felt to participate, the act of posting, replying, reading, etc.
If you don’t want the layout to be dismissed, you’ll need to allow a huge amount of personal customization so that we could make it look like this board if we want to, or the Disney grade school forum like the way it appears now.
2 bits of feedback:
1 - I like how you handled the text of the post, it’s segregated from the other clutter type stuff like like the avatar’s etc. which makes it easily readable and clean. IMO that tended to be one of the biggest issues with other forums is trying to find the actual post content buried inside a lot of extraneous data. So I think you did well on that (it’s one of those simple little things that makes a big difference).
2 - I really want the ability (here on this forum) to click on a thread to make it generally disappear, sort last, greyed out, whatever. One of these days I will write a grease monkey script so I don’t have to skip past the same threads over and over again looking for something new or one I previously thought was interesting. Seems like it would be a nice feature in forum software.
Moriah: yes, theming and styling is all supported as a major priority. So the “look” can be changed, elements can be hidden, and so forth.
RaftPeople: once you log in, you can set the visibility of a topic via a control at the bottom (the assumption is that you reach the bottom, for now…) and set a topic to “muted”. Then it will never appear for you. You can play with this if you like in the sandbox at http://try.discourse.org
Thanks again for everyone’s feedback. It really was useful.
(And no, I don’t expect any established forum communities to switch to this, or any other new forum software overnight. This is a 5 year mission we’re on.)
Can you add a mailing list on the website so we can sign up for updates, especially for when it becomes available for general use (instead of having to go through Git)?
Your website sucks. I went to look, and you have boxes that contain content too big for the box, so that stuff gets cut off and you can’t read it, things that appear over top of other things, etc. I couldn’t even use your site to see what your software looks like.
For me, it would be much better as a control on the right of each thread in the thread list so I can flag them just based on title alone. Then when I return later it’s easy to skip over all the threads I know I just am not interested in.
I would replace the “Activity” data one the right of the threads for that kind of a control (personal opinion is having tons of stats and crap tends to look busy and cluttered, instead of so many numbers for the general stats about a thread, some visual item like a meter or bar showing size/amount of activity is cleaner, or alternatively hidden behind a “Show Stats” button or something).
On the main try.discourse.org page, I’m confused as to the benefit of showing the avatars for 5 participants. It doesn’t seem to be the first 5, or the most recent 5, but maybe the most prolific 5? That seems rather useless in cases where we can have dozens of people posting to one thread. In addition, the avatars are so reduced in size, that unless a board has few active members, it’s going to impossible to ID a poster from their mini-avatar.
My concern is similar to a issue I have with vBulletin 5 and its dependence on Ajax: can Google and other search engines get to all of the site? Search engines can’t scroll down to reload.
The other issue: it looks like you can browse older threads only by scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. One advantage of the old WWWThread-style boards is that one can jump through pages of thread listings.
Like others, I don’t understand the restrictive margins, nor can I for the life of me understand why I need to see avatars of the person with the most posts in the thread.
It’s been mentioned upthread, but if you want to sell a forum upgrade to an established community, sell us something that actually applies to their community. I’m not opposed to upgrading, but why bother if it’s just to see avatars in a much, much uglier interface?
Some really good suggestions have already been made. As a longtime SDMB member I can think of lots of neat things I’d like on here, but they don’t seem to be the focus of discourse. Some have already been brought up:
Customizable userid notes. SDMB has thousands of users, and it’s hard to remember who’s who. Quick, easy notes on users would be immensely helpful. Even as a mod it’s hell on wheels to get that info.
The idea of allowing moderated image embedding is great. I don’t want stupid GIFs all over the place but appropriate pictures, graphs, and exhibits would be fantastic in certain fora.
I’d also suggest that an EASY, GUI manner of building tables/graphs into posts would be just fantastic; I would have used such a function 250 times by now, at least.
