# How are people feeling about Discourse? **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [November 25, 2020, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428 "2020-11-25T16:40:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![discobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/discobot/32/570_2.png) [@discobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/discobot)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2020, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/141 "2020-12-25T21:23:27Z")
> 🔮 Outlook good ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2020, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/142 "2020-12-25T21:38:03Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > There’s a difference between a bug report and folks wailing that “your product is not identical to the old product, so you MUST modify your product to our desires or our community is lost, Lost I tell you!” Or, “Your product is so wrong for our use we should switch back immediately.” I agree. I thought the way he was treated was bizarrely inappropriate, I don’t understand why people were so rude - and I don’t blame him in the least for deciding he’d had enough. People were acting like we had paid him some huge fee to deliver a custom product. 90% of the transition issues were not shortcomings with Discourse, which overall is far better than the old software. They were mostly problems with the older crowd here not coping well with change. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2020, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/143 "2020-12-25T21:38:27Z")
Hmm - that’s not it; it just autofilled @Tripler for me. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2020, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/144 "2020-12-25T22:27:27Z")
When I do the “@” thing, the auto fill menu appears for the first 3 letters of the name and stops working at all when I put in the 4th letter. Sometimes earlier. ---
**Author:** ![kayT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayt/32/3633_2.png) [@kayT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayT)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/145 "2020-12-26T01:00:57Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > 90% of the transition issues were not shortcomings with Discourse, which overall is far better than the old software. They were mostly problems with the older crowd here not coping well with change. Yes because everyone knows that all the older people are stupid and can’t do tech. Could we stop with the prejudices and just look at the situation? Some things about this board are a big improvement and some things don’t work. Question seems to be how to get those things to work. Who can we speak to about these problems? Quarreling among ourselves and blaming others clearly is not the answer. I hope TPTB are working on finding an administrator and not just ignoring the board, but I am not optimistic. ---
**Author:** ![Tripler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripler/32/21807_2.png) [@Tripler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tripler)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/146 "2020-12-26T01:09:33Z")
Sorry about that. I broke the internet for a little while. . . it’s fixed now. Triper A little duct tape, some Elmer’s glue. . . and SkyNet is back online. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/147 "2020-12-26T01:58:46Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > Also, if I want to look up something on the page itself, I can’t just do “CTRL F”, because then it opens the search engine automatically. That’s odd. When I’m on a thread, I hit CTRL F and enter what I’m looking for, and it brings up individual posts. For example, I did “CTRL F Guinastasia” on this thread and it brought up all your posts, and posts where people refer to you. ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/148 "2020-12-26T02:03:03Z")
Sometimes I don’t want individual posts when I do that, though – I usually use “CTRL F” when I’m looking for a word on a page (usually to see how many times it’s there or whatever). I don’t want to see my posts, or whatever – just the word highlighted, like it does on any other page on the internet. ---
**Author:** ![cincinnatus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cincinnatus/32/7990_2.png) [@cincinnatus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cincinnatus)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/149 "2020-12-26T03:35:47Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > Going to the hamburger menu What is this hamburger of which you speak? And where is it? ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/150 "2020-12-26T03:37:03Z")
“Hamburger” is apparently tech-speak for those three lines at the top right-hand side of the display. I had to have it explained to me, too. ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/151 "2020-12-26T06:34:34Z")
The Hamburger Menu is not unique to Discourse. That’s its standard techie name. Wikipedia even has an article about it. > **[Hamburger button](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_button)** > > Pages for logged out editors learn more > > The hamburger button (the triple bar ≡ or trigram symbol ☰), so named for its unintentional resemblance to a hamburger, is a button typically placed in a top corner of a graphical user interface. Its function is to toggle a menu (sometimes referred to as a hamburger menu) or navigation bar between being collapsed behind the button or displayed on the screen. The icon which is associated with this widget, consisting of three horizontal bars, is a... It’s actually not a new thing. It came out of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the early 1980s. Also in the early 1980s, some dude you might have heard of named Steve Jobs gave Xerox $1 Million in stock options for a tour of PARC and detailed information about the various projects that they had been working on. Jobs took the Graphical Use Interface that had been developed by Xerox and incorporated it into Apple computers, and from there a bunch of guys from this little company known as Microsoft copied the idea and called it Windows. You can also thank Xerox PARC for integrating the computer mouse (developed by Stanford at Menlo Park) into the GUI, another idea that Steve Jobs (and Microsoft) thought was a keeper. So yeah, the Hamburger Menu dates all the way back to those days of computer development. By the way, if you use a condensed version that just has three vertical dots instead of lines, it’s called a Kebob. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/152 "2020-12-26T13:23:51Z")
> [@kayT](#): > > Who can we speak to about these problems? Post in “site feedback”. If it’s something that can be done with the system exactly the way it’s set up now, the odds are good someone will help you do it. And a large fraction of the frustrations users face are due to the somewhat unintuitive interface, and not due to actual problems with the set up. If it’s something that requires an admin, well, at least it helps to have issues written down, should we ever get an admin. If it’s a discourse bug, perhaps it will get reported. Although probably an admin should check and see if it’s a site-specific thing, first. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/153 "2020-12-26T13:25:07Z")
Hmm, and maybe these should be tagged. Spitballing here, and looking for feedback. But how about tags Open question Answered question Request Bug Moderators could change the tags at user request or when it seems appropriate. That would also create an FAQ, by it’s nature. 😁 ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/154 "2020-12-26T17:57:03Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > Sometimes I don’t want individual posts when I do that, though – I usually use “CTRL F” when I’m looking for a word on a page (usually to see how many times it’s there or whatever). I don’t want to see my posts, or whatever – just the word highlighted, like it does on any other page on the internet. As I said upthread. There’s no concept of a “page” in Discourse. Because the thread might be a thousand times longer than what’s shown in the browser, the idea of a “page” is fundamentally obsolete. You can totally open the browser’s Find function you’re used to using. But you have to do it by clicking the browser’s menu item, not by Ctrl-F. It feels backwards at first, but it actually makes more sense the way they did it. - Ctrl-F is “find text in thread” plus all the other special filtering options of Discourse search, such as by specific person, date range, included tag(s), etc… - Browser menu → Find is "search for plain text within the small (and unknown) fraction of the thread currently inside the browser, plus in all the chrome around the edge. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/155 "2020-12-26T18:06:09Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > You can totally open the browser’s Find function you’re used to using. But you have to do it by clicking the browser’s menu item, not by Ctrl-F. > > It feels backwards at first, but it actually makes more sense the way they did it. > > - Ctrl-F is “find text in thread” plus all the other special filtering options of Discourse search, such as by specific person, date range, included tag(s), etc… The internal find won’t highlight the text. This is very annoying when I’m trying to make sure I hadn’t missed a part of the conversation or am trying to get a feel for the context of a discussion, because in order to make sure you haven’t missed something that people will call you out on for missing, you have to search for a term, and then still have to browser search for the term within the page that pops up because the term still isn’t highlighted. in the ideal world I’d also like the option to load the entire thread - it’s just text and can’t be that much heavier to load than constantly refreshing the page state, but I can see how that could be hard to implement. But highlighting a search term is something that even vB could do. Ironically, because Control-F worked so well in vB, it was actually annoying for vB _to_ highlight the search term, because it was pretty garish and you could always control-F for it. That’s how I remember it highlights the search term, from memories of the search term sticking out like a sore thumb! ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2020, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/156 "2020-12-26T18:18:52Z")
The “load whole thread” option is a good idea. For a 10,000 post thread that might be a problem for a browser on a phone. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be available for asking and work fine on a real computer. I suspect some of the reason it isn’t directly available is to put an obstacle in front of content scrapers that love to steal messageboard content and repeat it elsewhere on ad farm sites. See here for a sneaky technique that will load the entire thread that you can then browser text-find through as you and @Guinastasia want: > [@Why was the design of the website changed?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-the-design-of-the-website-changed/925828/20): > > @GreenWyvern:Aha! We make a heck of a team. Again as to Chrome on Win10 only … Ctrl-P is both a Discourse command and is the default keystroke for the browser’s print dialog. Which response you summon changes how it works. Clicking the “Print …” choice in the browser’s menu always brings up the built-in dialog which is a pop-over, not a separate window. In that print dialog you get only the loaded part of the thread regardless of what you do with the page range. Keystroking Ctrl-P sometime… ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2020, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/157 "2020-12-27T18:21:53Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > I don’t want to see my posts, or whatever – just the word highlighted, like it does on any other page on the internet. When I open a thread, and then use CTRL F, whatever I type in the search box is then highlighted in the thread. The really weird thing is that the search box stays active if I go to another thread, and the word in the search box is then highlighted in that thread too, if it’s there. That highlight feature stays on until I clear the search box manually. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2020, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/158 "2020-12-27T19:56:18Z")
That’s exactly the effect I have too. Using Windows 10, Chrome browser and the SD Light theme. I wonder what **Guin** is using? ---
**Author:** ![SCAdian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scadian/32/3292_2.png) [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2020, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/159 "2020-12-28T01:10:54Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > When I open a thread, and then use CTRL F, whatever I type in the search box is then highlighted in the thread. Ditto. When I Ctrl-F in this thread and type in _tern_ (with “Search this thread” checked), it offers five posts: #69 by GreenWyvern, which includes the word in **tern** et #131 by Northern\_Piper – pat **tern** #132 by puzzlegal – pat **tern** (quoting #131) #146 by Tripler – in **tern** et #148 by Guinastasia – in **tern** et **tern** is highlighted in all five. Uncheck “Search this thread”, and I get five other threads, from four different topics. In both cases, if I don’t like any of the five offered, I can click on “More…” ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2020, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428/160 "2020-12-28T03:33:59Z")
So it only shows you 5, even if there are more? That’s… weird. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-feeling-about-discourse/926428.md?page=9)