How are people feeling about Discourse?

[puzzlegal]

I miss mouse over. But I’m not willing to cripple my laptop just for this site.

[EllisDee]

I like the way discourse handles PMs. You even get the standard 15 minute (used to be five) edit window. Far superior to vBulletin’s email-style PM system and its limited inbox space.

I really, really don’t like that none of the old links to pre-discourse threads and posts work. Particularly links in old threads to other old threads; if they link with a thread ID or a post ID without explicitly telling you the title, you have just no way of knowing what thread it was or how to find it. It’s just gone.

I also really, really don’t like that discourse isn’t compatible with a wide range of BB codes people used to use on the old boards.

Those two negatives combine to make it feel like we just threw out 20 years of history to start over.

But hey, much better PM system, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

EDIT: For context, just the other day I spent the time to recreate a workable table of contents for the SDMB fantasy football dynasty league. Check it out. Each year we create a new thread, link it to the previous thread, maybe the previous thread’s draft results or rules discussion, yada yada yada. At the end of each thread we post a link to the new thread. None of those links work anymore. And many, many posts from previous years (roster lists, draft results, etc…) are very long and now hot garbage because of the formatting issues.

[EllisDee]

In fairness and in the same context, the fact that discourse updates itself when a new post is made to a thread you have open without having to manually reload the page is a massive improvement to the old boards. Our in-thread drafts are much better for it.

All in all there’s a ton of good improvements, but they came with a few really, really bad side effects.

I’m softening on infinite scroll but still not loving it.

[Joey_P]

@engineer_comp_geek

I don’t know what changes were made to the themes. All I know is that they were updated.

One of the changes the implemented on the Vincent theme is a very small text box that tells you where the last post was when you last viewed the thread. But it’s dark red font inside a small black box, against a dark blue background. It’s nearly impossible to read. Can you see it? In between the two posts, it says “last visit”.

Personally, I would have much rather seen the bolding problem fixed. In this theme, bolded text is actually smaller and ‘thinner’, but very similar to the rest of the text. When someone bolds something, I won’t notice it, unless they say something like ‘bolding mine’ and then I can find it, but I have to look for it.

[Revtim]

Took a bit of getting used to but I think it’s fine.

[JohnT]

I enjoy the hell out of Discourse and the additional features allow me to make better posts and OP’s. Needs underlining as a text format option, and there is a bug with the automatic numbering system, making it impossible to count down:

For the above I typed in 10.9.8.7.6. and got 10.11.12.13.14. Yay! If you remove the periods, you’ll be OK:

10
9
8
7
6

…

[Sherrerd]

@JohnT

… Needs underlining as a text format option, and there is a bug with the automatic numbering system, making it impossible to count down:

For the above I typed in 10.9.8.7.6. and got 10.11.12.13.14. Yay! If you remove the periods, you’ll be OK:

10
9
8
7
6

…

Agreed on the need for underlining.

Weird about the ‘no counting backward.’ Someone from David Letterman’s legal team enjoined them from it, maybe?

not following you around---I just clicked on one of the blue circles under my last post, and here I landed. !

[puzzlegal]

I also miss colored text.

Mostly I’m enjoying Discourse. I love the quoting and linking.

I still find the infinite scroll thing unpleasant. It’s just harder for me to look at a thread that is long, or even one that has had a lot of posts since i last read it. Logically that doesn’t make any difference, but my behavior has clearly changed, and i routinely drop threads that i once would have continued following.

[TheGunIsMightierThanThePen]

@JohnT

Needs underlining as a text format option

Underlined text

[u]Underlined text[/u]

@JohnT

there is a bug with the automatic numbering system, making it impossible to count down

 10. ⠀
⠀ 9.
⠀ 8.
⠀ 7.
⠀ 6.

 10. ⠀ ⠀ 9. ⠀ 8. ⠀ 7. ⠀ 6.

Ok, that was an ugly workaround and I agree that Discourse should give users a native and more elegant way of doing it. Good bug find, by the way.

@puzzlegal

I also miss colored text.

Discourse now has MathJax support which can render colors. Refer to these posts:

MathJax has been added in to the SDMB. [Like TeX/LaTeX]

\color{navy}{\text {Okay, this looks like an easier way to do it}} \\ \color{RoyalBlue}{\text {There are a lot of named colors}} \\ \color{purple}{\text {Dozens of them}} \\ \color{ForestGreen}{\text {And if you use the text command, then it handles spaces correctly}} \\ Here’s a list of colors. And this is the the way to do it: $\color{navy}{\text {Put your text here}}$

I Suppose There Should Be A MMP

This is a test: \color{red}{\text{this is a test}} \color{blue}{\text{this is a test}} \color{green}{\text{this is a test}} So, we can encolorate text after all, but it’s a rather messy process. This is the coding, but remove the initial x. x$\color{red}{\text{this is a test}}$ I just created a .doc with the different colors entered for quick copy-and-paste…

[GreenWyvern]

@puzzlegal

I also miss colored text.

You can do it with the Mathjax plugin and Latex.

\color{navy}{\textsf{Navy Blue sans serif font}}

\color{red}{\textbf{Red bold serif font}}

\color{OliveGreen}{\textit{Olive green italics}}

In the middle of some normal text, a \color{Fuchsia}{\textsf{fuchsia}} word.

\fcolorbox{green}{Goldenrod}{Text in a box}

\large\color{white}\fcolorbox{white}{NavyBlue}{Large white text with blue background 🌠}

 
List of colors here.

[JohnT]

@TheGunIsMightierThanThePen

Underlined text

Ugh, my bad. I meant ‘…in the format controls’ and I should have made that clearer.

[JohnT]

Oh, and…

\color{red}{\text {Thanks!}}

[puzzlegal]

@JohnT

Ugh, my bad. I meant ‘…in the format controls’ and I should have made that clearer.

Yeah, it’s nice that your can theoretically do it, but that’s way too much for me to learn, remember, or type on my phone. It’s not a useful option when it’s that difficult.

I really miss having any easy drop-down option for changing the size and color of text.

[Cervaise]

@puzzlegal

I really miss having any easy drop-down option for changing the size and color of text.

Apparently it’s incorrect to participate in online discussion using anything but the default typeface option.

[puzzlegal]

If you routinely posted in a weird font of color, I’m sure people would find it annoying. But there are lots of other ways to use size and color.

On my other major message board, we used to use red font to indicate sarcasm. It was a nice custom.

I’ve highlighted complex quotes with colors to make something easier to follow.

When quoting articles, multiple sizes are nice for headlines. I also like to put footnotes in a smaller font.

[GreenWyvern]

@puzzlegal

When quoting articles, multiple sizes are nice for headlines. I also like to put footnotes in a smaller font.

That’s very easy indeed with markdown. Just put some #'s in front of the text.

# Header1
## Header2
### Header3
#### Header4
##### Header5

This gives:

Header1

Header2

Header3

Header4

Header5

 
You can do small text with tags:

<small>Some small text</small> → Some small text

 
You can also do footnotes¹ like this.

¹ My footnote

[puzzlegal]

Thanks! the footnote code looks simple enough for me to master.

[GreysonCarlisle]

I think all of these formatting options still work:

We're All Here. Now What? (Basic Tutorial)

Table of Contents Note: this post was made before the transition. Any or all of it may already be wrong, outdated, or muddleheaded. I’ll try to update as necessary. I have a bunch of pretty pictures to go along with it, but images take forever to upload tonight Important: Discourse is always infinite scroll. There is currently no (good) way to add pagination or a nested view. Sorry. Basic Tutorial (Took it out. Ran out of characters.) Setting the Default View Setting Up Notifications T…

And I still hate Discourse.

[Sherrerd]

@puzzlegal

I still find the infinite scroll thing unpleasant. It’s just harder for me to look at a thread that is long, or even one that has had a lot of posts since i last read it. Logically that doesn’t make any difference, but my behavior has clearly changed, and i routinely drop threads that i once would have continued following.

This is an issue for me, too. I’ve developed muscle-memory with regard to scrolling that keeps the text from jumping the way it always did (for me) in the early weeks of getting used to Discourse, and that helps me avoid aggravation. But I still wind up avoiding very-long threads that I might otherwise have participated in.

[thorny_locust]

Once I got used to the infinite scroll, which did take some doing at first, I found that with the aid of the sidebar I can keep oriented in a thread much better and more easily than I could (or can on other boards) with separate pages.

I suspect this may have to do with subtle differences in the way people’s minds work.