I totally grant that different folks have different opinions.
My only point is to find out whether the opinion is well-informed or simply a knee-jerk that “different = awful” with no effort spent yet to learn how to use the tool to it’s full effectiveness.
I’m not going to speak any further for @Balthisar, and I doubt they care about your validation of their opinion.
For myself, I’m thoroughly used to Discourse. The unpleasant surprises are long in the past.
But let’s be candid, here. Discourse blew the everliving crap out of the Priniciple of Least Astonishment, carving bold new paths in browser user experience. It’s a matter of individual preference and commitment whether any given user makes the adjustment.
I thoroughly agree. Thanks for saying it so well.
If you hit Ctrl-F twice, you’ll get your browser’s search function, but it’s useless since it can really only search a few posts above and below what you’re looking at.
And not being able to use that plus my hate for the Discourse search feature makes trying to find something a nightmare. In general, I just want to hit Ctrl-F, type in my search term and tap enter to work my way through the thread. PLUS, this way gives me the ability to see the context of the post I’m looking at. I can quickly see the posts above and below, if it’s not what I’m looking for, I tap enter to go to the next one. This isn’t nearly as easy when Discourse (and other similar forums) just give you a list of posts within the thread that contain your term.
Is there any reason we’re forced into the infinite scroll? I mean, I know it’s a big part of the brand here, but it would be nice if we could set it to be paged with X posts per page and the entire page loaded at the same time.
FWIW, while there are things about Discourse that still annoy me, overall I like it a lot better than the previous boards. The quote function in particular is IMO a vast improvement.
And I suspect any board software is going to annoy me occasionally; at least, unless I spent a huge amount of time studying up how and wrote my own – and I’m sure that process would annoy me much worse, even if I pulled off getting good at it. As would the responses from the people who found things that I liked were annoying to them.
This is me as well. I use the surrounding context to spot the post I’m trying to find. For example, if there was a long thread about personal finance and I wanted to find a particular post where a common word like “mortgage” was mentioned, I would prefer to see the term in context since that would help me recognize the particular post I was interested in. With the Discourse way of just showing a couple of lines around the term, I lose that positional context. I have to read the couple of lines and try to remember if they came from the post I was trying to find. It’s the same when I’m looking for something in a book. I can leaf through the pages and from visual appearance and context know if I need to go forward or back to find the particular entry I’m looking for. Functionally Discourse search works fine, but it’s cumbersome for me and I usually don’t bother with search since it’s not really that critical for hanging out on the SDMB.
Perhaps one change to Discourse could be to show the search results in context rather than just in the summary. That is, make it work more like a full text search. Highlight the term on the page and then have a way to jump to the next or previous match (similar to searching in a Word document). Or just leave the Discourse search result box up and allow me to click on the entries one after the other. Right now the results box goes away once I click on a result and I have to bring it back up if I want to click on a different one.
How am I feeling about Discourse? I don’t hate it nearly as much as I hate the Electronic Medical Record used by my system. Whenever I feel blue about Discourse, I just think of my EMR and I’m lots happier about Discourse.
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For example, if there was a long thread about personal finance and I wanted to find a particular post where a common word like “mortgage” was mentioned, I would prefer to see the term in context since that would help me recognize the particular post I was interested in.
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Sorry if someone suggested this earlier but is this maybe a choice of version of Discourse thing? If I go back to say, post 27 or post 227 and search for mortgage, your post comes up with 3 or 4 lines surrounding it. And if I click on that, it shows your entire post.
Also, if I use search this topic it searches the entire thread, not just what is visible.
This only applies to PC use, not sure how it works on other devices as I rarely search for anything on the Dope.
I agree they shouldn’t care about my opinion. I was just hoping to educate/inform on the off chance they hadn’t explored it in detail and their complaint was based more on lack of knowledge than fully informed preference. We shall see which it is.
Overall I agree w you that Discourse is not as discoverable as was vBulletin. Then again, substantially no modern apps or app-styled websites are either.
It’s a valid debate whether that’s progress for user utility versus just visual prettiness for stylists’ egos sakes’. But it seems a bit unfair to blame Discourse specifically for following the same trends as everybody else.
YMMV as always.
Thanks for sharing the double ctrl+f advice, which I give out a lot. Can you describe what you’re searching for? There are a lot of pro-tips with search, we might be able to help.
For example, try typing @username into search and see what happens. (I originally said @me but there is a user with that name here courtesy of migration.)
This is interesting, because I’d think “a couple of lines around the term” is exactly the context desired? But it sounds like you mean something a bit different?
You should be able to middle-mouse-click (that is, click the mousewheel, the “third / middle mouse button”) to open each search link in a new tab – though I wouldn’t go too crazy with this or you’ll get rate limited.
For me, context, means a few posts on either side of the result. Like what happens when you hit (regular, not Discourse style) control-f and search through some posts. You see the above and below posts as well. Often that’s necessary to find what you’re looking for.
For example, sometimes I’m looking for a post but I don’t remember any good keywords to use, however I do remember what someone said in the next one or two posts. With Discourse style searching, I have to click on each link instead of just being able to quickly flip through all the results in situ (Ctrl-f, enter search string, tap enter until I find what I’m looking for, tap escape to dismiss the search bar).
aha lol – there’s actually a USER named “me” who blocks the self search @me shortcut! 
So, you’ll need to type your actual username into search to get the effect, sigh. Migrations… Discourse doesn’t allow usernames under 3 characters out of the box.
Try @username using your actual username to achieve the same effect, unfortunately “me” is blocking functionality here. Heh. I hope that one topic about weed was worth it, “me”!
Another fun search shortcut is l for latest. Add that to your search to order by most recent, like
Show me the most recent time dave said the word zebra?
is
@dave zebra l
I use that shortcut a lot.
Looks like someone registered twenty years ago to post in a thread about weed, and hasn’t been back since. I went ahead and edited the name to something longer.
Ah, excellent! Thanks for that.
And I do understand the point you’re making @Joey_P , where the browser will let you iterate through matches on the same page, e.g.
The closest thing we offer is “search in topic” checkbox, then use middle mouse button (or right click, then select “open in new tab”). The equivalent is a long-press-and-hold on mobile.
While I am at it, press / to bring up search, and press ? to see all the keyboard shortcuts. esc will close search if you don’t want it open.
This is not correct. I would miss you if you stopped posting. You’ve been around a long time and I like reading your posts.
fwiw, I use Discourse on 4 different devices, and NONE of them has a middle mouse-button. (One is my phone, and the other three are laptops on which I use a touchpad.)
I still haven’t learned to use Discourse’s search facility effectively, but perhaps that’s a “me” thing. It took me a while to master vBulletin’s search facility, too. In general, I’m very bad at remembering “magic words” (exact user names, the exact words someone used in a discussion) so I don’t find any search facility that depends on those to be super-helpful. But, as I said, that may be a me thing.
I remain frustrated that the mouse-over preview doesn’t work on my Win10 laptops (because Discourse can’t distinguish between a laptop with a touchscreen and a phone, I gather.) I don’t understand why it can’t just always show the mouseover if you use a device that supports it (a mouse or touchpad)
I love the way Discourse handles multi-quotes. This is really elegant and easy.
I dislike the infinite scroll. It makes it tedious to read a long thread. I find I just give up on threads if they’ve had more than about 6 replies since the last time I was there. Or if I feel I need to catch up, as a moderator, it feels like a chore. Somehow, that never bothered me when threads were paginated. I might skip through the pages, browsing one or two posts, so see how the conversation had developed. Or I might just skip to a page close to the end. And if it was interesting enough, I might even go back and read it all. Or not. But it rarely felt like a chore. With infinite scroll it always feels like a chore. I don’t expect this to change, as I gather infinite scroll is deeply baked into Discourse, but if anyone is reading this thinking of how they might build their next piece of chat software, I offer it as a perspective.
The thing I continue to hate with a passion is that things disappear, and the back button is broken. For instance, I am in a thread, hit “reply”, realize that I want to scroll up to review something else before I reply (maybe to quote it) and accidentally hit something other than “delete my reply”. Perhaps the back button.
Anyway, I end up with a useless broken open reply window, and worse, I lose the thread I was trying to reply to. And IT’S REALLY HARD TO FIND IT AGAIN. Because Discourse thinks I’m done with it, I guess. Maybe I found it in my unread menu, maybe it was in the clickbait at the bottom of some other topic. I may not have been aware of which category it was in. (It would help if the category titles were in larger font – I wonder if an admin could adjust that) Anyway, now I may spend 10 minutes search for the damn thread, or I may just give up and feel frustrated.
This probably happens to me most every day I use Discourse. Yes, I am an imperfect typist and make mistakes. I find Discourse unusually unforgiving. No other software I use punishes me routinely for touching the wrong part of the phone.
I also hate that as a moderator, the moderation threads go away. I’m told there’s some way to find them again, after they have been “completed”. Sometimes I even succeed in finding one. But all too often I don’t, and again, I spend a lot of time frustrated.
That’s odd. I am working on a laptop with a touchpad, and the mouse-over preview works just fine. I wonder what is different.
Also, you mentioned in your next post that the back button is broken. Do you mean all the time? Do you mean your browser’s back button? I use my browser’s back button all the time and it works, but, oddly, sometimes it goes back two steps and I then have to use the forward arrow to get where I was trying to go.
I could never wrap my head around that either. We went back and forth about it earlier in the thread. If mouse-over preview is enabled all the time, what difference does it make on a touch screen device where you can’t ‘mouse-over’ anyway. If there’s a technical/programming reason, I understand, but if it’s ‘because there’s no mouse to mouse over with’, I don’t understand.
My workaround was to disable the touch screen on my laptop. Considering the only time the touch screen ever gets used on my laptop is when I bump it by accident, it’s no big deal for me to disable it. Most people, however, aren’t going to want to do that.
Not a touch pad, a touch screen. Like you can use your fingers on the screen to act like a mouse. Discourse seems to put anything with a touch screen into the ‘mobile’ category and disables mouse over on all of them, even if they have a regular mouse (or touch pad) as well.
That’s what I’m confused about. What’s the harm with enabling it on a phone. You won’t be able to use it, so who cares?
Otherwise, my suggestion would be that rather than disabling it on all devices with a touch screen, enable it on all devices with pointing device other than a touch screen. That way things like laptops with touchscreens fall into the ‘mouse over allowed’ category, but tablets and phones won’t.
