How are people feeling about Discourse?

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341

Have you looked at your browser history? That is a built in feature in the browser since way back in 1995, it tracks your complete browsing history by URL change:

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So you’d see the last (x) “web pages” you visited there in the browser history. It can technically go back for days…

It’s a technical limitation in what the browser supports at the moment. A similar conundrum is how you handle “mouse cursor hover” on a touch device. Some (very rare) touch devices tried to emulate this by detecting the finger physically hovering over the screen!

342

And it doesn’t work in Discourse, because Discourse fills up the browser history with huge numbers of replications of the same thread since it turns every time the page advances into a new browser item.

Yes, the older stuff is in there somewhere. But unless you’ve only just left the page or haven’t done anything in Discourse since, it no longer shows up neatly in the history tab, because it’s buried way too deep; you have to open a window and hunt further back through the history window for it. That’s one of the things I still don’t like about Discourse.

I can partly work around it because I can go in history to recently closed tabs and those show up one at a time; but even that is an extra menu to go through. And I gather it doesn’t work on a phone.

343

True, and a fair point. But in traditional forum software you’d have a lesser form of the same problem as you visit the individual pages in the topic while reading it, wouldn’t you?

  • Page 12 of topic X
  • Page 13 of topic X
  • Page 14 of topic X
  • Page 3 of topic Y
  • Page 4 of topic Y
  • Page 1 of topic Z

etc.

344

Only if I’d visited all of those pages; and I could see a whole lot more posts on one page than I can in Discourse. At a size print I can easily read I see only maybe one to four posts at a time in Discourse; not only could I see more in the old forum, because I use a wide window and Discourse insists on lots of white space at the sides, but the entire 20 or 40 or however many posts I’d set a page to counted as one page in the browser history. Often I’d only have opened one page of topic Z and Y and two of X for a number of posts for which Discourse might run up large numbers of each.

345

There’s also the /read shortcut, as in

https://boards.straightdope.com/read

That’s the amazon feature we’ve discussed before. To find the last time I talked about it, I am gonna search for the last time I said the word “amazon” like so:

@me amazon l

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Now I can press down arrow, then enter, to jump to that post in that topic. This editor remains open, and I am typing in it. I press reply and it asks me if I want to reply on THIS topic (the one I am now currently on), or the ORIGINAL topic where I originally pressed the reply button.

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I press (or use my keyboard to select) the “reply on original topic” button.

346

I forgot we recently added a shortcut to the user page for this one as well, but it will only appear on YOUR user page hence the /my/ shortcut:

https://boards.straightdope.com/my/activity/read

347

Yeah, i had 40 posts per page in vBulletin, and seem to get about 4 per page in Discourse. (One on my phone, but maybe it loads more then that?) It’s actually somewhat annoying. I did mention that i liked explicit pagination… :wink:

I don’t understand this. But if it only works if i remember an unusual word that was on the page it’s not going to help me much. That’s not how my brain is wired.

348

I think of it more as “when was the last time I talked about zebras?” but yeah, it depends how unusual the topics of discussion are.

349

I was talking about the auto accident in the uk that’s being litigated in NJ. I talked about cooking pizza. I talked about covid. These are all common words on the forum.

And the way my brain works, i probably remember talking about horses with stripes, and can’t remember the word “zebra” right now.

350

Right, so you can add words to make it a more specific match, e.g.

@me accident uk l

so you don’t necessarily need a word as unique as zebra, but combine two or three slightly less frequently seen words that you’re confident you would have used recently.

Often “show me the last time I said pizza” is enough, unless you’re talking about pizza every week :wink:

351

Only the actual post may not have used either the words “accident” or “UK”. I might have said that prosecutors in New Jersey are appointed, and that insurance companies investigate fatal crashes. Or I might have used different words…

I actually have pretty decent google-fu. So perhaps I could do this. But honestly, it’s probably easier to just look at the list of recent posts and scroll back 5 pages until I find the one I want. And either way, I will feel grumpy that “back” doesn’t work and that the handy menu that I clicked on to read that post a minute ago has been purged and no longer has that information.

Anyway, if you are thinking of potential upgrades, a handy, dandy, nicely formatted(1) list of subscribed threads with recent activity is pretty high on my wish-list.

(1) and to me, “nicely formatted” means formatted so I can see a lot of it all at once on the page.

352

The /unread tab is exactly this; it’s a list of subscribed topics with new replies, ordered by most recent reply. Unread in the sense that “you’ve set a notification level on this topic, and there are unread replies.”

The “suggested topics” list at the bottom of every topic is also a list of all your subscribed topics, ordered by most recent activity. Logic being, at the end of the reading rainbow, when you get to the bottom, the pot of gold is more subscribed topics to read. :rainbow::honey_pot:

:woman_shrugging:

The default for this tab has an explanation printed directly on it:

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353

I think you missed that I specifically asked for RECENT activity, not UNREAD activity. I’ve spent the last several posts whining about how stuff disappears from the /unread tab, and how much that frustrates me, and makes me feel lost. If it included everything RECENT, whether or not I’d read it, I would be enormously happier. “Stuff that I’ve read disappears” is certainly the thing that I like least about Discourse. It’s why I gave up on the first Discourse forum I tried to use. It’s the thing that I continue to struggle with on a near daily basis.

I would be DELIGHTED if there were some toggle option for whether that tab were /unread or /recent. It would pretty much remove my anxiety using Discourse fora.

354

???

What I’m seeing at the bottom of this topic is five topics, none of which I’m subscribed to, and none of which I think I’ve even read. – I might have read Advice for selling Vinyl LP’s, come to think of it. But I’m not subscribed to it. – same thing at the bottom of several other topics open in other tabs, though they don’t all show the same five.

I’ve no idea why any of them are being suggested.

355

I see; it “disappears” because you’ve read it all and you are up to date. There’s nothing left unread in it. I believe you can possibly use search for what you want:

in:tracking order:latest

“all topics I am tracking, ordered by latest post”

https://boards.straightdope.com/search?q=in%3Atracking%20order%3Alatest

Good point! If you have exhausted all the new and unread (subscribed, in the parlance of this region) topics, the suggested footer picks randomly from recently updated topics in the same category, with a time gate of I think one year… let RNGesus take the wheel, sort of thing… a random walk through other recent fun discussions that are related by dint of being in the same category :pray:

356

Yes, it disappears because I read it, but now I want to respond, and I can’t find it. Didn’t we just have this discussion? It drives me nuts. It’s far and away the thing I dislike most about Discourse – that stuff is always disappearing and I can never find things that I was just looking at a minute ago. This frustrates me literally every day that I use Discourse.

357

Or I want to tell my husband something amusing, but don’t remember all the details. But now I can’t find the post I wanted to read to him.

I don’t have a perfect memory. Things disappearing causes me stress.

358

Wouldn’t you want to respond based on something you just read, e.g. someone replied, as you did just now, which created a new, unread reply and thus bumped this very topic into my unread list?

In my experience, most discussion is based on a person reading new repl(ies), then deciding to reply to that topic more or less immediately after they read the new replies.

Is that not true for you? :point_up_2:

I guess I’m just not following this model, sorry. Is the idea that

  • days would go by

and

  • the discussion topic has no replies at all

and I’d suddenly decide “gee, I better reply to that topic nobody else has replied to for three days?” If that was the case, assuming I previously replied to the topic, I’d go to my reply history and find my earlier reply?

It does get a bit trickier if I have never replied to the topic at all, only read it, because then I don’t have any reply history for that topic. That case, I guess, is what you’re describing?

If it was a topic I created, it already has the highest notification level (watching) out of the box, but for the sake of argument, let’s say nobody replies to it for a long time. If that was the case, I’d go to my topic history and find it there?

One suggestion: if you want to reply to a topic you are currently reading, but don’t have time (maybe you’re about to go on a long vacation, have errands to run, etc), you can set a bookmark timer to remind you a few days later by pressing the bookmark button on the post you want to reply to?

Apologies – I want to understand, but I must admit this model is a bit alien to me.

359

Can’t respond for puzzlegal; but I don’t always want to reply immediately, for any of several reasons.

Sometimes I just don’t have time right then.

Sometimes I want to think over my response, and may do that while doing something else entirely.

Sometimes I need to do research before replying, either because I want to check whether there’s evidence that something I was going to say is actually so, or because I am sure of it but think people are likely to ask for cites and I want to check for recent useful cites first before posting. [ETA: or I may need to read cites that someone else posted.] It may not only take me time to do the research, but it may also be some time before I can take time from other work to do it.

Occasionally if something really hits a nerve I want to calm down first and post second. – or, alternatively, I may be falling asleep and just not want to deal with it right then.

360

@puzzlegal

I’ve been playing around with something that codinghorror posted to someone else, but maybe this might work.

It’s the read list in the activity tab. It keeps a list of everything you read, It doesn’t disappear. It changes color when you’ve read everything in the thread. It takes one more click but it displays well on my phone. It updates with stuff you read, so it doesn’t disappear stuff.

You could bookmark it or hit your avatar, then profile, then in the activity tab, on the left side, there’s a ‘read’ list.

Could you explain a bit more what the site getting confused looks like or does?