Do you use the little thumb scroll? Once I got used to that the infinite scroll was much more manageable.
It’s usually poorly implemented. For example, on some sites you’ll scroll down a few “pages”, click on something, then when you come back you’ve lost you’re place. Ones that do save your place usually have to load every thing above it, making it slow. Discourse has handled this as intelligently as possible.
There’s nothing fantastic about discourse, but I wouldn’t want to go back to vbulletin. Everything is at least slightly better on discourse (and yes, I LIKE infinite scroll better now that I’ve gotten used to it) and VB feels so very mid 2000’s. Ancient.
Putting aside the personality conflicts some of us have had with Jeff, I quite like Discourse. There are some features I’d love to rip out and banish to hell **cough** Discobot **cough** and the associated “I know better than you or the admins or mods what is best for this audience”. The “stop posting so much” and “bring some other posters onboard and shut up” types of notices are the height of an implementor’s arrogance about how any specific board should be managed. But overall this is a fine implementation of a discussion board. If we moved back, even to a vBulletin system that worked, I would miss many Discourse features – like the “latest posts” in the right-hand view, or the automatic and reliable ability to resume a thread where you last left off. And I love the Onebox and image embedding.
It’s fine. The thing I miss most is seeing join dates, number of posts and locations without having to click anything.
Part of what makes it hard to assess is I used VBulletin mostly on a desktop and I use Discourse mostly on mobile. Struggling to post links is largely a mobile issue. I’m still learning Discourse. For example it never occurred to me to search within a thread for the post I want. I LOVE that it auto-saves drafts.
I find Discourse harder to navigate, but again, I’m using a mobile interface. The only way I’ve found to get back to threads without new posts is to bookmark them. If you hit the back button on accident and you didn’t get the chance to make a post, the only way to find it is to navigate by category. Very annoying.
But overall it gets the job done. I’ve hated using Discourse on other boards, so I’m not sure why it works here. I just wish there were an app.
There needs to be a concise, organized list of instructions of how to do everything in Discourse. And it needs to be in an easy-to-find place.
Every new user has the same questions, and @LSLGuy is going to wear himself out repeating himself every single day. We do have some really long unwieldy threads that explain most stuff, but they’re not organized the way a new user would need.
If we had that, I’d be pretty satisfied, except for very minor quibbles.
I miss the Lounge, though.
the Lounge? was that some sooper-skreetit place where the cool kids could hang out?
The first rule about the Lounge is you don’t talk about the Lounge…
We have changed because the software has changed. It used to be that the path of least resistance was to either look at the list of threads you’d posted in recently or the new threads or the list of forums/categories. Now, the path of least resistance is to look at the list of stuff it suggests at the bottom of the page (drawn from all over) or to look at the list of threads that have been updated since you last posted (and if you read it and then go back to the menu IT DISAPPEARS which is probably the “feature” I hate most) or at new stuff (where threads also DISAPPEAR.) At least if I click on “latest” the threads don’t go away as I review them.
But no, it’s kinda awkward to use the categories now. There are too many of them, they don’t all show, you have to awkwardly scroll through clumsy menus that aren’t well implemented in mobile… It’s there, but it’s not how the forum expects you to interact with it, and it’s not implemented very well.
I am aware of that, and I sometimes use it. But I have a REALLY shitty memory for names and magic words, and a really good spacial memory. So this is a major downgrade in functionality for me as compared to pagination. And… they aren’t mutually exclusive. I used to search within thread in vBulletin, too. It wasn’t quite as “slick” as the Discourse search, but it was very functional. I especially liked that you could click on part of the thread info, and get an ordered list of everyone who had posted to the thread (from most active to least) and click on the number of posts to show every post by that person. That was, to me, an AWESOME feature that I really miss. (and I didn’t have to know how to spell the person’s name, I just had to recognize it in the list.)
Yeah… numbers are like names – not as easy for me as spacial information. But that is a nice feature, and I use it.
No, it works on this PC, but it doesn’t work well on my other PC and it really doesn’t work at all in mobile. I use “jump to number” instead. Which is a little clumsy, but acceptable.
Yes, those are both great features. I don’t hate Discourse. It definitely does some stuff better than vBulletin. But all in all, I prefer vBulletin.
There is. It’s not very different from the browser experience (except that my browser blocks ads and the app doesn’t.) But the app does nicely organize my three Discourse sites, and tells me how many new things I have in each. So I’ve been using it on my phone. If you search the Google Play store you shouldn’t have any trouble finding it. This page about it says there’s also an iOS app, and you can see the Discourse logo in the one-box.
TL;DR
It’s not that I’m ignorant of how to use Discourse. It’s different. There are some good differences, and there are some that really don’t work for me. There are a few differences that I love, and a couple that I hate.
Overall, it is less structured and it’s easier for me to lose stuff and have trouble finding it in Discourse. On the plus side, it’s easy to pick up a thread exactly where you left off, which vBulletin was supposed to do, but vBulletin is buggy about that.
I prefer Discourse, and don’t miss vBulletin. Like some others have said, I could do without the Nanny State bullshit aspects, but they’re a minor annoyance compared to, say, how badly broken the search was on the old site.
What wolfpup said, give or take a few specific details with regard to my personal likes and dislikes. I’d have picked XenForo, not Discourse, if I had gotten to choose the replacement for the old board’s software. But that’s a quibble.
We were in big trouble with vBulletin 3.0. For no cost to members we got a HUGE upgrade - one that is working pretty smoothly despite the huge vacuum left by the loss of TubaDiva. I for one am grateful even if a few details are imperfect.
The long unwieldy thread you mention is probably this one by GreysonCarlisle, which calls itself a tutorial but is more like a fairly extensive Discourse users manual. I keep it bookmarked, along with a few other briefer cheat-sheets I’ve found.
Good points all; I grabbed that snip just to anchor my reply to a specific post. I sounded more dogmatic than you, an expert Discourse user, deserved. Sorry about that.
Mobile is a bear; I found vBulletin almost unusable on mobile whether on the browser or with Tapatalk. Our long form comments and tiny screens are just a poor fit. Discourse might be slightly better or might not. I’d certainly never try to write a post on either site on mobile.
An interesting meta-observation is whether SDMB’s distinctive culture can survive having a large percentage of users using it on mobile regardless of platform. Back in 2000 of course nobody was on mobile. Now it’s some decent fraction and growing every day. And was also under vBulletin for the last few years.
To the degree Discourse works better under mobile than vBulletin (assuming it does), that lubricates the slide down the slope to lots of mobile users with whatever impact that has had / is having / will have on board culture.
Yes, I think it does. Just for starters, it shows text large enough that I don’t need to take my glasses off to read it. (Yes, there was a skin that did that, but that skin was broken in other ways, and i found it unusable.) It’s also far easier to quote on mobile than it was in vbulletin. There are certainly fewer times that i feel, “i must switch to a PC to write this.”
On the other hand, a huge win with Discourse is that if i start to write a response on mobile, and then decide i need a pc, what I’ve written FOLLOWS ME to the pc. I used to sometimes cut and paste my text into email to do that. More often, i just started over. So while it’s a lot easier to use a phone, the barrier to moving a particular post to the PC to edit and refine it got way lower.
And of course, our implementation of vbulletin was broken, and vbulletin has reached end of life. We had to move to something or lose the forum. I may gripe here and there about Discourse, but it’s an enormous upgrade from “vbulletin is unstable and about to die.” I’m extremely grateful that tubadiva was able to port the board to discourse and fix the major issues before her untimely passing.
Sorry, but I don’t understand.
Under “About”, all it says is “Keyboard Shortcuts”.
When I click on About, it lists admins, moderators and such.
Before this recent weirdness, I couldn’t even tell you how Discourse differed from the old system - other than # of posts and joined dates. That is how I generally experience tech changes. The initial change is difficult for me, but then I readily adapt to any new system.
I’m surprised I’m the only one who is experiencing this inconvenience. Might be my incompetence, or my obsolete computer. Either way, either it will fix itself, or I’ll just stumble around the new set-up.
You’re in Desktop view. Don’t worry about it.
Which theme are you using? Perhaps you changed it inadvertently.
I’m curious - how could I have inadvertently changed it? And where do I check to see which theme I’m using?
I have no idea what theme I’m using - I set it with someone’s (possibly your) assistance soon after the changeover, and have not thought of it since.
Profile > Interface > Theme
It’s worth going through all the settings some time, just to see if you want to set things differently.