Not exactly, but I also felt, very strongly, that dropping the floppy drive from the Mac, and removing the headphone jack from the iPhone, was the correct design decision. For better or worse I am “that kind of guy”.
In this case it’s fine since we can discuss and learn about all the various ways people can find stuff, summarized from the above discussion:
link to topic at the top of the editor
bookmarks (with reminders!)
reply drafts in your user profile
the /read section of your user profile
search, both quick and advanced
the /unread and /new tabs
the suggested topics list at the bottom of each topic
built in features in the web browser (history, etc)
keyboard shortcuts (press ?)
There’s always more than one way to do things, and that’s good!
With all due respect, no one will find any of those unless they choose to stick around for a while. A design decision that literally scares people away is not one that can be overcome by “look, if you spend a lot of time clicking everything you can find, you can find a way to mitigate this unpleasant behavior”.
Also most of those don’t do anything unless you know in advance that you will want to return to a thread before it gets bumped by someone else. So far, I’ve only seen three approaches:
and
guess what category it’s in and browse that category until you find it. If you don’t find it, pick another likely category and repeat as needed.
I submit that the third is likely far and away the most common way people deal with this problem.
I will say that my prior phone was selected in large part because it was one of the few that met my other criteria and had a headphone jack. And the only reason my current phone lacks a headphone jack is covid – I decided that being able to wash my phone was more important than having a headphone jack that I only use when I’m out and about in venues with a lot of other people. So I suppose I’m THAT kind of person.
But we both know that the other type exists, too. I suppose this gets back to my suggestion that you may not care about driving away older potential members from your fora.
Back in vBulletin which didn’t really have an unread feature I used the SDMB by opening the forum/category page for e.g. GQ. Which listed them from most recent post to older. Then I’d scan top-down for ones I was interested in & Ctrl-click those into a new tab. Then I’d read each tab and reply or not, closing the tabs as I went. When I was out of tabs I’d go on to the next category I paid attention to; generally IMHO, MPSIMS, and P&E, with an occasional foray into CS or the Pit.
That method still works exactly the same in Discourse as it did in vBulletin. And nothing ever “disappears”. Because I consumed each category in turn, it was easy to know which category to look for a thread I’d recently closed; it’s the same category as the tab still on my screen (unless I’d just changed categories, in which case it was the previous category in my standard priority order).
I’m not suggesting you’re “doing it wrong”. I’m just throwing out ideas to see if any of them resonate with you as a way to reduce your frustration while still using the inherently very frustrating device that is a modern mobile phone.
Discourse shows many fewer topics per page than vBulletin showed threads. I used to do approximately that (although I never opened new tabs just to look at a thread – I very rarely opened a second tab if I was doing some complicated editing, usually as a mod splitting up a thread or something) but I find the interface in Discourse less appealing, because it shows so little.
Also, it’s harder to navigate to categories in Discourse than it was to navigate to fora in vBulletin. In vBulletin there were several ways to quickly navigate hierarchical fora with a few clicks and no waiting except for the forum selected to open. In Discourse there’s no place that shows all the categories from the “default” opening, and I have to click a small fussy button to even see all the categories (which then take a bit to load) and then they don’t show all at once and I need to scroll down the page. So I’ve almost given up using categories. (That the category is shown in teensy tiny print on the page also serves to de-emphasize it.) It’s funny that I find a few extra clicks and scrolls a significant discouragement, but I do. I might be happier if I trained myself to do that.
But I will say, that on my other major Discourse server, I have my profile set to display the categories when I open the site, and just needing to scroll around through the not-very-pretty/not-very-compact display of categories makes me a little grumpy every time I open it. I think Discourse doesn’t WANT you to use categories and know “where” you are, it wants you to randomly flail around.
Or lived experiences are different. I have struggled to find threads nearly every day i visit the dope since switching to Discourse.
In fact, i just lost this thread by pausing to check out how easy it might be to search on mobile. I was able to find it with the “read by user” menu, which only cost me half a dozen clicks.
I guess, to me, if i need to use “search” then I’m lost. And that feels uncomfortable. I want to know “where” to find things, in some spacial analog. Thinking of posts as a bunch of disconnected random entities floating… Somewhere… makes me unhappy.
I probably would have guessed that. But no, now that the categories are printed in tiny gray font, I often don’t notice them. Maybe that’s just an artifact of the skin I’ve chosen. But between the tiny font and that it’s slow and awkward to use the category list, I’ve kinda lost categories as a useful thing.
One of my suggestions, back when this was new and shiny and we were making suggestions for the board, was to change some of the skins to make the category name large and prominent. I think that would help people stick to appropriate posting style, too.
While we’re on the topic of skins, I’ve been using Vincent and noticed two issues.
Firstly, when anything in bold is actually less bold. The font is thinner and smaller. It’s close to the regular font, so it’s not that I can’t read it, but when someone mentions that they ‘bolded the relevant part’, I struggle to figure out what they’re talking about.
Also, and I know this is odd, but a lowercase j in a username displays in a really odd way. Whether it’s an @ or the username at the top of the post it’ll do it.
Let’s see if I can get some screenshots:
Here you can see what bolding looks like on this skin. I’m sure in the above paragraph where I ‘bolded the relevant part’ it looks fine to you but this is what it looks like on my screen. You can also see what a lower case j looks like when someone @'s it (which I deleted before posting so as not to actually @ them).
Here’s that same name, but it goes for any lower case j, at the top of a post.
Neither of these are a particularly big deal, just odd quirks.
Sure, theme tweaks are a good idea, maybe create a topic for that (or a mod could use the topic-level menu to split the above posts into their own dedicated “theme tweaks” topic) … we’re happy to do a pass on tweaking themes.
There were a couple of long topics about themes (see, that’s why "topic seems like an awkward word – there were two collections of posts on the same topic) early on. I’ll try to pull some stuff together this weekend. They were LOTR themed – one theme to rule them all, and three for the posters, iirc.
Oh cool! Yeah, solidify feedback in those topics and we’ll make a pass on it. You’ve been so generous with your time, happy to reciprocate on the theming side!
But I don’t know that in the first place, and that’s the problem. I knew what page I was on without devoting any effort or thought to it. I don’t know what post count I’m at or near unless I make a special effort to notice it.
And codinghorror’s trick also relies on numbers in a similar sense. Sure, I could guess that a post I want to get back to is half or 2/3 or whatever of the way through the thread, but If you guess 150 and it’s at 120 or 180, I at least will give up before I find it when I can only see two or three posts at a time, and once again there are no landmarks to tell me if I’m headed in the right or wrong direction.
Plus, fuck keyboard shortcuts. The great thing about moving from DOS to Windows a generation ago was you didn’t have to remember a host of keyboard shortcuts anymore; you could just use the dropdown menus. There are four or five keyboard shortcuts that I use often enough to remember; anything else, I’d have to Google to find out what it is.
ETA: That was weird: I was still thinking about whether I was done with this post, or whether I still wanted to add to it. Some random cursor movement apparently was interpreted by Discourse as my wanting to post. So here it is.
I was going to comment on how much I’m liking Discourse, but Discourse reminded me that I had previously posted a reply. I’d forgotten what I said, so I did a quick search on my username, and up popped all the things I had posted. So yeah, I can only add that I’m liking it more than ever. A lot of thought obviously went into it. If we somehow reverted to VB, even if it worked well, I would miss Discourse a lot.
I have to say, in reference to the latest few posts, that the continuous scroll never really bothered me and is in many ways a feature. The pagination in VB is completely arbitrary and doesn’t relate to any meaningful organization. The only issue I have with the scroll presentation is that on my tablet, my hovering fingers are always accidentally hitting some part of the scroll bar that causes Discourse to abandon whatever I was reading and navigate way back to somewhere it thinks I wanted to go but actually didn’t.
Just an update. This has been improved. When I originally wrote this, if I clicked on someone’s profile, as I just did to see wolfpup’s post (since he mentioned them), you’d only see that poster’s posts. In order to get back to everyone’s posts, you could go back to the profile and remove filter, but that would take you back to the top of the thread.
Since then, Discourse has improved this feature. Now when you find the post you were looking for, there’s a button called ‘show all’. When you press that, the other posts fill in, but you’re still back at the post you were reading. You don’t get taken back to the top.
There are a LOT of features I like about Discourse. But the constant improvements, making things even easier and more seamless all the time is awesome.
discussion:
menu to split the above posts into their own dedicated “theme tweaks” topic) … we’re happy to do a pass on tweaking themes.
