Having had my share of being critical, here are some things i really like about Discourse:
The method to quote and to multi-quote is terrific. Really easy and reliable. This is just really well thought out.
It displays images, videos, and other links beautifully. Yeah, i know some people want a text-only experience, but I have never been in that camp, and i love the embedded content.
It’s very nice that i can start a post on my phone, realize that it’s going to be a complicated post with a bunch of links, and switch to my laptop without losing the draft.
The “jump to post#” is nicely implemented, and works well even on a phone.
I also like some of the community moderation features that have been turned off on this site, and the ease of uploading photos on (other) sites that allow that. I used to struggle with getting the codes right on vBulletin, on Discourse it just works.
(But i feel the need to second the “fuck keyboard shortcuts” sentiment. If you need to remember a keyboard shortcut to do it, then that functionality is absent, as far as I’m concerned.)
Not arguing because people have the right to feel the way they do about a feature.
But for those people reading and thinking that there’s a lot of memorizing to do, there isn’t.
You just need to remember the ? key. Push the ? key when you’re not in the editor and then a menu with the rest of the keyboard shortcuts pops up. Then just choose which shortcuts you want from that menu.
The latter gave me a list of posts that had ‘seen’ in the title. And the former…well, if I bookmarked every Dope post I visited, I’d have so many bookmarks that bookmarks would be useless.
To be fair vB had/has multi quote (though not quite like this one, which does work better since you don’t have to edit what you want) and even nested quotes. Similarly, vB can absolutely do inline pictures and videos, but as you well know, TPTB ran a pretty barebones board as far as features went, which many, if not most of us were happy with. IIRC, one of the concerns about moving over to Discourse was inline pictures/videos/gifs etc.
Personally, as long as things don’t autoplay or I can stop them, I’m okay. But if there’s something moving on the screen I have an exceptionally difficult time reading anything else. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons why I use UBlock, so I can block out individual animated things. Blinking smiley face, gone. Gif that I can’t stop, gone.
I’ll never understand why (on other boards, not ours) some people think it’s okay to have multiple animated, sparkling, flashing, things in their signature. It’s like driving on the freeway with an ice cream truck next you, with it’s music cranked up and the driver honking and using the PA the entire time. It’s kinda distracting.
And for a while, at least one one board I’d read from time to time a few people had signatures that included ‘smileys’ that would roll back and forth across the entire width of the post block over and over. Ugh
Agreed. I’ve got my very small handful of keyboard shortcuts I use (that are either built into Windows or are mostly universal across Windows programs), but I’m not a keyboard shortcut person. I’m in the camp that thinks you should be able to quickly and easily access commonly used features with the mouse and not have to rely on keyboard shortcuts. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with them (so long as they can’t be hit accidentally), but it shouldn’t be the only way to access a feature.
But that’s another shortcut. And while I know it’s just one, having to hit ?, comb through [counts] 65 keyboard shortcuts because you want to do something seems like a lot of work. But, again, if these are all things easily accessible with the mouse and codinghorror is just pushing keyboard shortcuts I’m fine with it.
Who’s going to remember all these search tricks (and keyboard shortcuts)? I know in earlier post, which I’m not going to go looking for, codinghorror was bringing up all these search shortcuts that involved @ or :. At least to me, that makes the board less user friendly, not more user friendly. And, while I know he 100% isn’t going to budge and I’m not asking, a lot of these suggestions seemed to be in response to asking for pagination (or at least the option to do so) since it seems to me the driving force for a lot of the search tricks is due to the fact that control-F doesn’t work unless the phrase you’re looking for is within a post or two of whatever is currently on your screen.
I have a hard time believing I’m not the only person here who’s basically says ‘fuck it’ and posted something without checking to see if it’s already been posted or not linked to something/checked who said something because they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
Err, I’ve accepted that. That doesn’t mean I’m going to start using keyboard shortcuts. Different strokes, and all that.
This isn’t a Discourse vs. vBulletin issue, this is a design preference that’s relevant in essentially every piece of modern software. Most of us have preferences, reinforced by thousands of hours using hundreds of different pieces of software.
My husband loves keyboard shortcuts. I loath them. Sometime we use different software to achieve the same goals due to our preferences. (He uses Vim, I use a variety of mostly wysiwyg editors.) Sometimes we have to use the same software. Then, it’s nice if it accommodates both kinds of users.
ETA: Literally the only thing I’ve asked for with Discourse is the option of being able to paginate. That’s hardly ‘entirely rewriting the code to suit me’, especially considering a lot of people want pagination. Even codinghorror’s own link about why pagination is so awful is full of people telling him why he’s wrong.
Discourse is built from the ground up to work based on infinite scroll. To alter it to function with either pagination or infinite scroll at the click of a button would take many months of fulltime work, if it could be done at all.
I think codinghorror said that there is internal pagination, because webcrawlers need it. So my guess is that it would be possible. I agree that updating the user interface to allow users to organize their experience by pages would not be trivial, however.
If I could make one change to Discourse, I would change the assumption that “once you’ve read this, you are no longer interested in it, unless it changes”.
That seems like a really odd assumption to me on its face. I re-read favorite books, and re-watch movies I liked. Sometimes, it’s to watch them with friends, or to catch details I missed. Other times it’s just because it was fun to watch once and I will find it fun to watch again.
I recently joined a D&D game, for the first time in ages. So I bought the new (5e) players handbook, and I’ve been reading it. I mentioned that to the other people in the game. One said, “oh, how interesting. I’ve never read the rule books, i just pick up stuff from other people.” Another said, “I re-read all the source books every year, maybe skimming over bits, but refreshing my memory of all the major elements.” Neither of those people is wrong, they just have different cognitive styles.
And then there are reference sources (like the “rules” topics) that I haven’t memorized, but may want to refer to.
Discourse is EXTREMELY biased towards the “read once and remember everything I care about” style, which I would guess is a minority of actual human beings. I would LOVE to be able to toggle that assumption off. It would change the interface in a myriad of little ways, all of which would make me happier.
But that might be an even more difficult change than giving users access to pagination.
My programming education ended 20ish years ago (though I do still dabble in a little bit of C++, but I have hard time believing that telling the software to break a thread into pages would take, by your calculations, 500+ hours of programming.
Most of my vBulletin experience was on a more modern and more robust implementation that allowed pictures, editing, and a lot of stuff that the Dope had turned off. And yes, vBulletin certainly did images and multiquoting competently. But Discourse does them better, imho.
One thing I’ve noticed is that board seems to be designed to push conversations forward and not dwell on old ones. Previous threads are harder to find. You get ‘scolded’ for not letting other people talk. Threads are limited in how many posts they can have. I understand, or rather, assume, codinghorror is trying to make it more like an IRL conversation, but the nice thing about a forum is that you don’t have to have old conversations over and over and get the same question asked multiple times or misquote people because it should be easy to find what was previously posted.
That’s kind of neat; but it’s not much of a shortcut to have to read through two pages of popup trying to find the one I was after! More like a longcut, or the entire scenic route.
I do very much like the quote function; when I want to respond to one or two lines in a long post, it’s very nice not to have to quote the whole thing, hunt through the quote for what I want to answer, and delete all of what’s irrelevant to my answer. And if we had the option, I’d stick with infinite scroll and the scroll bar; once I got used to it I like it. But I agree it would be good to have the option – I apparently don’t orient myself by pages online, though I do with a physical book; but I’m not surprised that some people do.
Another nice thing about the forum format is IMO precisely that it’s possible to think over and consider one’s reply, to go away and do research on it if needed, to come back to it hours or days or even weeks later if other Life has intervened and not allowed the time or spoons to deal with it. In-person conversations have advantages and disadvantages. On-line conversations have different advantages and disadvantages. On-line conversations are never going to have all the advantages of in-person ones; why discourage them from having their own advantages?
Agreed on all points. I used to participate on a few boards that didn’t lag multiple versions behind AND allowed inline images and gifs/videos. But one option that would be nice, which may well have existed on the other boards since I never looked into it, would have been to set gifs, videos, animated smileys and really anything that moves to be ‘click to start’ instead of ‘autoplay’. Like I mentioned earlier, if you have a signature with a smiley face rolling back and forth, I have to scroll it off screen to read anything, it’s just too distracting and if you post enough that I can’t do that, it’s a real PITA for me, but that’s me.
I can’t tell you how many times on vB, I’d hit the multiquote button as I’d read through a thread and by the time I was ready to post, I’d have no idea which sentence I was after. And I’m guessing most of us, at one time or another, said ‘screw it’ and left a giant post in tact rather than spending 10 minutes breaking it up to reply to different parts and get rid of the bits you didn’t need.
Yes, vastly prefer the way you can quote on here.
I thought we didn’t allow moving sigs, etc. here. I haven’t noticed anything auto-starting on me since we’ve been in Discourse. Is that something that varies by theme? Am I just not remembering? I find moving gifs annoying, too.
