On the forum that I manage, I make sure to never push the shortcuts because people perceive them as being unnecessary complexity even if they never use them personally.
In my experience, folks who use shortcuts love them. Folks who don’t use them hate them.
I agree with the sentiment that if the only way to get at a function is through a shortcut then the function does not exist for most people but it’s hard, sometimes, to put every feature into a clickable UI.
I don’t entirely understand the hostility to the idea that you can just hit ? and have access to every function but I respect it and try to provide alternatives in the software that I provide.
Sorry, I misread what your problem was. All I can offer to that is the solution you already use, search this topic. I actually love the search on Discourse, especially compared to what we had on VBulletin, but I understand some people don’t like it.
I wouldn’t say that I’m hostile to it. I’m just saying that it’s not a shortcut. I might occasionally find it useful as a guide to things that can be done here.
I use keyboard shortcuts for the small handful of things that I do all the time – cut, paste, copy, refresh, close, undo, save; stuff like that. There are so many possible keyboard commands for so many possible things that I do only occasionally or hardly at all that I don’t bother trying to learn them; especially when they can vary from program to program and site to site.
Oh yes, pardon my french, but fuck signatures, forever. They are the literal worst. So bad. That being said we did (under the gun of an enterprise customer) offer a plugin that added it, but it was strictly opt in so onlymasochists people who checked the “yes, I want to see signatures because I hate myself” option would see signatures
Discourse will warn you if you are posting a link that someone else has already posted upstream in the same topic, at least.
Yes, that won’t be happening. We are open to a lot of things but… not that. I’d put pagination in the same category as “forum signatures” personally. As I’ve said, I try to keep the number of hills I’ll die on to a minimum as I get older, but… that’s one of them.
There were a lot of people who said removal of the headphone jack in iPhones, and the floppy drive in Macs, were wrong, too. Guess who’s gonna be on the wrong side of history? And hey there are headphone jacks and external floppy drives, so it’s not like I’m saying these should never exist!
I would characterize it more as “once you’ve bought milk, you don’t need to buy milk again for another week, so you can cross that item off today’s to-do list.” In other words, once you’ve read the topic to completion, there’s no need for it to be on today’s to-do list until there are more new replies to the topic.
Not so; old topics (that you’ve indicated interest in, by either replying, reading them for more than 4 minutes, or explicitly setting a notification state on the topic) will bounce back into unread assuming they have new replies. So you could say Discourse is biased towards discussions that are active, and … well, that seems like the correct design decision to me? Why would we prioritize discussions that are dead, that nobody is replying to?
Anyway, great discussion, and I particularly want to thank @puzzlegal for her patience with me. I did identify the one case that I hadn’t considered, which is
discussions which are NOT active, nobody is replying to them
but you read them and intend to reply to them, eventually
The read section of your user profile is a big step forward for this use case and a relatively new feature in Discourse, only 3-4 months old if that. So, progress!
Apparently not; as you provided a plugin option for signatures but not one for pagination.
thorny – picking nits since before she can remember – locust
Or there’s a new relevant story in the news; or you yourself had a new thought about the subject; or you finally found time enough to do as much research as you think you need to before posting –
The technical hurdles for pagination are far higher than signatures, “you only have a slice of the topic loaded at any given time” has been baked into the architecture of the design from day zero.
It is a rare discussion indeed where nobody is replying and nobody has thought about the subject, found time to research and post, etcetera. … multiplied by the number of people viewing the topic every day…
I agree with you on this one! No, I really don’t need to see your cute thought EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU POST. Yeah, I’m the person who likes to reread novels. But i can do without your sig.
And yet, I’m on another Discourse forum where an annoying poster has an annoying sig. An annoying and extraordinarily prolific poster. The admin must have globally turned on sigs or something. I take it that if i look I’ll find a way to turn that off? Happy day. Thanks again.
Which I suppose can be a good thing at times, but it is NOT a good thing when it interrupts me to tell me that the link in what I just quoted has already been posted. If I didn’t know it had been posted, I wouldn’t be able to quote it…
Fully informed preference. I spend a lot of time tailoring my operating system and browser to do what I expect it to do. Discourse can go to hell for usurping my environment.
Sorry for the late reply, but this software sucks, so despite being a member for two decades, I don’t like to come here anymore.
It’s not some adversity to change; there are all sorts of other sites who put their “communities” and support forums on Discourse, so I have no priors when using them, and they suck, too. I don’t let that suckiness bother me, though, because I’m only in and out searching for an answer to an issue. However, I used to spend time on the Dope, and it’s intolerable now, because Discourse, while it has some neat bells and whistles so that marketing can say, “look at this!,” has really shitty UX.
I was on a bit of a ramble there, but what I meant was that I often won’t link to another thread, or specifically, another post within a thread, because I couldn’t find it again.
@Joey_P , if you go to your user menu (click your avatar, in your case a purple “J”) and then click on the little person icon, one of the choices is “activity”. Click on it. Then it lets you choose “read” from the menu on the left. This shows you all the threads (topics) you have read recently. That will likely help you find the post you want to quote.
Yes, it’s a lot of clicks, but I find it makes this place a LOT more user-friendly. I hope that option works its way up to something easier to find in a few more updates.
Everything is flung haphazardly into a sea of white space. I want a clear boundary enclosing all that pertains to a particular post. How difficult can that concept to grasp?
… multiplied by the number of people viewing the topic every day…