Is it ok to give a critique if the discourse format now?

About This Message Board
1

I don’t know, does this go here in ATMB or over in Site Feedback?

Anyway, we’ve been here a few weeks now. It seems that most people have settled in and adapted, mostly. I think a critique of the new platform is warranted. Here is mine.

The Appearance;
Meh, I’m using (I think) SD Simple? Lite? Its basically blue header and white background. Functional, ugly, makes me think of facebook for some reason. I haven’t found a color scheme I truly think is attractive on here, but this seems to be the best of the lot for me and I actually like it even if I think it’s ugly.

Areas of Functionality;
Icon Menu Upper Left Corner-The problem I see with this menu is that it opens to “notifications”. I think it would be better to have it open to what I’ve come to think of as the User Control Panel instead. I don’t find any positive to the current configuration.

Infinite Scroll/Pagination-infinite scroll is terrible. It bloats my history folder. It is more difficult to navigate a thread. No positives for this item.

Text Editor Box-I actually like the way this works when posting in a thread. I do have a minor gripe about the way replies to specific posts and the edit menu in the box function, but not a real negative over all for me.

Thread Presentation On Forum Page-I don’t give a rat’s skinny tail about who posted last. I want to know who the OP is, what the name of the thread is and maybe a tiny bit of the op itself, so I can determine if I want to bother going into that thread or not. This is one item that has caused a large reduction of time spent here for me.
Icons intead of Names–Bad Idea. For the Many who elect to not have a personalized avatar, it makes for a confusing experience trying to figure out who wrote what sometimes

Time Stamps-30 minutes ago, 4 hours ago, eh, I prefer actual date/time. Looks crappy and lazy, regardless of which is easier to code.

The “download discourse” nag-why won’t this thing go away? A definite negative.

Stickies-I can unpin these now. A definite positive.

Categories/Forums-I can mute those I don’t frequent, which puts them down at the bottom of the page so I don’t have to bother with them in any fashion. A positive.

Notifications-I was disgusted, when we first moved here, to find my inbox for my email flooded with notifications from discourse. It took me a few minutes, but I finally figured out how to stop that. @ notifications from threads are also unwanted. That I have to manually reset a thread from following/watching/whatever because discourse automatically sets that and it can’t be turned off is a BIG no no in my book.

Overall Impressions;

Discourse comes across as a gimmicky platform made of cheap “greasy” plastic that was hastily thown together using various features of other platforms. It seems like its trying to be a little bit of everything and fails to come together fully. Thus it doesn’t have the feel of being any “one” thing all while maintaining a (for me) a creepy feeling of being constantly watched while waiting for the sales pitch. Over all I’ve found myself spending less and less time on here as the weeks progress.

I can see a lot of potential, there are some really great features here, but, the negatives just out weigh the positives just enough to make this place less than it can be.

I know that content counts more than forum, but the experience of that content is degraded by the forum, unfortunately, in this case.

2

Hover over the time stamp and you’ll get the actual time.

I’m not sure what exactly you’re speaking about here, but you can tweak how tracking/watching works. In your preferences you can change what the system does when someone posts to (or replies to you in) a thread you’re tracking or following, how you tracking/subscribe to a thread etc.
I’m thinking what you want to do is set tracking to ‘never’ and ‘when I post to a thread’ to ‘watching’. That, IMO, would get you closest to how our old system worked and then in “emails” change “send me an email when someone quotes me, etc etc etc” to whatever you want it to be (I have it set to never).

I feel like it’s a knock off of reddit, but one of those reddit subs where the mods need to tweak a few settings on their overly aggressive bots.

3

I really like that, as long as I’m logged in, when I click on a thread I am taken to exactly where I left off last time.
I do miss the mouseover preview for thread titles. And this site hasn’t crashed even once since I’ve used it.

4

That’s taking some getting used to for me. I never used the ‘go to newest post’ (or whatever it was called) feature. So every time I click on the notification box here, as soon as the thread loads I scroll down, and then realize it started me in the right place and I need to scroll back up.

What I’m still not really liking is how all the replies are ‘linked’. If someone’s post is clearly a reply, but without a quote, I end up having to scroll back up to see what they’re talking about.
I’ve tried using the 'X replies) button below a given post, but it throws me because I know I’m reading things out of order, and then I end up reading the same posts again when I make my way down to them.
IMO, I’d rather people just quoted and replied like we used to, it was a lot more straight forward, but that’s just me. I’m not a fan of it, but it’s really not a deal breaker at this point.

5

I only use that when I’m late to a thread and I want to reply to a post. Far easier than trying to find replies scattered through the thread.

6

That’s probably one of my favorite features, too, though the site’s stability and performance is excellent, too. Not sure I agree with some of the OP’s criticisms, but at any rate I regard the new site as generally a very positive move. My biggest beef is probably the “community-moderation” focus and that stupid bot that keeps closing or opening threads when the mods have deemed otherwise.

One good thing, though, is that in contrast to the old site which was pretty much dead technology, this one is under active development and, as well, mods and admins are still tweaking it. Hopefully the platform developers are listening and are responsive to our needs. Even if they don’t agree philosophically with some of our asks, they could be made to be admin-configurable options, like turning off Discobot’s meddling.

7

My critique was certainly not comprehensive and the things mentioned in this one vary from mildly annoying to WTF to Very Nice. I was trying for more of a general idea sort of theme rather than a lengthy detailed examination. Take time stamps for example. Not real important, but they contribute to what I view as a shoddy appearance.

My hope is that once moderation and administration has been worked out, some of these things can be addressed.

I think if I had to say which things were absolutely needed changed, off the top of my head I would go with the user icon menu from the top right of the screen should be defaulted to the user menu, not notifications, pagination instead of infinite scroll(seems like lazy coding). The function of taking you to where you left off in a thread is neat, but the issue with blowing up my browser history is a problem in my book. Somebody mentioned it in another thread that I can’t find at the moment, so I know there’s at least one other person on here who feels similar about this.
The name vs avatar needs to be changed so that at the very least, if you don’t have a custom avatar, then just your name is displayed. Finally, the “who posted last” issue. This one is a real biggie. Seriously, who cares who posted last if you haven’t been in the thread before? It’s better to know what and who the op was and was about originally at least when looking at new threads.

Oh, and that thrice damned download discourse nag! It needs to go!

8

When a post is a reply to another post, there is a link to the appropriate post that you can just click. No scrolling required.

Google Photos

9

You DO get this with the custom Straight Dope Light/Dark themes (and maybe some others) but NOT with Sam’s Simple theme, last I looked. You also get a better SDMB banner.

OTOH, Sam’s Simple shows better information on the thread title page more like vBulletin did, showing the OP’s name and last poster’s name in plain text, and the OP date too (so you can spot a zombie). I’ve been wishing those details could get imported into the other themes.

10

Many other sites have on-demand scolling (e.g., the comments on YouTube videos and many other sites and other places) and I haven’t noticed that they clutter up my history. This must be some quirk of the way Discourse works, which one might hope could be fixed.

11

Never seen that, on phone, tablet, or desktop.

12

Okay, that does work. I thought I had already tried it and I thought it worked like the VB one. On VB, if you click the chevron, it would take you up to the quote. For the most part I liked the way that worked since it didn’t just ‘scroll’ up, it was actually a link to a new page that would load with that post at the top. Meaning, you could scroll around (to get the context and other replies) and hitting the back button would take you back to where you started.
This is a bit different since it doesn’t give you any nearby context, we’ll see how it goes.
The other nice thing with the chevrons is that you could click on a quote to see the post it came from. If that post quoted another post you could click on that as well and eventually figure out the discussion that led up what what you’re reading (and then use the back button to get to where you started).

The problem with the mouseover previews is that they don’t work if your monitor is a touch screen, regardless of the theme. I’m using Vincent, mouseover previews is fine on my work desktop, but doesn’t work on my laptap. I haven’t tried disabling the touch screen (it’s not like I ever use it), maybe that would fix it.
I’m not sure of the reasoning for that. My gut says it has something to do with assuming the user is on a mobile (ie only have a touchscreen, no mouse) device, but I can hover over other things at works fine, like the time stamp or the user avatars. For some reason it’s only disabled for the thread preview.

13

Neither have I. I haven’t accessed the new site from my phone yet, so I’m assuming it’s like the tapatalk nag screen.

14

Thank you for trying it extensively first before your critique. Some of us switched, immediately saw that it was different, were horrified, and reacted accordingly. LOL

15

Yes, this is a huge plus.

I agree with this. I find it frustrating that the info on a thread isn’t terribly helpful. I want the first few lines of the thread, and the OP, not who last posted.

Not all of us.

Same. I get useful mouseovers on some of my hardware and not other devices. Someone pointed to a developer thread on the topic. Yup, it was a sloppy way to determine if you had a tablet/phone rather than a laptop back before touch screens became standard on laptops. The developers don’t want to make it an option (because no one will find the option anyway) but don’t seem to have any good idea of how to fix it. I think they don’t feel it’s a serious problem. But this is one that we might possibly get fixed it we asked persistently and nicely.

16

Awesome!
(sort of)
Now I know why mouseovers were working on my iMac but not my work computer. I just disabled the touch screen, restarted Chrome, and mouseovers are working fine.
How to do this: Go to Device Manager → Human Interface Devices → Touch Screen, right-click and choose “disable”

Frankly, I have no use whatsoever for a touch screen on a laptop. All that happens is occasional weirdness when I bump into it, and some web-based applications do weird stuff like disable normal scrolling when they detect a touch screen. Unfortunately, it respawns after each reboot.